[ Tom, Brett]

I’m sat here in our London hostel. My feet reeeeally hurt and I feel pretty grimy from the lovely tube journeys we’ve been taking. I ache and I have a liiittle bit of a headache. Yet my brain is still happier than a really very happy thing on one of it’s overly happy days. MCM is the first convention I’ve been to, and …wow. The first day was amazing. A-MAZ-ING.

Sorry if this is a bit of a wordy post, by the way. I’m sure there’ll be a lot of photos in here once it’s actually up on the site (Woo, writing in word!). We’ll try to split accounts of various games into separate articles just for you people who don’t really want to read our blabberings and just want to see some games.

Getting there early was completely and utterly worth it. Just because we were all heading there at around the same time as a lot of other people. You’ve not lived until you’ve seen female-ash and pikachu hug a Waldo lookalike holding a large FREE HUGS sign, more about free hugs later. As one of the many con-goers packed onto a little DLR train, watching regular commuters staring wide eyed at the zombies, or warriors wielding huuuuge swords was hilarious. Yay hilarity!

Ronald-ine McDonald was awesome

It was even better once we left the train. After the “march of the geeks”, as one lovely commuter called it, of everyone from the train walking along the same walkway in various costumes. We arrived at the door and were greeted by a quick ninja hug (also part of the free hugs) in which you get picked up and spun; it was a surprising yet fun way to start the expo.

As we waited for the press room to open, more and more costumed people kept arriving, I’d have been just happy sitting at the main door for the next couple of hours watching the array of characters join the event. From TF2 characters, to Link with a fully working bombchu;  the Tardis to neko costumes. We saw it all and it was gooood.

Nervously walking in the press room, we thought everyone would be more professional than us and work for big companies. We were wrong, most of the people at the time we arrived were young students who ran their own sites etc. just like us. We even met a similar sized site to us, who were impressed by our cameras, before revealing a professional shoulder camcorder and boom mic… Still, they were nice and you (and us – bah to lack of immediate connection) should really check their site out at http://www.projectnpc.com. A quick pass scan later we were in, skipping the queues. The MCM expo itself had begun…..

Thank God for those passes (<3 Ralph-Uren PR and MCM Expo Group, thanks for not completely ignoring our applications like we feared!), the queue was scarily big. So, we skipped through the press room and left poor ol’ Rhys and Neil to queue, you can read their account of the days events here. Once inside, awe occurred. First convention, large hall and lots of stalls. We decided we should put work first, newly empowered by the press-labelled lanyards we were almost brandishing ahead of us to prove we should be there, and headed straight for the games village.

Borderlands was fun!

Taking a quick stroll around the section, we checked out the booths that were there. EA’s zombie vault, SEGA, Ubisoft, CAPCOM and mini LEGO: Rock Band Stage. We’ll post a photographic roundup of the booths after we’ve gotten some more photos for you tomorrow. Still wandering a little aimlessly, with what must have been only around 20 people inside yet, we were waved over to the Borderlands booth to play, it being one of the few gaming ones open that soon. ‘twas good fun and it’s pretty much swung me to bag that on Steam at some point. We’ve got a writeup of our little preview of Borderlands here.

Unfortunately, by the time we had finished playing and looked around the comic and anime side to the expo, the EA vault for Left 4 Dead 2 had opened and formed a massive queue, that didn’t die down all the time we were there. However, we did get attacked by zombies, well tame zombies chained  by EA to market L4D2 at MCM and got a chance to quickly play Fairytale Fights which takes the cuteness of various fairy tales and slaps a load of violence and gore into them whilst playing like the Lego Star Wars, Indiana Jones etc. games. We did not play the game too long though, so we shall find out more tomorrow.

Speaking of Lego, Lego Rock Band was running next to the EA vault, allowing players to get a play of any of the games songs, in front of a crowd. Quite scary in fact, since the speakers were turned up high and you stood on a stage. Videos of us playing can be found here.

LEGO Rock Band, also fun

Oh yes, LEGO: Rock Band was pretty awesome. We are –totally- the champions, thanks and well done to the EA rep that got up with us and sang it, it was the feedback people were grimacing at, honest ;) Definitely need to be getting that, even if we just export it’s rather nice track list, lots of people singing Song 2 too, looks like the ingame minifigs of real-life musicians are a hit.

After walking past, and shying away in fear from, some awfully crowded and queue-y booths for Tekken 6, Tatsunoko VS Capcom, Monster Hunter 3 and Bayonetta we decided the best course of action would be to return tomorrow to get these. Less people = Less queues = more gametime, right? So you’ll have to check back later for those. I’m telling you right now, I’ll queue all Sunday to get into Left4Dead2 if I have to.

After that we were pretty much done, work-wise. Then it was time for more fun, less work. Trapsed around the manga and anime stalls for a good long time, met some people from t3h intarw3bz, collected/dispensed free hugs and had a roaringly good time, and we get to do it all again tomorrow, hooray!

FREE NINJA HUGS

Oh yes…  free hugs. Many people around the expo had signs, of varying creativity (properly made signs to “free hugs” written on their face) offering out hugs to people. I gladly accepted this from -everyone- I saw, meaning I got a hug every few minutes. Some people went one step further and did special hugs. I’ll be writing a short article about this popular activity and count exactly how many hugs I get tomorrow.

And that’s it for day one! Until day two… THE GAME!

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