I’m almost two weeks late making this blog, but I went to the Play Expo in Glasgow over the weekend and it was cool. It was my first time going to a gaming convention of any sort, so I didn’t know what to expect. They had lots of arcade machines, pinball tables, retro consoles, cosplay and other stuff. While the place was super crowded at first, it emptied out a lot later on in the day, giving me the chance to actually try out quite a few things.

Highlights for me were:

• Briefly playing old Doom on the Oculus. It worked well, and the parts with moving platforms hit me really hard. I continue to look forward to seeing what comes out of VR in the coming years. It’s a shame there was only one Vive setup there, and almost no one got a chance to try it out.
  
• Playing the Vectrex, an ancient console with a vector based screen instead of pixels. The games on it were super simple but actually a lot of fun – most of them just involved shooting at spaceships, which is my sort of thing.
• Playing some arcade machines! I’ve got a thing for Defender, so I played that a lot. Some of the games had very weird controls – Marble Madness just has a trackball instead of any buttons, which was fun but awkward.
• Playing some pinball! I don’t think I’ve ever played any real pinball before. Most of my experience comes from playing Pokemon Pinball on the Gameboy Color, so that was a fun experience.
• Talking to some other indie devs briefly! There wasn’t any well known devs there, but it was nice to see what others were working on, and I’ve got a few more people to follow on Twitter now.
• Seeing cosplays of some characters from Ed, Edd and Eddie. Didn’t expect that at all.

So it was a lot of fun, and I think I’ll be looking around for similar events in future. It was pleasant seeing so many nerds together, people from my own tribe. I felt right at home being socially awkward and almost not talking to anyone.

In other news, the UK is gonna leave the EU, and everyone is panicking. I’m just gonna walk it off and see what happens.