As you probably read, Eurogamer was this weekend in London and DtoidUK decided to meet up. 15 dtoiders sharing a 15 bed room plus London Dtoiders joined us for fun too. Myself (pheonix), Gandy, Halfleft, Shakey, Malcor, Hammertmie, Phil, Kat, Anus Mcphanus, Justice, McSnow, N0brein (from Germany!), Nicmonroe, Mikey, Batthink, Francis, Surplus gamer and Corican getting sexy in London.
Eurogamer in itself was amazing, with relativity small lines (20 minutes wait max) for games like Left4Dead2, Bayonetta, AvsP, Split Second, God of War 3, Dante Inferno and Assassins Creed II, to name just a few. But those were the tip of the iceberg.
Our first night together did see the expected worries that come with 'meeting people from the internet', but with a couple of drinks, some pizza and a comedy night where I was able to shout out the term 'more like 10 shit loads', it wasn't long before people started to relax.
Friday morning, the first day of Eurogamer saw our first rookie mistake. After a 3am bed time we dragged ourselves out of bed to be at Eurogamer for 9am, but we forgot to check when it opened which turned out to be 11am, but it meant we were nearly first in line and managed to get sexy with our favourite games straight away. The night then saw me take 20 people to China Town to an amazing Japanese restaurant for there first taste (and time with chop sticks) of Japanese food.
With hunger satisfied I thought our first major night together would best be spent in an arcade, and no small arcade at that. We went to the Trocadero. The trocadero is a 5 level arcade that saw some epic Street fighter 4 action (with applicable trash talking), some ParaPara, Bumper cars, Mario Cart and the obvious couple of shooters just to name a few. The night was finished beautifully with a couple of bottles of vodka and shooting the shit in the dorm room until 4am. Bliss.
Up early once again for day two saw everyone finish off playing the games they wanted to play, but it wasn't long before we were drinking champagne cocktails and top shelf whiskey in Planet Hollywood before heading off to Gamerbase for our final night together.Gamerbase occupies over 2200 sq feet and has 65 Dell XPS PCs containing the new Intel Core Quad Core processors and 8800GTX graphics cards. They have an incredible library of over 150 games available. I worked my UK Community Leader charms and got a pretty sweet group discount and we spent 2 hours playing Quake Area and Unreal Tournament in one great big sexy LAN party. Nothing says 'I love you' like death by minigun. we once again finished the night with more vodka, shooting the shit, watching Halfie vomit becuase he can't handle his drink and by 10am we were parting ways after an AMAZING weekend.
Destructoids community is really, really important to me and it felt amazing to be able to put on something like this for the UK community. Not everyone can run off to PAX at the drop of a hat, but nobody should miss out. This weekend cost a fraction of PAX (£54 per person for 3 nights in the hostel!) yet we had a great time. It is really important to me that the community gets together like this. We had so much fun and all with some amazing people.
So to the DtoidUK community, thank you so much for being your fucking awesome this weekend. You guys are amazing! Thank you, thank you so much!
Love, Pheonix.
P.S for Dtoid UK Eurogamer attendees, you can check out all the awesome photos and upload yours here
http://www.flickr.com/groups/1273186@N21/pool/page2/. If you didn't go you can still click there to be insanely jealous.
:D
Good times had by all.
Also, "we were drinking champagne cocktails and top shelf whiskey" -- I guess that the money you didn't spend flying to America, you spent on booze. Way to keep up the spirit of Dtoid, folks! <3
Gamerbase was pretty cool also, 16 player unreal with awesome people. n0brein is very awesome for travelling the distance and just being a fine chap. I wish we could do this more often. I look forward to meeting up with you cool and sexy people once again in the future.
Fuck, I'm not even out of the country and I'm already missing everyone <3
Huge thanks to pheonix for organizing everything and getting us all together
It felt amazing because you are amazing, Pheonix! You rule, Dtoid UK rules. I wish I could have been there.
This weekend was better than I could have hoped for and it's all down to you guys. You are all fucking ace! The expo itself almost takes a back seat to hanging around with you guys. We will need to sort out something soon!
Also why is there only one pic with the Chinaman? And why's it a pic of the back of his head? RACIST!
(I shall post all my photos up tomorrow when I get back from work)
British are crazy.
Just you wait until Nik uploads that picture of you squatting with you pants down.
Also fantastic weekend was FANTASTIC. Thank you everyone for making it be so good.
That's the one.
we may not have had Hamza's junk but my god that's a good looking Asain fellow!
Sadly I have bugger all energy when it comes to the night so I was pretty much asleep in my top bunk most of the time, occasionally peeking to see some bizarre site before flopping to unconciousness again. Great fun though, especially the eatings and arcades. And the gamerbase stuff which was just awesome. I think there needs to be a part of any narp where everyone present plays at least one game altogether. It's almost indescribably awesome (Not entirely, otherwise I'd be a crappy write).
Thanks to everyone who made that weekend so great, between getting scolded by NJ for introducing every indie game with 'oh goddammit!' and the approapriate way to piss on someones children it was fantastic. Also Mikey's adorability betrays how shitterrifying I found it meeting someone whose art I currently have as a desktop background and am seriously considering framing under glass.
Can't wait until we do something again!
TENT POLE!
<3 Dtoid UK.