The key element of today was pizza. This has become somewhat of a tradition among TSA’s staff and friends in recent years, with a seemingly ridiculous number of people filling a good chunk of a Pizza Hut at last year’s EGX. With Rezzed being a smaller event the size of the gathering fell to just three: Teflon, David Howard of One Hit Pixel fame and myself. We did go slightly classier this time though, upgrading all the way to a Pizza Express. Swanky.
It’s things like this that make big game shows fun though. Obviously it’s great to see new games and play with interesting mechanics, particularly when you can give developers feedback that might help to shape the game, but hanging out with people that you don’t get to see all that often is a real joy, as is meeting new people.
In some ways this is odd, because I’m not always the most social of people. I find that meeting new people is particularly terrifying much of the time, as is hosting big, social gatherings. This fear is why I’m the natural choice to arrange dinner with people during game shows, it’s simply a great way to raise my stress levels and keep me full of nervous energy.
However, far harder than herding people towards a pizza restaurant is finding an appealing pub in Soho. It’s not that the pubs themselves actually look that bad, it’s just that they were all ludicrously busy. It was foolish in the extreme to attempt this feat at 7pm on a Friday evening, but Davs and I had 45 minutes to kill before Tef arrived for dinner, and the pub seemed a natural fit. Ultimately we resigned ourselves to sitting in a Starbucks, although this did have the advantage that Davs could charge his phone.
The hustle and bustle of London is, of course, part of what makes it such a thriving city. I don’t even mind some of the downsides like insanely crowded public transport. However, when it stops me from getting a quick drink in because I’d have to essentially fight my way to the bar then I’m somewhat less in favour of the sheer volume of people the city contains.
In more Rezzed related news, probably the standout part of my day was spending a bit of time in the Leftfield Collection. If you’re unaware, this is a room full of games that are, generally, quite experimental or unusual in some way.
To give you an example of just how unusual some of these games are, my favourite game there might be Line Wobbler, which is described as a one-dimensional dungeon crawler. Instead of your average screen, the game uses a single strip of LEDs as its output. You play as a green dot taking on the red dot menace, and move along the line by moving an upside down shoe-spanner repurposed as a joystick of sorts.
I’d like to make this clear that this is not the oddest game there, not by a long shot. Deep, an underwater VR game you control entirely by deep breathing, is certainly a contender, as is , simply because it’s bonkers.
However, by far the most unusual game on show is Taphobos, which I refuse to play as it requires you to don a VR headset inside a distinctly non-virtual coffin. Apparently there’s a second player who’s communicating with the coffin encased player throughout, but I very much doubt I could even find someone willing to go into the coffin while I played the phone based role.
What I find interesting about games like Line Wobbler or Taphobos is the fact they’re games you’re never going to see offered commercially. Game or Amazon are unlikely to start offering coffins alongside VR headsets so you can get the full Taphobos experience.
Instead these games are built entirely as experiments to show in these kind of gaming gatherings, created purely for the love of building games, to see just what can be done with the medium. It’s games like this that make the case for games as art more strongly than just about anything else, and that’s something that I just love to see.
