24: The National Videogame Arcade (Wed 11th November 2015)
Greetings, once again, dear word-absorber. What a busy week it is in Gameland. Last Thursday, I dashed over to Chris Slight’s house to record some videos with him for our podcast’s YouTube channel. Why a podcast needs a YouTube channel I have no idea, but Chris seems keen and I hate to crush his enthusiasm just because he’s making absolutely dreadful use of his time in a way that he’ll never be able to translate into income. We shot a bunch of ‘Let’s Play’ videos which, for the uninitiated, essentially means you can watch gameplay footage while listening to me making Chris sad by telling him I don’t like Halo.
The following day, fellow “WiFi Wars” chum ‘King’ Rob Sedgebeer and I were at the Royal Institution again, so that I could exploit his genius for my personal gain. Every once in a while, this wonderful building opens its doors, and bars, for their ‘Lates’ events, allowing grown-ups to potter around at night time and look at cool science stuff – in case it’s not immediately apparent, I’m not the brains of the outfit.
As regular readers will be aware, our show, “WiFi Wars”, allows people to login to a wifi network we setup, and then compete against each other on a series of games, quizzes and challenges. It’s very stupid, very fun, and Rob is very clever. For the Royal Institution’s “Gunpowder, Treason and Plot” event, he adapted the classic multi-player cartoon terrorism-sim, “Bomberman” so that our audience could all battle it out on a massive grid.
Depending on how tight it is to catch the last train this Friday, it’s possible we’ll be having a play with it again at the National Videogame Arcade in Nottingham. Yes, that’s a real place. Launched in March of this year, the five-storey building has three floors of exhibitions (which, importantly, you can get your hands on) as well as event spaces and a licensed bar (hooray!). We’ll be doing WiFi Wars there as part of the Nottingham Comedy Festival so, if you’re in the area, or know someone who is, get down there, or send them there, so that we can all have fun together. Wouldn’t that be lovely?
If Nottingham’s too far to travel for some of you – after all, this is the LONDON Economic – I’ll be in Bethnal Green on Sunday doing our other live videogaming/comedy show Go 8-Bit alongside long-suffering double-act partner Sam Pamphilon, and special guest comedians Garrett Millerick and sketch act Lazy Susan. We’re trying out a whole bunch of new games in anticipation of hopefully, finally, getting the show onto telly next year, so it’s sure to be fun/an absolute shambles.
In review news, I’ve been playing a lot of ‘TriForce Heroes’ on the 3DS for Ginx TV. It’s basically another one of those Nintendo titles that attaches a passable game to a great franchise (in this case Zelda) and makes a lot more money than they would have done if they hadn’t slapped a brand that has very little to do with the gameplay all over the box. It’s FINE, it’s just not a Zelda game and it’s incredible how Nintendo seemingly manage to get away with the amount of spin-offs they do without ever really being held to account.
I’ve also been playing a lot of Fallout 4, which means I’ll be spending many sleepless nights in the coming weeks converting in-game tyres into rubber. If that sounds like your thing, pick up a copy. It’s really good, although the characters look unforgivably dreadful because “Bethesda”.
Hopefully see some of you soon! That would be nice!
Okay, thanks, bye then!