About a week ago now, I was invited to attend a LAN Party in Swindon at Gillian’s. I’ve been wanting to do a short write up about it for a while now, but have just been so busy lately. Even today, I’m writing this after coming back from a weekend at Rik and Wing’s, which I’ll write about later this week

I haven’t been to a LAN Party since I was 18 years old! I was looking forward to this for nearly 2 months and had anticipated the fact that no one will be sleeping much that weekend and decided to pick up a few tins of Caffeine Mints to help with that XD The first evening began with Kit picking me up at my apartment around midnight, arriving at Swindon at about 1:30am, and then immediately diving into an ‘Unreal Tournament 3′ match. By 8am I’d decided I needed to crash and excused myself to retire to my lovely fold-away futon that I’d brought along with me.

I’d only managed to get 3 hours of sleep though before I was up again at 11am, only to find that some people were still up playing ‘World of Warcraft’. I was tempted to join them, but I haven’t touched my WoW account in quite a while and my character was far too weak to go on Raids. In another corner of the room, we also had an Xbox 360 and a PS3. A couple of the guys were taking turns playing ‘Devil May Cry 4′, which is a stunning game. I’d been planning to pick this up in another month or so and this weekend kind of spoilered the game for me haha but it’s fine, I’m in it for the gameplay, not the story.

After some breakfast, Gillian decided to treat myself, Denji and Bex to a game of Scrabble! Yes. At a LAN Party, with all this awesome hardware around us, we play a board game. It was awesome XD You should’ve seen my face light up when I spelled the word ‘SPLEEN’. Also, I think we all giggled when Gillian spelled out ‘ORC’.

The rest of the weekend was pretty much more gaming, a trip to the supermarket to buy more energy drinks, some food and aspirin. I swear, I was buzzing so much, when the weekend was over, my body was shaking from Caffeine withdrawal! There was a lot more to the weekend, but unless you were there, words just don’t do it justice. It was great. The guys I’d met were all a fun bunch and we had a fantastic time shooting each other. There was a lot of love in that house that weekend.

Looking forward to the next event

I’ve been sending out books at the start of the year for reviews and a rather lovely one came out today at Sequential Tart, by Sheena McNeil.

Each new twist and turn had me fully captivated - I literally could not put it down till I’d read every last page! The art is vibrant and energetic […] Every detail adds realism to this spectacular world, and each character stands out as important and unique - each with a story to tell. […] The story is compelling and entertaining with an excellent flow that makes it fun and easy for such heavy topics of death and sadness.
# read the full review

She awarded it a Grade 9 out of 10. Stunning! My report card has never been so good

In other news, today I went out to meet and interview two ‘Set Production’ Designers concerning my little film project. Everything is being shot on a budget, so the first thing we needed to do was to find a Set Designer so we can discuss costs for building the set and try to keep things affordable.

It was very educational. The two ladies I met today had a lot of experience in the industry, shooting for both Film and Television, and as I explained to them what it was I wanted to capture, in terms of Set Design, they offered a lot of advice and concepts. I was really thrilled by it all. What I thought was very humble about them, was how even though they have all this experience, they’re still very much into working on Indie projects for free, purely for the love of the challenge and to get more items on their Show-reel’s.

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I can’t believe this sudden burst of games lately. I’ve been eating a packed lunch the past week in an attempt to save some cash after purchasing Assassin’s Creed, Uncharted: Drakes Fortune, N3: Ninety Nine Nights and Zombies Calling. I thought, great! These should keep me content for the next few months. I still want to pick up Mass Effect too at some point. Damn it!! See? All these games does not stop the lusting after the next load of upcoming titles. Oh, when will it end?!? *eats sandwich*

Looking forward to getting my hands on an Alone in the Dark demo (PLEASE release one T_T) but in the meantime, I played the demo for Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, which I really liked, and also just discovered Dark Sector (pictured above+below) which is coming out in about a month or so. Currently, very much looking forward to this title. It looks like super fun and it totally slipped under my radar. I only came across it by complete accident when I was doing a search for Dark Messiah on Amazon.

The main character in Dark Sector has had his arm exposed to some toxic disease and it mutates “into a gnarled, armoured instrument of destruction that can spontaneously grow a three-bladed flying weapon called the glaive”. It’s played in a third person view and has a few similar traits as RE:4, thus its appeal.

Lately I’ve noticed an influx in the action-mmo genre. *JOY*

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My sister had decided she wanted to do something special for her 24th Birthday, and special it was! She’d given me a call and told me of her plans, to head out to a super-shway Rollerskating Disco Bar!

I hadn’t been ice-skating since I was 15 I think. Rollerskating? Not since I was 10!! It was a pretty surreal experience getting wheels attached to my feet XD I loved it, but I did spend most of my evening trying not to fall. I’d invited Nana along, who hadn’t been rollerskating since she was 10 also, but she seemed to be doing a better job than me at it.

I would like to add, that I didn’t fall at all during my entire evening. But I had enough instances where I did the “OMG I’M FALLING *waving arms around*” stabalising dance XD Nana at one point actually thought I was dancing! See, even when I almost fell I still looked cool - Hah!

My sister’s friend, Adam, had come dressed as a robot (custom costume made out of boxes)! He had a sticker on him that said ‘I Am Programmed To Be Awesome!’ and he so was! The fact he never fell over even once in that thing deserves respect. Lots of people were dressed up in 70’s getup, but the most random costumes I saw were the Scoobie Doo and Pink Panther outfits.

Crazy stuff.