game city's last stand - day 5

so I got no sleep friday night... :( horrible stinking cold from being too sociable, talking too much and generally being on holiday, but i wasn't about to let it get in the way of rocking out!

in the big tent @gamecity watching the world's first lego rock festival \m/, hope i can still sing with a stinking cold

they set the giant tent up with astroturf, deckchairs, umbrellas and lots and lots of lego, with giant lego bricks on stage and raina lee being incredibly enthusiastic and lovely. but whilst i waited for the rest of my band to arrive, there was a small matter of matsuraa-san's keynote in the ballroom to go to. there was live music, live playing of brand new rhythm games, lots of general excitement and margaret robertson doing an excellent job of interviewing landing exactly on the right side of the fangirl line.

waiting back stage for our brickstock performance @gamecity to a crowd of thousands (of minifigs ;)

but now it was time... after already hearing quite a few renditions of bryan adams and bon jovi, we decided to give the crowd a break and go for walking on sunshine by katrina and the waves. possibly not a wise choice as it goes on for*ever* at the end with bits i didn't know how to sing, and a bass player who had never played the game before, let alone in public! but we had fun, and rocked out, and Omegazoid seemed to go down well with the crowd :) definitely the highlight that i've been telling people about the most :D

finished rocking out to lego rock band in time to go see jonathan smith ballroom bricks @gamecity, lego alex james is uber cute!

and then straight after playing the game, had to run back to the ballroom to see the lovely jonathan smith talk about lego rock band. i like how the songs were picked to be ones that would make you feel awesome :) i also like how they've managed to take out most of the annoying bits and made the game even more fun, rather than just a change of song list. he told us afterwards that previous rock band DLC will work with lego rock band too which is pretty awesome (dependant on family friendly-ness, understandably, the Lego corp probably don't want their characters singing dodgy stuff). one of my favourite things has been the character design though - lego blur are adorable; i always had a crush on alex james and his lego'd up floppy fringe is incredibly cute - and lego queen follow quickly behind with the immensity that is brian may's curly lego mullet. the whole thing is tempting me horribly into the murky (well, seemingly expensive) world of lego minifig modding...

Also TT are working on lego harry potter! :o going to be aaaawesooome :D next year @gamecity?

*how* excited am i about this?! it seems it had already been announced and so wasn't new news to anyone but me, but yay! i wanna do magic spells with my wiimote with the same ease and pure joy as lightsabre fighting in lego star wars. and then, that was it... hometime for me, as i'd not booked a hotel room for saturday night due to not realising there was another party that night, and to be honest, the cold was getting the better of me anyway. would've loved to stay and get dressed up with professional makeup to do Left For Dead: Live, not to mention to see how they were going to manage StreetFighter: Live (something like this maybe?) but it was sadly not to be...

til next year :)

sadly having to leave @gamecity before The End party (bah illness n lack of sunday trains) but thank you for an absolutely brilliant week :)

p.s. one of my tweets is in Edge! check out their gamecity round up (slightly more concise than mine, but not half as interesting hopefully ;) in the christmas issue out now :)

a splendid day 2 at game city

something splendid at game city, originally uploaded by spugmeistress.

Day 2 in the game city week and it starts off with Something Splendid...

Omg takahashi's playground is actually going to happen @gamecity! Yay mobile internet!

11:46 AM Oct 28th from mobile web

So, Keita Takahashi (aka Mr Katamari Damacy) is going to design a playground to be built in Nottingham! He kind of talked about it at his keynote two years ago but I don't think I ever expected anything to come of it, especially considering how long it took for them to get Noby Noby Boy out, but it's pretty awesome that hopefully in a year or two we might get to go play on it! The Q&A made sure that adults (and dogs) would be allowed to join in the fun too, although what the fun will actually be is still a mystery, other than something involving natural hill slides (interestingly, hand gestures and delayed translation add a strange layer to proceedings) and a provocatively large amount of polystyrene balls. One of these days I will have another go at unlocking the 2nd level of We <3>

(This is also the point where I'd visited the o2 store, and the very lovely assistant guy managed to stifle his laughter at my ancient (but awesome) Nokia E70 long enough to get me on the mobile web, woo! \o/)

Just played canabalt for the first time @gamecity in front of a curry house of people and didnt suck!

12:52 PM Oct 28th from mobile web

Canabalt kicks ass. I'd heard about it before but not played (as I later found out, it runs at about 7fps on my stupidly broken iBook) but quite aside from AdamAtomic being lovely and very interesting while we ate curry for lunch (another pleasantly surprising first!), it is just so damn addictive.

Also just got a certificate declaring i am officially brilliant at lego rock band \o/ @gamecity

12:56 PM Oct 28th from web

I think these are the wrong way round, but somewhere along the line we made it to HMV to audition for Brick Factor. Lego Rock Band is ace fun - much hilarity watching the guys before us do an awesome rendition of Walking on Sunshine before securing our place in Brickstock with Summer of '69 by Bryan Adams (I was on vocals - always am - as much as I love the drums and am a natural bass player, I'm usually the one least shy at singing, after waaaaaay too much experience on Singstar :D )

Is celebrating being born the same year as band aid and elite @gamecity

3:20 PM Oct 28th from mobile web

Do they know it's Christmas is my Christmas song :) 1984 was obviously a good year for the world ;) The Elite talk started out interesting, the game visuals and music are still surprisingly beautiful and I'd enjoyed learning about a game that I'd never played (due to the aforementioned being born the same year it came out), but unfortunately I remember very little of the actual talk because I don't think it was that enlightening... Got a very stylish origami poster though so can't complain :)

I think after that we took the opportunity to visit the best comic shop in the country, Page 45 of Nottingham, (always nice to go to a comic shop where everybody knows your name, even if you've only been buying by mail order) - introducing my friend Marc to the graphic novel that inspired the Batman: Arkham Asylum game (I know it's critically acclaimed and all, but unfortunately I can't stand the art style which in turn totally puts me off the game, which I hear is actually really good), and buying some new Joss Whedon loveliness.

About to go play at hide&seek sandpit @gamecity yay!

6:49 PM Oct 28th from mobile web

Well I already knew Hide & Seek was going to be fun - certainly enough to miss the 'We were 64' commodore love in event that it clashed with (I was an Amstrad girl) - but it was kinda nice to go to Sandpit in a place other than London where the atmosphere has changed a fair bit since more people have found out about it. Very glad that the lovely people on the desk let us in despite me being the only one out of our group to have found out about pre-registering, and ended up being roped into a game of 'Are you Thursday?' whilst we were still in the queue. The aim was to swap playing cards branded with the days of the week by asking people and finding out if they were a day adjacent to you - I never made it out of the weekend, but wonder if it was at all inspired by Garth Nix's Mister Monday books...

Awesome fun at sandpit @gamecity, *waves* to cool ppl we played impromptu werewolf with! more lego rock band too \m/,

12:34 AM Oct 29th from mobile web

So yeah, we got there a tad late (due to Wetherspoons food issues) but bagged ourselves stickers for two of the games running at the end of the night, so decided to head over to Lee Rosy's lovely tea shop just across the road from Broadway cinema where they had *more* Lego Rock Band (yay! - we got to do You give love a bad name by Bon Jovi amongst other things) and delicious chocolate cake mmmmm...

Then, in the true spirit of Sandpit, deciding we didn't need a scheduled game to gather people together, we teamed up with some (quite lovely!) random people and taught them how to play Werewolf. I *suck* at Werewolf, but nevertheless it is still fun, and got to meet some ace people (hi Hannah!)

We played hipsync (silent disco:the game, v fun) & moveyhouse (which, despite tech difficulties, might be the best film ever :)

12:37 AM Oct 29th from mobile web

Then the 'proper' games: first up HipSync, which was basically a Silent Disco (in the middle of the bar!) where everyone had randomised MP3 tracks and had to find other players who were dancing to the same style of music as them. A few sync issues (ironically) but fun none the less, and the 'game' aspect of it did mean that no one really cared about dancing/moshing/headbanging to silent music in front of a bar full of people :) Would definitely like to play again.

Lastly was Moveyhouse, in which a cinema full of people watched descriptions of people in another cinema and attempted to act out the human drama which was probably far more interesting than the film being shown. Some more technical issues, but the joy of these type of games meant that we weren't entirely sure what was supposed to be part of the script or not, what was pre-written or improvised live, and just got on with having fun with Darth Vader masks and Werthers Originals instead :) A surprisingly emotive experience - laughter really is self-perpetuating, and might actually have been the best film ever (they told us to say that ;) )

Off to the pub after that for fake cobwebby beer and interesting discussion - but possibly the concluding thought from the day is that the most fun came from when we were just chilling out and playing together. Which would make sense, considering we were at a games festival, but the interesting part was that the games we played were mostly of the non-videogame variety...

star power

star pin, originally uploaded by spugmeistress.

two new brooches up today, big ghost pin and star pin, available on etsy or folksy for the uk types.

speaking of star power - i recently became completely addicted to rock band when they had it at a conference i was at with work and nearly lost my voice pretending to be shirley manson :) back home all i've got is guitar hero 2 and singstar on the ps2. so the question is, to rock band or to guitar hero: world tour? and on the ps2 with the stuff i've already got (and some drums obviously, it's always been my secret ambition to be a drummer) or on the wii with the hope that nintendo gets DLC working? apparently rock band peripherals work with guitar hero world tour (or is it the other way round?) but it's all very complicated... any suggestions or advice welcome, for a rocking out christmas :)