The Day we went to the London Film and Comic Con | GamesYouLoved

The Day we went to the London Film and Comic Con

Article by Dean Hedger and John Preece

The date was Sunday 24th July 2015

The destination was Olympia – London

The event was the London Film and Comic Con The day went something like this….

It was an unusually early Sunday awakening for the Father and Son duos of Dean and George Hedger and Jon and Matthew Preece.

Well it was early for the Dads as George and Matthew both the tender age of 10 and do not understand the concept of a lie in yet! They are normally wired into FIFA early doors on a Sunday – but not this week as the destination was the LFCC.

A plan was hatched on the train that we head straight to the gaming area, the event was a total sell out and we needed to get our retro fingers onto those consoles first.

So what if Michael J Fox and Sigorney Weaver were there!? We wanted to see what retro joys awaited us. The plan swung into action once we had negotiated our way through the entrance queue and zig zagged crowd control barriers. We asked a couple of stall holders “where are the games?”, “dunno came the reply as they had been trapped on their stalls for 2 days already.

Given they were selling replica knitted cats of that waving japanese cat I’m not thinking we would be sharing much in common regards the games anyway! We got a sniff of a clue that the games were on level 2, helped by Jon looking at the show guide and confirming this was indeed their location.

We head through the crowd like a four man crew, think Full Spectrum Warrior or SOCOM, you get the idea. We scale the stairwells, marching past the poor celebs signing autographs enroute – They actually think we are there to see them!!!! Then finally the anticipation is over and we arrive, we moved up from level 1 to 2 and burst through the doors, you could say we levelled up (see what I did there). And guess what…….

We were about the only people there! We reformed as the lack of a thronging mass of people took us by surprise, we then realised we had full access to an array of delights.

As they say a picture speaks a thousand words and the pics here show how we got tucked into – Street Fighter, Mario Kart, Space Harrier, Various Star Wars stuff and Road Rash amongst others. Sitting down to play these games we were overwhelmed with a sense of nostalgia, and I’m not talking about the guy dressed as Howard from Big Bang Theory who was firmly entrenched with a Dreamcast controller in his hands.

Space Harrier on Megadrive was just as hard and as fantastic as it was all those years ago. Dark Forces on the Gamecube was still as addictive and the various incarnations of Mario Kart meant we could look at complete strangers with a look of “Wanna game? You’re going down chum!”

Even our boys (products of the 360/PS3 generation) began to see our joy at playing these games as they settled down to a bit of Rogue Leader and Battlefront.

We were all certainly spoiled for choice at the sheer range of consoles available to play and even found ourselves discussing the idea putting on a similar exhibition of gaming in our home town – although I imagine we’d be slightly more protective over our own consoles!

Next Blog – PLAY MARGATE!! See you there………….

Get your tickets here: http://goo.gl/79Jg2g

Article by Dean Hedger and John Preece