Friday, March 03, 2006

Public Gaming

John, Kieron and I met up last night in a pub in London for drinks. And after a while, after eating some rather nice burgers, we got out our DSs, and played games.

We started with Mario Kart DS, which was great. I won. Kieron will claim he would have won had the bar staff not come over to us and started to talk about how they were planning on installing an Xbox 2 and a PS3 for customer use on a Saturday afternoon when the pub was quiet. Kieron will claim that, but he would be fibbing, since I was paying as much attention to the barman as he was.

It was interesting, in fact, that three of the (male) bar staff all came over and were talking to us about videogames, whereas I've never been approached by bar staff wanting to talk about anything else in the past. Oh, with one exception. It was all very pleasent.

I think we were all slightly apprehensive about the reaction we'd get playing games in the pub, but it was pretty good, in fact - when we were playing Mario Kart almost everyone who walked past was trying to see what we were playing, probably because of the way we were just as animated as normal, laughing, telling each other we were gits, groaning at being hit with four red shells on the trot, urging more speed out of our karts ... I didn't think we would be, but I suppose the game demands it. Having drinks probably helped.

Second we played some Advance Wars Dual Strike. The first game lasted about 3 minutes before the connection dropped, which was annoying - we've never had the connection problem before with any other game, but AWDS seems to be very flakey. We played that for ages the second time around but it was a bit of a stalemate and got a little dull. Especially because John had four or five battleships; Kieron had lined up infantry all along the shore so John couldn't land, and I had loads of bases and territory but had nowhere to attack. I can't remember the name of the map.

We finished up with some Bomberman DS. I can't remember who won that. I do remember being the red bomber and saying "Red Bomber, one more!" in a slightly high pitched voice, far too loud.

The pub we were in is the Prince of Wales Feathers on Warren Street. A good place to play games. Unfortunately no TheCloud wifi. I might suggest they get it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmmm - good luck to them getting an 'Xbox 2'. I must've missed the XBoxes 2-thru-359. ;o)

I *should* have won Mario Kart - you're a liart and a cheat!

And I know why you can't recall who won Bomberman - p*sshead!

--
KieRON.

Anonymous said...

T'was I! I won Bomberman (well, the second match, at least).