I was in London over the weekend visiting the Excel centre on a non-gaming errand and thought I might swing past the Loading Bar to check it out. I've heard much about it and it is a popular place for the gaming luminaries to hang out (Guy Cocker frequently records his podcast here) so I've always been curious to visit.

As a wee whipper snapper, the only places I could go, hook up with mates and enjoy video games socially were the arcades. These were few and far between. I'd often go up to the Trocadero in London, to enjoy a bit of Afterburner in the full 360 cockpit or shell out £5 (that's worth about £9.63 or $15.97 in today's money) for the shonky VR games.  A mate of mine, a fellow avid ZX Spectrum gamer, had relatives who owned a flat in Paignton, Devon. We would spend the summer saving up loose change before making the pilgrimage to the arcades down in the Southwest. It was great being able to feed the machines all week but it just wasn't regular enough for me. It would have been cool to hang with my friends somewhere nearer to home and enjoy some great local multiplayer gaming. Arcades in those days were fairly seedy places without the glitz and glamour of Flynn's from Tron.

The Loading Bar, formerly the MADD Lounge, is a venue where gamers can grab a bite to eat, have a drink and play video games. Its original birthplace was in the South West of England but, after a successful Indiegogo campaign, opened up a branch in Soho. The bar frontage is confusing for the uninitiated, still looking like the Mango Bar it originally was, however, walking past the front counter you can see the main upstairs area with tables and screens for socialising and gaming. Much like visiting gaming conventions, there was a palpable smell of body-odour oozing round the bar. This brought a smile to my face. It's quite a small venue, with a lot of devices pumping out heat, so people are going to sweat, and, unfortunate though this cliché is, it was my first impression. Nevertheless, I am a forty year old man, used to the creature comforts in life, and not the main demographic that this bar is aimed at (one chap I ended up chatting to asked me if I was the owner). I'm pretty sure my student hangouts were of a similar nature. 

Nevertheless, this was a nice place to hangout. There were plenty of regulars playing games, the upstairs having a more retro feel to the games on offer with older, retro consoles and full-blown arcade machines to use (although there was a Sony-branded-PS4-in-a-plastic-box type stand much like you see in shops, but with playable games on offer ). The downstairs had a choice of Xbox, PS3 and Wii consoles to play on. Also available are more traditional table top games which are a great idea and certainly appeal to groups of people coming who could not get to a console. There were a bunch of guys having a great time playing Street Fighter, and I headed off to profusely sweat over a bit of Tekken Tag Tournament 2. 

The beer was relatively well priced for London, and the cocktails were pretty amazing. The cocktails all have game related names and are designed to reflect aspects of the games. I got chatting to The Realm, a team of PC gamers who play as a team online who had never met IRL before. They had come down to London to meet up and drink at the Loading Bar. From what I heard, the cocktails had entertaining names, but could certainly pack a punch (click on menu below for a full view). Overall the atmosphere was cheerful, calm, and people were happy to chat about games and play with random strangers. For me, with most of my peers worrying about mortgages and school fees, it was nice to be in an environment where I could enjoy a genre I love so much without feeling ostracised. 

The Loading Bar has a prolific twitter account @drinkrelaxplay, tweeting its regular gaming nights, be they affiliations with the big named companies or board game nights, such as Table Top Tuesdays, organised by BRB's Tim Hibbs, new games available to play and any new cocktails they have recently created. There's a thriving gaming scene going on in the heart of London and it's well worth taking a visit, with friendly staff and clientele. It's a shame there aren't more places like this around. 

By now all of you lovely gaming fanatics should know the Sony news. If not pop over to Matt's Article here and read it first. Got that? Good. Now, this is obviously pure speculation at this stage, but I have a concern. I'm concerned that Sony are turning into George Lucas. You know what I mean. We've been rinsed for our cash by the weirdy-beardy from Skywalker Ranch as he adds a bit of lens flare and new walking lizards to his films every ten years so nerds like me have to buy the Star Wars box sets bloody well again. All he needs to do is digitally remove all evidence of Jar Jar Binks and I'll be on to Amazon like a virgin fanboy at a Naked Slave Leia convention. 

Sony seem reluctant to talk about the details of how the consumer will purchase this service. By now if it was going to be part of Playstation Plus, Sony would be telling us. They'd be shouting it form the rooftops. To be fair, we get a very good deal already from PS+ and I can't see Sony giving anything else away. Lets remember, folks, Sony are a business, and they need to make money. There is a chance it'll be used as an instant demo delivery service for subscribers, but I can see a premium 'Spotify of Games' offering coming very soon. 

If this is for games we already own, are we happy to be paying for them once again? What happens when publishers remove games suddenly as is their whim? I don't want to be 50 hours into Skyrim when suddenly it vanishes in a puff of electronic smoke. Netflix having been cleaning out the old content this January, so a precedent has already been set. I'm not sure I'm ready to reinvest.

On a side note, it does also mean we are already using the last Sony console ever. Playstation Now will certainly work on PS Vita TV, as a well as a raft of other devices. We could be entering a thin client paradise where Playstation games can be played on anything. For a price.

This post is a tad meta, sorry. 'What's that, Jon? You're writing about a writer who writes about vidya-games?'. Yup. Writing about stuff is easy. Anyone can type some old tosh on the internet and post it up, ahem, but writing about stuff and keeping the reader interested and want to read more? Bloody hard. Yesterday Cara Ellison, a critic who writes about 'games and pop culture' , came up with an ingenious way to (hopefully) make a living. Cara's articles are thoughtful, funny, cathartic and heart-felt. She inspired me to improve and attempt to put a more individual stamp on my own personal writing style. I have a long way to go, and with less life ahead of me than behind, I respect her innate talent and fresh point of view. 

There is a consensus that games journalists have the dream job. Play games all day, write about them and get paid. Brilliant, sign me up. The truth is, the games industry is still young and still lacks the respect from the media that is attributed to critics of film and music. Cara has written, among others, for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Guardian and The recent TV programme How Video Games Changed the World. She recently won The GMA Rising Star award and is a big advocate of writing and creating Twine games (electronic 'choose your own' adventures - click the picture below to see what she has created- NSFW). Games journalists don't get paid much. With the advent of YouTube and Twitch and the focus on new media, the expectation of journalists to multi-task creatively is much higher. Cara struggles to make ends meet despite her great CV, and this is her problem. She wants to do what she loves most, earn a comfortable living and entertain us with her writing.

The internet is in a flux at the moment. Hard copy media is slowly tipping into the oil like a doomed dinosaur and online press is taking over like the ice-resistant mammal poised to command evolution. Cara won't be writing games reviews with a score at the bottom. She agrees that reviews like that are necessary to aid purchasing choices, however, if your desire to delve deeper into the games industry and pull out the heart, lungs and intestines of what happens on the other side of the screen is your bag, baby, she's the girl. 

Anyroad, please share Cara's Patreon page. You can find it here. Share her link amongst any of your friends and family and on all the social gubbins you can find. I have no vested interest, nor do I want to harvest click-throughs, so just share her link not this blog. 

She's already hit her target to cover travel, however it would be great to see what she could do with even more creative freedom. I am looking forward to see what comes out of this idea, because her writing is lovely, but also where this could lead writing and blogging for the future. We've seen emergent gameplay, but this is emergent journalism. Good luck, Cara.




PS - Cara, sorry if I drunkenly tried a pathetic conversational gambit at the GMAs. I was a teeny bit Star-struck. 

Hi there. This part of the site is an area I like to think of as typographical onanism. I'm going to use this feed to post some of my more, erm, personal opinions about games, comics and all that jazz. I'm a bit of a fossil and never got into the whole blogging thingamy, but I'm hoping it will both amuse, offend and stimulate feedback. Do feel free to leave comments, share links or just skip past this to the reviews and other articles on the site.

Cheers.




I NEVER look good in bloody selfies.