A neon arrow, a zebra carpet, a forthcoming coaster, this is no ordinary building. Yesterday was the PlayStation Video Store launch party in glitzy Soho. Having travelled for an ardeous couple of hours via a national service that seems to bring out the aggressive, antsy and grumpy nature in even the best of citizens into the capital, I met up with overlord Alex. After a brief difficulty in locating each other, my bold blue hoody ensured I stood out from the crowd and we headed off to the pub, we were considerably early. He spent the first batch of conversation complaining about his travels from Scotland (the cheek of it), before we discussed some TSA happenings over a diet coke and an orange juice respectively.
As time ticked over, so did our patience with our resident TSA news hoarder. We sat in the Pillar of Hercules awaiting Tuffcub to enter, gossiping as to whether each man that entered was him, awaiting for someone to answer their phone when we enquired as to his whereabouts. Eventually he wanders in, his towering figure not something I was expecting. Regardless of the staff’s appearance we’re all lovely online, and both Alex and Tuffcub proved to be exactly the same in person.
After spending a little bit more time in a completely different Soho bar whilst we waited for the event to start, we chatted about how dissapointed we would be if Gerard Butler didn’t sing on stage with Little Boots in his King Leonidas voice, the gap in years between my young self and the slightly older two (which didn’t go down so smoothly) and at the confusion of multiple doors leading into the bathroom and the possibilities of treasure located behind one of them.
Once our baffling dialogue had seized, we made our way down the road to the event location where we were greeted upon a club-styled stamp on the wrist. Like the rest of the night, this was no ordinary stamp as we all inspected our wrists curious as to where the ink actually was. Either it’s UV ink, or they’re stamper was shockingly bad at his job was the conclusion we settled with.
Amongst the tiny but supposedly delicious bowls of Shepherd’s pie, was of course the reason we were there, to get pissed. No, I kid, it was for the now launched PS Video Store. With the launch trailer looping on some truly huge TVs, we prodeeced through a variety of equally mentally decorated rooms until we reached the demo room. As demo’s go, there’s obviously not a great deal to go through besides all of the facts that I furiously typed on my iPhone with its dwindling battery and sent off to the staff to post for all you fine readers (found here, here and here).
Aside from the volume of titles now available for rentals and purchase, it was the pricing that really impressed us. It instantly went from a service that I didn’t plan on using to a rental system that has made me alter my LoveFilm subscription already. Rentals from £2.49 for SD and £3.49 for HD, these are prices that are just within impulse purchase regions for me.
Munching down on plenty of bowls (all the food was in tiny bowls) of hake and chips and drinking copious amounts of diet coke and a couple rather delightful lychee breeze cocktails, we discussed many more things. The eavesdropping of a conversation about the lack of porn on the Video Store led to a quite creepy situation, which calmly led to the topics of cottaging and wondering who the lady that everyone was interviewing was. Whilst Alex went of to pilfer some stuff (by pilfer I mean collect swag to give away), the lack of Gerard Butler was becoming increasingly disappointing, although Tuffcub felt it necessary to mock my lack of celebrity knowledge.
So after a splendid trip to meet two fellow members of staff, discover my like for a new type of fish, use a cloakroom for free for the first time since primary school and get to see and hear about the Video Store, I can safely conclude: well done Sony.
