My goal for the day was to get a free copy of Tropico 6 and I didn’t succeed.
Kalypso had a chill environment and everyone was very friendly. The presentation was long since they went over every procedure for publishing and every department, lol, they even had a chart for all employees in the office. Kalypso is a young private publisher for video games. The company has two game studios in Munich and Hamburg, developing Tropico series and some mobile games. As a fan of strategy games, I’m pretty familiar with their IPs like Tropico, Rise of Industry, Railway Empire, Shadow Tactics, etc. We got a full tour of their company and I really liked some of the offices where I wasn’t allowed to take pictures. Almost every department had a person introducing their roles and responsibilities to us, I felt welcomed. Excited for their E3 release!
The hosts indicated two interesting facts in the presentation that I feel like sharing here:
- Americans show much less interest in strategy games than Europeans. The biggest gaming market in the US is action games.
- Most players for time-consuming strategy games like Tropico are old people. (Betsy and Mark, are you reading??) Which makes sense because they are the people with money and time (the game is 60 bucks).
In the afternoon, we stopped at a Jewish cemetery first. As a person who’s not that into history, I cannot speak that much about the graveyard or the culture. Then, Sam and I took off first for a little walk in the town. Due to the history and title of the town, there are dragon figures every a few blocks. Those are not like the traditional European statues, instead, they are artistic figures decorated by newspapers, plastics, etc. We met up with the group at Vannini ice cream shop where they had many unique flavors including lasagne ice cream. It got colder while we were sitting there and started to rain a bit so we decided to walk towards the train station.
We neutrally decided on a traditional schnitzel place as our last dinner with the German counterpart. The restaurant was old, traditional and cozy but the waiters didn’t really speak English. My German friend ordered a schnitzel with mushrooms for me and I also tried other’s with herb green sauce; it was mild. Schnitzel is a traditional German food that meat is pounded thinly and then deep fried. It tasted a lot like country fried steak which reminded me of Cracker Barrel for some reason.
The walk back home was beautiful with sun setting. We passed a bridge which was popular for couple’s to hang love locks… I was kinda sad at the bar realizing our trip has come to an end and the Germans were leaving. Hopefully I’ll see them again.
