Awesome Day

Today we cruised out to hyde park and wandered around. I love London, totally and utterly fallen for it. I'd love to be able to come out to hyde park for a jog in the autumn, look, it's so pretty:
We walked through to marble arch and down oxford street, then mother went off home so I could meet with Dan. I was far early, but a bit glad to get rid of her as was doing my nut in. Anyway I spent the next few hours, wandering, consuming caffeine and drawing stick men. Cos that's how I do it. Met young Dan in ze apple shop and he suggested some food in a place called ping pong dim sum. Which sells, surprisingly, dim sum, and turned out to be extremely yummy, and twas just a cool place, with Star Trek doors on the loos. We then wandered down to HMV, tho managed to go to the wrong one for the event we were searching for. Luckily it was an all afternoon affair, and we wandered to the correct one. And there it was, 7 360s, assassin's creed, and a damn fine fille as producer of the game. This was a "first look at assassin's creed", where they were taking small groups up to a small stage, explaining the controls to use, let them play the game for a bit and then after that, go down and meet Jade Raymond.

There was a large amount of geek cock in our way though, so we decided to come back later. We were wandering around london and there was a dude with a sign saying "play 360", so we followed it to this weird vinyl record shop, walked down to a completely whitewash basement, where there was no signs, and just a random door in front of us. We opened it and there was 30-40 360s to play the latest games on for free. Very random, and more humorously one of them was red-ringed. Anyway after a bit of messing on them, we left and found a crazy, but nice coffee type place, where I grabbed a beer and dan got a very chocolaty mocca, not before pissing off some hot girls though. We swaggered back, and got in line to excite ourselves. Previously Altaïr or at least someone dressed up like him let us take a photo with him, where I'm having my throat sliced. Which was nice. Anyway he stood behind us at the line, and turns out we were the last ones allowed to queue. Excellent.

After a bit of waiting we went up, and got to play the game. Not sure about the fighting, still seems like if there's a lot of enemies they take turns. U got some fools chasing me, and they were following me all over the rooftops, if I did awesome jumps, and swings and shit, they would roughly keep up, but not be quite as skilled or stylish. Was realy good, and I jumped on some dude's shoulders and stabbed him in the neck.

Finally we got to meet miss Jade Raymond, who if you are too lazy to click on my handy wikipedia links or misunderstood my previous explanation is the Producer for the 360 and PS3 game Assassin's Creed. The number of women in game design is indeed small, and for them to be hot is indeed a novelty. The people in front of me and dan were a bit blargh, and just pointing at what they wanted signed. So we struck up conversation with her, etc. I cunningly had my "AI for Game Developers" book in my bag, and she signed that with "I hope you work for ubisoft". So I was much chuffed, and also got a large guy to take my photo with her:

Then Dan got his C++ book *head desk* signed and I got to ruin a photo of him and her with his camera. Sorry Dan! (assuming I have screwed it up). Anyway we wrapped up an awesome day in London at a pub somewhere, and chatted about the current state of everything. Then I grabbed a train to Orp, after confusing the times, and met Russ in the Harvey. Where we got mildly sloshed and got a kebab. Extreme good times, Russ's dad bought me a pint as well.