20: Big Day! (Wed 14th October 2015)
Hello, dear reader! Today’s a big day for me, so please cross all the things you can cross for me immediately. Oh, go on. I’ll tell you a bit more about why in a minute but, first, I should tell you about some of my other Adventures In Gameland – it’s been a big week too!
On Friday, I popped up on Sky News/Sky One tech show, “Swipe”, reviewing the week’s games before whizzing off to Manchester for Replay Events’ “Play Expo”, a brilliant gaming event that focuses on retro and indie gaming, although they also managed to secure the UK premiere of AAA-title Dark Souls 3!
Two particular highlights for me were the opportunities to meet (and interview) Jeff Minter and The Oliver Twins. Younger people reading this will no doubt be excitably thinking “Who?”, but for those of you who’ve been playing games for as long as me, you’ll know those names very well. Jeff for titles such as Llamatron and Attack of the Mutant Camels, and The Oliver Twins for best-videogame-egg-ever, Dizzy. If you’re a Dizzy fan, check out this link to find out about an event they’ve got lined up for the 24th October – they’re keeping their cards close to their chest but it sounds like big plans are afoot…
Also this weekend, we had a lot of lovely feedback for Videogame Nation on social media. The latest episode looked at the way Mental Health is covered in videogames, for World Mental Health Day, but also managed to cover the topic more broadly in a sensitive and insightful way – congratulations to everyone involved in the show for managing to find that delicate balance and creating a piece of mature videogaming television that didn’t involve misogyny and guns.
So, that was the weekend, back to my big day, today. There’s three exciting things happening that I’m incredibly proud of…
First, if you have Virgin Media, switch to Ginx TV at 7.30pm to see the premiere of my show “Minecraft: Digging Deeper”. It’s been a labour of love for the last six months, as I’ve written all 6 x 30-minute episodes alone, almost lost my mind standing in a voiceover booth/sauna to record the whole thing, and captured every second of game footage (twice, in many cases, as the first lot got deleted, which was BRILLIANT). Whether you love the game, or have no idea what all the fuss is about, I’ll be attempting to convince you to waste as much time on it as possible. Let’s cross everything and hope people like it. It’s taken ages.
The second exciting thing is that I’m off to the Games Media Awards. If (like me, until recently) you don’t work in the games industry, you’ve almost certainly never heard of this ceremony. Organised by MCV – the Games Media’s trade publication – it celebrates success in the sphere of ‘people who work in the games industry that talk about the games rather than actually make them’. We’re leeches, basically, but nice ones. Two things I’m involved in are nominated – Videogame Nation (which I mentioned earlier) and TwoMoreWhiteGuys (the twitch.tv stream I co-host semi-regularly with Chris Slight). Let’s cross everything and hope that I don’t get so drunk, I humiliate myself.
The third exciting thing is that I’ll be meeting up this afternoon with my long-term comedy partner Sam Pamphilon and our producer Rohan Acharya to work on our videogaming comedy show “Go 8-Bit!” once again. After a lot of tireless work on the part of Rohan for two years (how he’s not just given up and run away I’ve no idea), we’re now beginning to pick up pace on the creative side of the show once again, looking at the best way to translate the spirit of our live stage show to television. If all goes well, hopefully I’ll be telling you where to watch that some time next year. But who knows – telly takes AGES. Cross everything please!
See you again soon!
