UK Games Expo – Bag of Holding

Greetings everyone! In a couple of days time I will be on a train bound for Birmingham bags in tow, games and clothes packed (notice the order of priority there), and my press hat firmly on. Let’s take a look at the sort of thing I choose to carry around with me when doing the press thing and what you can expect from The Giant Brain over the course of the con.

What’s in the bag

I like to travel the con as light as possible but I need to balance that this year with being a bit further from my accommodations than I was last time. Staying at the Ibis at the airport means there is a bit more of a trek to the con proper so whilst I said last year I probably wouldn’t carry my laptop around all day, it really is going to need to come with me alongside power cables etc.

One thing I am going to be dropping from last year is the bulky camera. My camera phone will be more than sufficient for my purposes and it means I can drop a good couple of kilos of weight. Let’s look inside my press kit.

My faithful Crumpler bag getting ready for the con!

When I said I’m keeping it light I meant it. Battery pack for charging the phone on the go (not pictured), especially since it’s going to be my camera as well. Notebook for jotting things down for daily review stuff and deeper pieces as well as several pens (need to buy some more apparently). The newest bit of kit to me this year is my little voice recorder. I’ve found I need to record in WAV format for it to sound any good so it’s been upgraded with a 32GB micro SD card and can also plug into my laptop so I can upload stuff to the studio, Sam, as we go. Not exactly sure what I am going to be using this for at the moment but I am starting to formalise some ideas with Sam, Jamie and the folks I am attending with.

The other bits are business cards, my new 3D printed logos to be used when taking photos of games, micro SD card reader that my laptop can take and hand sanitiser.  I’ll be adding a bottle of water and mints to this lot on my way down and that should see me through the days quite happily. I’ve just slung this on my back and it’s a good bit lighter than last year which is great. I’ll be carrying my Quiver on me most of Friday as well to show off Swordstory at an appointment and to any who care to play it with me. That’ll weigh me down a little more but it should be fine.

Follow us!

As with last year I’ll be endeavouring to bring you daily updates as to what I am getting up to at the con. This will take a few forms. Firstly there will be similar posts to what I did last year. On top of that I will be using Twitter and Instagram a lot more to get stuff out as quickly as possible so if you want to see what I am seeing, then please do keep an eye on both of those.

Podcast wise Jamie will be down as well so we are hoping to record some content and if it is of good enough quality then you can expect some of that to filter into Brainwaves once we are all back together.

I’ve got a long train journey on the Monday to get back home and I also have the Tuesday off work so I am hoping to get a bunch of articles bashed out whilst games and topics are still firmly in my brain. I’ll make sure I actually review things I say I’m going to over the course of the con, I missed a few last year due to not being organised enough.

I really hope you enjoy our coverage of Games Expo this year. I’m super excited to be heading down this year with all the things I learned from my first time out as press last year. I’m going in with a short hitlist, an open mind and a hope to guide you in finding the cool things that are going to be on your gaming table soon.