Attention all technophiles! Nerdgasms ahoy! Like descending Space Invaders, a whole plethora of gaming activity will scatter across London in the coming weeks, as the London Games Festival arrives in town to delight and amaze us.
Events kick off with massive multi-media celebration Video Games Live at the Royal Festival Hall on Friday 24th October. The esteemed English Chamber Orchestra will provide renditions from classics such as Legend Of Zelda, Halo, Sonic The Hedgehog and a bit of Mario for good measure. All this epic music will be performed with a background of visuals from the games themselves on a huge screen and more lasers than you’d find in Lego Star Wars.
The London Games Fringe - in its own words - “exists to promote and celebrate the wide variety of gaming experiences which - for whatever reason - currently fall outside the mainstream”. Around various venues in the city between the 25th of October and the 7th November, you can find female-only gaming experiences, seminars, workshops and conferences on game design or if you fancy mucking about a bit, you can participate in a Guitar Hero Battle of the Bands or witness the Pro Evo Play-Offs.
Brick Lane’s Truman Brewery hosts the Eurogamer Expo from the 28th-29th October, where you can play all the latest big-name titles and most impressively, GamesIndustry.biz provide a careers fair to help assist the next generation of computer game makers. You can also explore the world of Little Big Planet, in which your hero ‘Sackboy’ explores an interactive landscape as big as anything ever created before.
If all that wasn’t enough the get your finger tips sweating, EA also bring back The Big One to Trafalgar Square on October 31st and November 1st, where you can take on the stars of music and sport at such games as Tiger Woods 2009 and FIFA 2009, all with a hefty dollop of live music to keep the big crowds entertained throughout. With unique opportunity to get your hands on the latest un-released games as well, this promises to be a real glimpse into the future of computer gaming.
Geeks of London, prepare to unite.
By Alex Tuck
Find out more and book events at the LGF08 website.
Image by jonanamary via the Londonist Flickrstream.
