Winterval 2008 = fe fi fo festive gaming fun for me!

Seasons greetings, I hope you had a lovely holiday! I did, thanks and have 3 new games to wibble about – here’s some first impressions 😀

de Blob – Wii
In a city called Chroma, there’s trouble afoot – it’s been taken over by the INKT Corporation, who for whatever reason have taken all the colour away and made everything dull and grey! You are Blob (literally) and your quest is to liberate the city from the doings of the INKT Corporation and make the place lively and colourful again by running into paint cans and throwing yourself at buildings, monuments, trees and the inhabitants, the Raydians – but watch out the Inkys are after you! It’s a fun and cute game, some time has been spent on the construction on the various areas and scenes which is nice. Gameplay is broken down into separate challenges that are surprisingly compelling. I’m still getting used to the controls as it’s pretty difficult to control yourself as ‘de Blob’ with the anologue stick on the nunchuck and I’m flying around all over the place, so the effects can be a bit manic. Also, I need to work out how not to skip the back story at the start of a new game. It’s quite addictive and I like it a lot 😀

Professor Layton and the Curious Village – DS
It was a bit of a hoohar to get hold of this game, I couldn’t find one in the length of Oxford St, this I was told was to do with Woolworths being the distributor and because they’d gone bankrupt supplies had run out – not sure if this is true though! I found a few in Rathbone St CEX, but decided that a mark-up to 50ukp for a 29.99ukp game was a bit, um, too entrepreneurial for my purse 😉 Anyways finally got one from Argos after scouring the internet. This is the first in a trilogy for Prof Layton & there’s lots of fun puzzles and brain teasers as you help him and his assistant Luke find the ‘Golden Apple’ in the village of St Mystere. For me a nice touch is the cartoon image of Citroen 2CV they travel around in – just because I like em, though wanted the Prof & Luke to hurry up talking me through the back story though, so could get to the games. The characters are somewhat grating at times, actually – esp Lukes adult-child mockney accent (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/2/13/)! The brain teasers are classic schooly ones, eg weights, matchsticks and stuff, so if you’re like me you’ll be scratching your head a lot and reaching for the hints – excellent fun if you’re patient enough to figure em out 😉

New Zealand Story Revolution – DS
First released in 1988 by Taito as an arcade game and also on NES, Amiga, C64, Master System, ZX Spectrum, Sega Mega Drive, PC Engine, (to name a few) a version of this platform game has now been released for the DS by Rising Star Games. It stars Tiki the Kiwi – a little yellow bird who’s quest is to find and free his friends from the clutches of a naughty sealion. The game play involves running about collecting fruit, jumping, shooting enemies and floating about on little balloons. It’s lots of fun and incredibly cute 😀 Actually, I probably should stop talking in such twee terms about this game, as the original was rather difficult and whooped the ass of seasoned, non-twee gamers! The makers of this version did add a few extras particular to the DS, it’s mostly d-pad / button gameplay instead of touch screen, so I got a bit confused when unexpectedly I needed to use the touch screen to spin a door handle. Oh yes, I’m looking forward to meeting the pink whale! Oh also quite excited about multiplayer mode, esp for the next DS:London meet up 😀

Haylp!

Here’s the pink ice whale boss – meep!

Hope Santa brought you some nice games too!

PS. I got a cheeky book from Cia: ‘My Grammar and I (or should that be ‘me’?) by Caroline Taggart & J A Wines – I think this might be a poke at my 1337 writing skillz – hrumpf – he’s lucky I didn’t throw it at him – the cheeky cat ;-P

PS2: Over the last couple of days, there’s been an abundance of Nintendo DS ads on TV for the ‘100 Classic Book Collection’ – it’s a nice idea in some ways, eg lots of classics to choose from and wonderfully portable for us tube sardines, but not sure if peeps will want to shell out for this when they could use Project Gutenberg for free (or by donation) & like me have a GP2X that has a reader. I won’t chastise Nintendo too much though, as anything that gets people reading, or new audiences into learning by play, is a good idea in my book (fnar) – I bid thee goonight (00:57am yawn) 😉

Elite: how it could have been the first (commodities / visual) MMORG – an arguement in my head!

This is a placeholder for a debate I’m having with myself about Elite, a game that appeared on the BBC Micro and Master. It was obviously the inspiration for MMOGs such as EVE (wish I’d asked Eyjólfur Guðmundsson about this when I interviewed him at EIF08), but perhaps Braben & Bell could have made it the first 3D / commodities MMOG…

I’ve been getting back into Elite on the BBC Master and looking at it again from perspectives influenced by my knowledge of contemporary MMORGs.

It’s an amazing and beautiful game as is, but what if…?

Update 1: Yep, MUDs were the first MMORGs, but contemporary MMORGs replace them on implication of larger scale – for example MUDs = 1 server / network , EVEonline (& other contemporary MMORGs) = many servers / networks

In the meantime, here’s some of my Elite pr0n 😀

Elite on BBC Master

Elite on Unix Amiga Emulator for Mac running on a Powerbook

Elite on NES

LGF08 – DS:London World Record attempt, Rocket Club, Holloway

The London Games Festival is under way and on Saturday I rocked up at the Metropolitan University’s student union for an attempt at the World Record for the most DS players playing together for 5 minutes, organised by DS:London in conjunction with London Games Fringe. The atmosphere was great and I met up with lots of friends and the mood was high. The excitement and tension mounted as we got nearer the counting time.

Downstairs an all Girl Gamer tournament was well away with 26 competitors. Meanwhile where we were, small groups of touchers sat in large huddles playing all sorts of games including our one of our multiplayer favs: Mario Kart, there were also some awesome tourneys featuring Bomberman and Tetris.

When the time came for the official count, we all walked in single file, waving our DSs at the officials from The Guinness Book of Records and there was a countdown to the result projected onto a huge screen. The excitement was too much for me and I dropped my DS – yikes! Happily my DS survived, but it’ll teach me to try and play Mario Kart whilst videoing and taking photos – meep!

Unfortunately we missed the World Record this time, but achieved a British record – hurrah! Although disappointed, everyone managed to keep smiling, as we’d had a great time. With no time for wallowing, we all pilled downstairs into the student union bar and drowned our sorrows with a few nicely priced beers and got stuck into the games pub quiz – which was a hoot and thoroughly tested our gaming knowledge – it wasn’t easy!

Well done to Joe, Dave Green, Minh, Rich, Taynor, Barry, Harrison and everyone else who made it a great day!

Virtual Worlds Forum Unplugged, The Hospital Club, London

Virtual Worlds Forum Unplugged was an impromptu replacement event for the last minute cancellation of Virtual Worlds Forum (6-8 Oct) due to an unconnected shooting near the event location.

It was hosted in The Hospital Club, a rather swanky venue billed as a place for new media professionals to gather meet and entertain. It ran on Barcamp style unconference rules – ie you turn up and pick a slot in the schedule to talk about your given subject. It was originally a rather large conference so there wasn’t the time or room for everyone to participate in true Barcamp style, but having only a few hours notice I think the events team did well to put this together and it was a great place for all the stranded delegates and speakers to meet.

I met up with a few friends and colleagues and had a very nice day. It was certainly really cool to sit with some of the leading lights and legends of the virtual worlds community, hear them speak and discuss thoughts with them in a way you don’t get to do in a traditional conference.

Below are some notes from a couple of the talks I attended. I hope the organisers aren’t bankrupted by the cancellation of the original event and are able to restructure it at a later date.

The first talk I sat in on was about virtual hospitals and medical facilities, apologies I didn’t get the name of the chap who was chairing it as I missed the first few minutes. There was a debate around whether health companies would use VW hospitals as a cheap alternative to the real thing.

Education was also discussed, how virtual worlds environments can be used for teaching purposes, but it was emphasised that there needs to be a separation between adult and teen access and different levels of education. Heard what I thought was some quite uneccessary worrying over kids having access to information to do/make sinister things in Second Life and also results of some data on US prosecutions for men picking up young girls on Second Life apparently said it was the girls looking for the men – hmmmm!

Anyway, the bottom line with medical areas in Second Life is not when, but how these technologies are going to change the future of medical services!

Jessie Mulligan, COO, ImaginVenture SA

Talked about trends in gameplay, firstly discussing three different markets:
* One is kids games – huge growth in kids’ games over the last few years
* Games worlds – social worlds, neighbourhoods, theme parks World of Warcraft Habbo Hotel
* Industrial parks – enterprise solutions – Second Life makes more money with corporations

Theme parks are making the most money – a 5 billion dollar turnover – China has a game which has the world’s most simultaneous users. QQ tokens became the currency of choice for gamers and got so big that the government regulated them. Apparently they were used for money laundering and even sex, so the government clamped down on them.

Games are going to grow regardless – it looks like they’re going to branch out more into Triple-A online games (games that you have to download a client to play) such as World of Warcraft. But web browsers games such as MMOGs and adult social world bridge the divide between high price condos and the ghettos – this is where gamers are dividing.

Accessibility and engageabilty – web based products are going to get very popular.

Cultural differences around the world are another consideration. Apparently Greek and Italian gamers have a history of not getting on too well with each other in World of Warcarft. Issues like whose national laws apply in virtual worlds and heavy laws such as people having to register their blogs, laws on gender such as if players are allowed to change their gender online are all things that have different rules in different countries. Huge concern over cultural indifferences in games narrative – when the US brings games into Asia they find the habits of people are different, from art direction to personalities, to technology.

In the next 6 months, apparently Brazil is going to be the third largest owners of installed PCs in the world. Someone asked about metrics for India, apparently they don’t have good enough graphics cards for a lot of games and virtual world play and it’s also an unknown territory as no one has any gaming stats for India. In china MMOGs dominate – because they’ve been so good at monetising gaming in lots of small games – this means they don’t need to have a huge take-up to make money. They’ve been firing off lots of run of the mill MMOGs because they know they can make money really quickly even though the graphics are outdated and in terms of story line they’re nothing new. The money comes in because kids in China are willing to pay to upgrade to a bigger sword whereas mostly in the West people don’t tend to do this because it’s seen as cheating.

For collecting money in Asia the trend is toward micro-transactions because it’s a low barrier to kids and it’s very social – in internet cafes kids show off and interact. They’re very susceptible to new trends. The West is more subscription based.

Summary
Games based worlds are going to keep going strong for next 5 years the key words are accessibility and engageablitly and be more web based.

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Mark Simpkins lead a discussion on tracking world issues that encompassed virtual worlds, role-play, ARGs and exhibitions.

Mark talked about ‘World Without Oil’ an ARG from Canadian Public Broadcasting Corp and designed by Jane McGonigal. It simulated the first 32 weeks of a global oil crisis and anyone could join in by tracking events, writing stories and sharing solutions. He then went on to tell us about the very recently launched Superstruct game. It’s a massively multiplayer forecasting game based on world threats and how to fix them, in a world set in 2019. It encourages people to think about how they would live with threats such as population explosions, pandemics, power struggles and more – building a virtual world. When you sign up for the game, you can create profiles and imagine structures around how you think the world will be, and submit stories of what you imagine the social structures will be – a bit like a live action role player game – it’s text based, so low tech.

It launched at 4am this morning (6th October) and people are generating stories already with a serious edge. http://www.superstructgame.org

Last Friday there was a photography project launch xdrtb.org – an effort to tell the world about the story of an extremely drug-resistant form of tuberculosis, XDR-TB. Through photographs taken by James Nachtwey. The aim of this project is to raise awareness – it’s curable if you catch in time and people stay on their medication. He created xdrtv.org which contains slideshow of his work to break this story globally on blogs, etc and breaking the story of pandemic that is happening now.

The Institute for the Future, based in Palo Alto, California is an independent think tank with 40 years of forecasting experience who work with organisations to help them make more informed decisions about the future. They are going to produce reports from Superstruct.

We discussed how we could deal with a pandemic right now if we thought about it and documented it on a platform such as Superstruct. It was proposed that we could use structs to document all our stories, posts, etc about issues that are important in the world right now. and also thinking ahead that when we are presented with the results of Superstruct we can compare them to other peoples ideas – creating a parallel metaworld on top of Superstruct.

We agreed that Superstruct and was a very interesting project to generate social ideas – promoting the general public to think about real world problems for the future. The question is what should people think about in particular? The credit crunch and other issues of the moment could be social ones such as knife crime and public health issues are a good examples of things we should be considering solutions for now rather than thinking about how to cope with them in the future.

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David Burden of Daden showed me Charlotte a virtual chat bot that he’d made for BBC Backstage a couple of years ago, which was a nice coincidence 🙂

DIS:E Symposium, EICC, Edinburgh, 12th August

After EIF08 had finished I attended the DIS:E Symposium (I don’t understand why this was a separate event – politics?), which had a rather different, more academic feel.

First on was Richard Bartle (University of Essex) with ‘Games and Academia: A rant’.

He’s a writer and game researcher, co-author of MUD the first multiuser dungeon and is one of the pioneers of the MMOG industry.

His talk was about the divide between academia and the gaming industry, especially how the top games courses in the UK were run at ‘modern’ universities, ie former polytechnics, rather than old universities.

He went on to say that this is a problem because although this means there are plenty of trained people, there are too few ‘educated’ people. Hmm, not too sure what that means exactly! Anyway, the old established universities don’t regard computer games as an academically respectable subject because there are no ‘first class’ games specific journals and also there’s no money in games research.

I wasn’t completely convinced by everything said in this talk, but it was certainly a bit of a rant as billed!

Professor Austin Tate (University of Edinburgh) Innovative Education using Virtual Worlds

Austin is Director of AIAI (Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute) in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. I’m really interested in the emergence of virtual worlds, especially as they’re getting more specialist and applied to learning and simulation from art galleries to healthcare. The following notes are a bit lean, but I hope the links help you find more…

Timeline for virtual worlds
* 1978 onwards – multi-user dungeon & domain via early chat / IM
* 1990 onwards – MOO – MUD object orientated
* 1990 onwards – MMORPG
* Now – multi-user virtual environments and virtual worlds (MUVE/VW)
* Next – external content management and links to web services

The Virtual University of Edinburgh VUE, has a campus in Second Life. Its looking at new methods of teaching and new ways to do things – a bit more fun, more effective ways of doing things.

The VUE virtual campus has a building reminiscent of the college buildings and also features local Edinburgh buildings. It has art installations – they have a gallery open in Second Life that will also open soon in real life.

iRoom: a room for intelligent interaction related to virtual collaboration work. For example there’s a Paternoster tasting room – people have their own whisky tasting kits at home, but join in an educational and social experience online.

Other virtual worlds include Kaneva, Lively and Wonderland (which I’ve blogged about before here: .

There are some professionally licensed and private virtual worlds such as ProtoSphere – which is aimed at companies as well as educational establishments: http://www.protonmedia.com

Forterra Olive is also licensed and quite expensive as it comes with lots of applications and specialist worlds in areas such as refugee, medical and military: http://www.forterrainc.com/

Twinity allows closed walls and systems. It allows the user to let selected people into their areas: http://twinity.com/en

Anyway, there’s a lot of virtual worlds now – but they’ll almost certainly thin out as some survive and some don’t. Privately managed regions and controlled areas are becoming popular, especially for simulation for medical, government and military. It’s all extremely interesting 🙂

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Gianna Cassidy from the Psychology of Music Research Group, talked about the relationship between music and games, here’s some notes from her slides.

Videogame play presents a valuable yet relatively untapped platform for musical experience:
* Exposure to symphonic scores eg Halo
* Increasing customisability of soundtracks eg GTA series
* Boom in music performance and creation games eg Rock Band

How music plays a fundamental role in videogame experience
* Forms a channel of communication, interaction and direction
* Enriches the game world – aiding the creation of context, setting the scene and semantic inference about protagonists
* Assist the player in navigation of the play space – directing the player through the sequence of game play and providing functional reference and feedback
* Developed from underscoring the characters actions and functional feedback from the environment to enriching, maintaining and manipulating the emotional context of the game world – aiming to create a seamless impression of gameplay.
* Music acts as an emotional glue between the player and the game – symbiotic communication of induced and expressed cultural. emotional and social content.

She went on to tell us about some research into gamers response to certain types of music in games – how it affects the rate of player activity, player physiology and emotional state – they used Wii Sports, Wii Star Wars and WiiFit games. As you might imagine self selected tracks had the highest arousal results.

Summary
* Music is a powerful tool to elucidate social emotional and cognitive processed and outcomes of our gameplay experience – an emotional glue and channel of information between the game and player.
* Music is a tool to regulate our social, cognitive and emotional interaction with games – it has both positive effects on accuracy, efficiency, judgement, attention, motivation, enjoyment, mood state, liking and evaluation of the game – mediated by preference, perceived control, contextual specificity and liking.

Edinburgh Interactive Festival 08, EICC, Day 3

After all the free Tattinger at last night’s BAFTA party it’s surprising I haven’t got a hangover, but after I discovered the samosas & spring rolls were vegan I stuffed myself with them to make up for the lack of a vegan lunch option.

Eyjólfur Guðmundsson, gave a very compelling talk on ‘Real politics invade virtual worlds – dealing with social and economic issues in EVE online‘.

This was a great talk as Eyjólfur who works as an economist for Eve online gave us an amazing insight into how money and politics work together in the EVE MMOG.

Set in a science fiction space setting of over 5000 solar system, players pilot ships around participating in various activities and professions from fighting to manufacturing.

Economics are a complex business when you’ve got players all around the globe trading Interstellar Kredits across 66 regional markets where pricing and availiabilty of goods differs from region to region. The things that are of value in Eve apart from ISK are minerals, ammunition, ships and ship parts – these are hunted, mined, manufactured and bartered for.

The economy used in Eve is an open economy, meaning that there are no fixed amounts of money or materials in the game’s universe.

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Downstairs, I have a play with Guitar Hero for DS, I’m not much better at this than I am with the full size Guitar Hero, but I am liking its super cuteness on the DS and the tiny Marshall amp that it’s plugged into makes me go ‘awww’ – sucker for ickwl things, me 😉 Anyways, the teens who are playing it next to me are much better at it, – as usual!

There’s also the Dare to be Digital showcase for the University of Abertay, Dundee. It’s a games development competition and the teams have 10 weeks to develop a game prototype. There are three winners and each wins £2,500 and a BAFTA nomination for the BAFTA ‘Ones to Watch’ award which will be awarded in March next year.

There’s some interesting and varied stuff from the students, with some rather nicely done graphics – my favourites are Origamee – a 3D pop-up story book themed world incorporating traditional adventure style puzzle solving, incorporating environmental issues and Grav, set in a ‘retro-futuristic’ environment where robots are your enemies and your surroundings are your best friend.

Edinburgh Interactive Festival 08, EICC, Day two

It’s day two of EIF08 and via a walk through the Edinburgh gorgeous rose gardens and lawns we made it to the EICC for just after 9am. It’s been full on and I’m struggling to take in all the information from the speakers – it’s been an awesome day and I’ve heard some great presentations.

It seems of most of what I’ve heard today has been about innovation and what is changing in the games industry / community – new ideas & audiences that are turning traditional attitudes on their heads – I’m suffering from information overload and it’s going to take a while for me to 1. unravel my notes 2. look & upload my photos / videos and 3. pick out the best bits so I don’t write a really verbose post!

Here’s some highlights from a couple of the presentations:

Opportunities in the new digital age: Chris Deering:

New trends for the expansion of immersive gaming experience:
* 6-10 age games, family and grey gamer sectors grow
* High definition enabled homes spawn combi console / STBs
* Ubiquitous wifi powers ‘anywhere’ gaming
* New game engines, physics, lightning and lip-sync tools
* Voice recognition, GPS and ‘location aware’ servers
* Massive worlds, cinema-real ‘thinking and speaking’ characters

New trends drive new gaming business innovation:
* Behavior tracking will enable ‘pinpoint’ marketing
* Micro-payments and cash online transaction modes
* Advertising subsidises consumer spending
* Gambling becomes a source of development funding
* User enhanced, user generated and user published games
* Games for special niche communities

Opportunities in new experiences where gaming culture will be relevant:
* GPS on mobiles and ‘location aware’ servers
* Ubiquitous screens and high definition redefine TV
* Females become the biggest paying audience on the web
* ‘Concierge’ services about as time becomes a precious commodity
* Monestisation of streaming unleashed the ‘long tail of live’
* Revolution in user interfaces and input including voice
* Mobile phone communities go massive and global

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Too Cool for School – A New Look at Games in Educations – Derek Robinson – http://hotmilkydrink.typepad.com

Derek Robinson gave us a great talk about Learning & Teaching Scotland has been looking at a different approach to games and learning.

Traditionally, games have been frowned upon in schools, but in Scotland they’ve seen some remarkable results by allowing kids to play off the shelf games such as Nintendogs, Guitar Hero, Brain Training and Endless Ocean. They found that these games helped flatten out the divide between different skill streams in the classroom . It was found that with maths games, for example in Brain Training & within Nintendogs, kids learnt quicker, became faster at solving problems and overall had more confidence and engaged more freely with other members of the class.

Playing these games has inspired the kids no end, they’ve set up blogs to talk about their experiences, such as how their pet dogs in Nintendogs are getting on and accessories for them. Derek emphasised how off the shelf games should not be dismissed and to be careful of thinking that ‘worthy’ educational games are the right or only choice for education.

Learning and Teaching Scotland have formed The Consolarium – a centre for gaming and learning.

Edinburgh Interactive Festival 08, EICC – Day One

I’m fizzing slightly – no it’s not due to too much bicarb, it’s because I’ve been up since 5am and via a bus, a very fast flight and the 100 bus I’m back in lovely Edinburgh.

About two hours ago it was unbearably hot and as I battled my way through performance artists and tourists up those bloody steep stairs to the top – the Golden Mile – I felt like a packhorse with my stoopidly heavy backpack and hot like I was going to faint like a pale wee thing, but although pale I happily made it to the fantastic Backed Potato shop for my vegan haggis potato with lashings of vegan marg J

I love the Baked Potato Shop, so much that was top of my list for things to do on arrival I ate it whist watching a rather eccentric man engage his audience with knives and humiliation of passing tourists – he was very funny! Then on the way down the other side it pissed down and now I’m soaked – the Mac, DS & GP2X are okay – I angled my prolly to protect my precious cargo before saving myself – well I’m waterproof mostly and can take it. Oh the fizzing? That’s me full of diet coke that got shaken up on the way and caffeine has never really agreed with me!

You’re not really here to read about my baked potato habit or the weather though, so here you go… The ‘Screening Day’ of the Edinburgh Interactive Festival is a mixture of industry talks and fun gaming opportunities. Nintendo, Sony & Microsoft are all battling for attention. It’s a mixture of kids n dads & longhaired gamer types. There’s a few girls here, but not many and they seem to be stewards or demo-ing the games.

So picture a chef from Nintendo cooking up a storm with his Cooking Guide, he’s in a makeshift kitchen with all the shiny apparatus you’d expect, surrounded by a breakfast bar complete with about 15 pristine white DS and menus – hey we’re going to cook together!

The burly chef offers me some chicken tikka masala as an incentive to join them, but I smile sweetly and just watch – I don’t think a conversation about my being vegan would enrich the flow of his patter – anyways I enter the Nintendo competition to win lots of swish kitchen appliances instead! Bar the chicken, I wonder if I’m his target audience J

There also a whole island FWOABW of screens and cosy seating for Little Big Planet – ‘The Next Big Thing’ from Media Molecule for PS3 – I have a chat with one of the designers to find out what’s going on – he tells me that it’s the most fun eva – basically it’s a very cute MMO (or play on yer own) where you swing around, collect things and the best thing is it’s got user modification coming out of its ears! Through various menus you can change the whole look and feel and via the eyetoy you can put your ugly mug at the centre of the action! If that’s got you all excited then the release is sometime in September, apparently.

Oh I must mention the Wiis, they’ve got very sporty looking ladies & gents manning them in white tracksuits. From watching they’re very popular with the uninitiated and so I feel I should wait till later in the festie to show of my 1337 WiiFit 5|<i11z – oh yes, they get you to put on special while socks with those grippy spots on to play – I like these people, they understand my OCD tendencies towards other people’s feet 😉

There’s also a square full of XBOX 360s playing various car games, very laddy and from where I’m sitting I can see that it’s been populated by schoolboys for most of the day. I’ve seen one girl play so far – it comes forth in my choice of hangouts – ho hum…

Okay, before I forget I went to a couple of interesting talks today, one was about advertising and gaming – product placement and ads within games – I took photos of slides instead of notes as I was a bit doolally from my 5am start, so I’ll let them do the talking.

I also went to a talk/demo of Multiwinia, by introversion – the fine people responsible for the excellent, but very difficult Defcon ‘everybody dies’ game 😉

Will write some more on these later – running to the last session of the day!

Have I Got Games News For You, Brighton, 28/07/08

I was visiting Brighton for a meeting and managed to persuade my trusty friend Anders to come along to the Guardian gamesblog pub quiz at the Caroline of Brunswick in Ditchling Road.

Anders had cooked me a fab vegan stir fry and so rolled down the road to the pub, just off The Steine. It was a hot ‘n’ humid night and the pub was rammed with steaming gamers, many who were down for Develop, the gaming conference that was kicking off the next day.

I looked around the friendly bunch for gamer friends, but sadly (& a bit surprisingly) there wasn’t anyone I knew about. As my dear friend Andy wasn’t such an enthusiast of a gaming as me I decided that perhaps a team of one girly wasn’t on the cards, especially as most teams had about 6 members and were looking seriously confident 😉

Anyways, battle commenced and there were some squeals and guffaws from the teams as the Guardian team announced questions. There was even a drawing and um, a plasticine round! My favourite was of course the games choon round – I especially love 8-bit tunes, so was in heaven when some golden oldies came up 🙂

Even though I didn’t have a team, I watched on with glee and even when I got too excited and glowing hot, a friendly barman came to my aid with a mini fan!

Unfortunately, due to the silly early hour that trains stop running up to London from Brighton I had to leave early, but I hear that the winners were very happy with their £75 prize and copy of the Guinness Book of Worlds Records. Next time there’s a gaming quiz I think I’ll just enter even if I’m on my todd – it’s just too much fun to be shy 😀

Guardiangamesblog Flickr pool

GP2X F200 – FTW!

Woohoo, I’m a very lucky bunny – came home from OpenTech with a very nice GP2X F200 open source handheld device!

No, I haven’t been maxing out my moo account again, I was just fortunate to enter a competition that Osmosoft, the sponsors of Opentech were running and be lucky enough to win the second place prize 😀

What’s cool about the GP2X is that it’s powered by Linux and you can write your own games or import games and emulators that other developers have built. It’s lots of fun and there are a couple of sites devoted to free games that you can pick and choose from – such as www.gp32x.com.

But wait… The GP2X isn’t just cool for playing games, you can run DivX movies on it, look at photos, read ebooks and play your OGGS on it – how cool is that!

I’ve been playing with it today and my favourite game so far is VEKTAR, which is like a cross between Asteroids and Geometry Wars.

Anyways, I’m very grateful to Jeremy Ruston, creator of tiddlywiki and the Osmosoft gang for my lovely GP2X, and I’m also hoping to develop a proper working version of the ‘Travelcat-log’ soon with the help of the tiddlywiki development group 😀