Cassandra from The Most Popular Girls on the Internet and Neil from GamerDork are combining forces to bring you one big, awesome sauce Gaming Event.

Free admission!

This event is absolutely FREE! Just register here and show up on the day!

Video Games!

Play console games on two giant projection screens.We’ll be bringing out the RockBand for sure, but feel free to bring along any co-op games you want to play with your friends.

Table Top Games!

We’ll have ample room for as many table top games as you want to bring. Whether it’s an all day D&D session or a half hour game of Go Fish, you’ll find the room to play – and the people to play with you.

LAN Gaming!

Bring your own rig to hook up in our LAN area.  Get into some old skool LAN action on Starcraft – or whatever games you want to pwn in.

Live Podcast!

Cassandra and Neil will be recording a live show on Saturday night with plenty of special guests!

Raffle!

With your registration, you’ll get one raffle ticket with the option to purchase more*. Cassandra is bringing a box of goodies from America (Twinkies!!), and we’ll have some other gaming related swag to give away!

*Raffle ticket income will go to cover the costs of the event. In other words – back into Cassandra and Neil’s pockets. No purchase necessary!

Location: University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

DorkapaTWOza is being held at the Barony Bar in the University of Strathclyde’s Student Union. Strathclyde is in the heart of Glasgow, close to hotels and dining. We’ll have a private bar, two large projection screens, and ample room for gaming and socializing. The student union also has public areas where we can play pool, darts, and other games.

Can’t wait to see you there!

This October two superheroes have specific games being released in their name. One of those is Spiderman in the Beenox-developed Spiderman: Edge of Time.  The other is Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham City. One of these has a Metacritic score of 59, is criticized for its blandness, and shares many of the disappointing traits synonymous with attempts to adapt different media into a videogame format. The other sits higher up at a rating of 95, and has been declared as the greatest superhero game of all time by some journalists. As a hint, the good one has wings…

Sadly, the default position is that having this high-quality interpretation is a welcome surprise instead of the accepted norm. The idea of a licensed videogame adaptation is one that rarely manages to deliver much player excitement, with superheroes in particular having had less than decent stabs at interactive outings.  Superman was perhaps the most egregious, but others have hardly showered themselves in glory; Wolverine, Thor and Iron Man have all suffered from poor gaming incarnations, with Harry Potter, Indiana Jones and Star Wars at least managing some modicum of quality without ever managing to hit the giddy heights of amazing — despite the might of Lego blocks.

This makes Rocksteady’s achievement of creating not just one but two almost peerless interpretations of a character many have different perceptions about a remarkable feat. The major reasons that most of these games fall by the wayside are easy to identify, but apparently difficult to overcome: a sloppy reliance on the brand, a compressed development time, failure to grasp the fundamentals of the franchise appeal, and worst of all an inability to combine engaging mechanics to the facets of the license. Examining Batman, none of these apply. continue reading

October already, eh? How did you get on with those things you’d been planning to do over the month of September? 100% completion you say? Oh sure. Well, if you haven’t been keeping up with the Character Select Network sites, then (more) shame on you. However, we’re very proud to share with you some of our picks from last month. Check them out..
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3D platformer, stealth-actioner and adventure game; Beyond Good & Evil is, in part, all of these. Like a slippery eel, however, it evades and escapes attempts to pin it down. When trying to describe BG&E’s gameplay, cartoony aesthetic and mix of lovable human and anthropomorphised animal characters it becomes – in my mind – lost in the melee of such games as Ratchet & Clank, Jak & Daxter and Banjo-Kazooie. It would have been joined by Psychonauts up until 6 months ago, but I now know better. If Beyond Good & Evil and Psychonauts have taught me anything it’s not to judge a game by either its cover or a preconception. Having been rightfully reprimanded for lumping the aforementioned games into any sort of “melee”, I fully intend to visit them in future ThrowBacks. This is due – in no small part – to the revelation of playing a game like Beyond Good & Evil.

Platforming and combat are present and correct, but Beyond Good & Evil is most memorable for those aspects that make it unique. Sneaking through colourful and varied hostile environments to capture photographic evidence which will fuel a revolution isn’t what I was expecting, but suited the story and the protagonist perfectly. Jade is no combat-hardened veteran or martial arts savant; what she is is a photojournalist who runs a home for orphaned children. Like everyone’s favourite unlikely hero™, Nathan Drake John McClane, Jade is in the wrong place at the wrong time and is forced into action.
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So here we are, the day that so many of the early adopters of Google+ – Google’s own social networking service – feared. Games are now live on Google+, and all the worry (so far) seems to have been for nothing.

For the vast majority of Google+ users, the biggest draw of the service is that it isn’t Facebook. The interface is clean and simple. Sharing is easy, and privacy is handled superbly. That, and there were no games. No notifications or posts cluttering up your feed as your “I’m not a gamer” friends poured hours every day into Farmville. No incessant requests to join peoples Mafias or form an Empire.

Naturally, having this utopia of social sharing only made the inevitable harder to bear. Games were always coming to the service, but one of the defining attributes of the Google+ experience so far has been that it is (in typical Google fashion) still in Beta. Not only that, but their staff are actively engaging with real users; asking questions, taking suggestions and adding and improving features based on the feedback. Looking back, I’m not sure why we were worried about games at all.
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As gaming confessions go, to say that for much of my younger days I hated the Mario games is probably one of the most heinous statements to put out there. As a series the games have arguably been lauded over more times than just about any other, won a place in the hearts of the joypad generations both young and old and been hailed on countless occasions as the standard bearer of the platforming genre (for simplicity’s sake we shall ignore the slightly less admired sports and party spin offs). But for all the plaudits that have been sent his way the truth is that I simply never felt the games were that much fun to play.

Let us first start at the very beginning. The NES and SNES Mario era of side scrolling pixel perfect jumping turned me off almost instantly, presenting a challenge that other players reveled in and I consistently cowered away from. Super Mario World and its sequels sat there and appeared to laugh at my consistently poor attempts to navigate any of the levels, each endeavor to figure out where on earth I was meant to be going while simultaneously not getting battered ended up with me running around in circles and bemoaning my sense of direction. Every time I tried to get back into it I always came away feeling bruised; my gaming ego ground pounded on by my inability to judge and time my escapes from Bowser’s oncoming dangers and each environment’s unique but frustrating hazards.
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