1349: Zeds

I am tiiiiiiired. So tired, in fact, that I very nearly forgot to write something today. That would have been disastrous. (I’m sure no-one would have minded if I “caught up” tomorrow, but that always felt like cheating somehow, and after 1,349 days it’s a matter of pride.)

Here I am at 1am, then, wondering what to write about before I fall asleep. I could talk about the Eurogamer Expo again, I suppose, since that’s been occupying literally all of my time since Thursday.

It’s the last day of the Expo tomorrow. I’m probably not going to hang around until the end because I want to get home, but I am going to catch a couple of last developer sessions and spend some time with my friend Mitu’s game Redshirt. It’d also be nice to actually have a chance to fiddle around with a PS4 and/or an Xbox One, but the queues for those have been so ridiculous it hasn’t really been practical up until now. I had to lurk around the Nintendo booth before the show opened to be able to play Bayonetta 2, so I shudder to think what hoops I’ll have to jump through to see the things that people are really excited about. (Aside: Bayonetta 2 has been drawing an impressive queue of people each day — thought obviously not on the scale of something like Call of Duty or Titanfall — which was nice to see.)

What else? Today I met Mike Bithell, and he’s a thoroughly pleasant person — a preview-cum-interview type thing I did with him will be up on USgamer on Monday. I also had the good fortune to meet both Damien McFerran and Johnny Cullen, both of whom are people I have, until now, only known through Twitter. It’s nice to put names to faces, and Damien in particular had some very kind things to say about my work that pretty much made my day, so thanks for that, sir, if you’re reading.

I’ve eschewed the evening social gatherings while I’m here, much as I did when I went to Gamescom. The workload has been less insane here than it was at Gamescom, but I’ve still been working into the evening most nights. I’m also not all that great socialising with people I don’t know all that well who do know each other, either — I know there’s no way to fix that aside from actually jumping in and getting involved myself, but frankly I haven’t quite felt up to it! I do like the Eurogamer lot on the few occasions I’ve met them, though, so perhaps some other time I’ll have the opportunity to hang out with them socially.

I’ve remained relatively swag-free from this visit, with my freebie acquisitions being limited to a T-shirt that’s too small for me from the The Evil Within presentation the other day, a poster from the indie game Cloudbuilt that I was awarded for being only the second person to beat a particular level on display, and some flyers from FuturLab for their upcoming PS4 and Vita game Velocity 2X which, in all honesty, has been one of my favourite things I’ve seen at the show. I’m thinking of framing both the poster and one of the flyers, since both of them have super-distinctive artwork that would look great on display. We’ll see.

Anyway. I’m yawning my head off and it’s getting hard to concentrate so I’m going to leave that there. Tomorrow’s entry will be from back in my own home rather than this not-all-that-bad-really-but-I-can’t-believe-how-expensive-the-tariff-displayed-in-reception-is hotel room.