Along with Blood Bowl, Monster Hunter has become a defining RPG-themed pastime of the summer for Gamesblog readers. The co-operative Pokemon-style adventure is almost as popular among Chatterbox contributors as it is on the streets and in the public parks of Tokyo.
Last week, a bunch of 'box veterans headed down to the Gathering Hall, a temporary meeting place in London's West End, where Monster Hunters can gather, play and swap tactics. Set up by Capcom in July, the venue is shutting down soon, but it's been an interesting experiment in creating a Japanese-style micro-culture, based around a single game title. There was also free beer.
We'd like to see more of this sort of thing. Now that publishers are pushing the community element of their games, it's time they came out from behind their server admins and community managers, and met gamers face to face. There should be FIFA, Rock Band and even Wii Fit hang-outs around the country - and surely the Rockstar Social Club should mean more than just an online leaderboard.
Anyway, regular 'Best of' editor OfficePest, kindly emailed in a report of the Gamesblog Gathering Hall invasion. For those interested in the extra-curricular activities of other readers - or the formative community experiments of modern videogame publishers - here's what they all got up to...
"Thursday 13th August was a momentous day – the geekfest known as The Guardian Gamesblog Monster Hunter Gathering Hall Meet Up.
Crispycrumb was first to arrive and sat in the window of the Royal George quaffing a pint, swiftly followed by OfficePest, Henrypootle, Lazybones, CommodoreSchmidlapp, Chubster, Smellavision and CunningStunt. A special mention goes to Lazybones for actually waving a copy of The Guardian in our faces! The others just sidled up muttering things like "blog" and "Guardian" and then looked very relieved when it turned out to be the right group.
After the awkward introductions, several beers were consumed over conversations surrounding such topics as stolen 360s, GWX [A Gamesblog regular and fanatical Nintendo fan - Keith], drunken gaming and CunningStunt's trousers. Then we all wandered over to the Gathering Hall to find another blogger waiting for us – RustyJames!
Crispycrumb was the bravest of us and approached the desk admitting that we were, "The Guardian Gamesblog lot". Thanks go to Capcom for letting us all in, despite only about half of us actually owning PSPs!
We all signed in at reception and admired the art on the walls – huge cut-out pictures of the weapons from Monster Hunter. Apparently they will be giving them away, along with the bean bags, when they close at the end of August – so if you want one, get along there!
We then wandered upstairs into the Gathering Hall proper. It's situated over two floors, which are basically big open halls with bean bags strewn everywhere and power points around the walls for those who need a charge up. Leo [Tan] – the Capcom PR guy was on the top floor, so we headed that way.
Leo was a top fella – very friendly and willing to help out the top hunters or the newbies. We split into two groups and hit the bean bags and started doing some missions together. Crispycrumb, Leo and I helping out the new bods.
Then Crispycrumb and I deserted the newbies and got Leo to help out with some higher level missions. The rest of the bloggers gave up on the whole gaming idea and just stuck to drinking. I like to think we helped reduce their stock of beer and wine, ready for closing night.
There were several groups hanging around the hall doing missions together, but it was still quite quiet in there – particularly as it got closer to closing time. Apparently on the first few nights it was open, there was barely any floor space left! Hopefully it'll be something similar for the closing night as well.
We all left the Gathering Hall at 10pm (kick-out time) and Leo suggested we head to a local pub to carry on the gaming. Unfortunately us bloggers were all far too wasted at that point and just stuck to drinking. Leo escaped at about 11pm with a good few handshakes and thanks from the bloggers! The rest of us slipped away over the next hour. CunningStunt's train went the wrong way though. The state of the underground nowadays, eh?"
