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...
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