The full story of last night’s descent into debauchery is told by this series of pics, but the sad and brutal truth is that what started as a black-tie, five-course dinner party took less than two hours to turn into a drunken, high-altitude skinny-dip, and less than fifteen minutes after that to turn into a mounted cosplay rampage in which we skinned baby dinosaurs for sport and punched each other in the face for happy eternities.  I don’t intend to leave the house with less than three ninjas ever again. Endless thanks are due to Munch for the eats and Crys for the dress and everyone else for the larks.

* Is it cosplay if you dress up in game as game character from the same game? How can it not be?

Edit: Oh, god, I forgot about the naked conga.

Home from Birmingham, that is. My E3 verdict? Glad I didn’t go. By all accounts it sounded tame, contained, and underwhelming, although interesting to see that PSN rather stole the show with The Last Guy and Fat Princess and a better look at PixelJunk Eden, which I’d already made my mind up to love long before the screens started trickling out, but whoosh! and yay! and ooh!

No, I’ve spent the last week (and will spend next week) going round a much nicer, friendlier, and more exciting game show which is rather quixotically based - simultaneously -  in Dundee, Birmingham, Dublin, London and Brighton. And it’s got shorter queues and better sandwiches than E3.

It’s Dare To Be Digital, the UK’s leading student game-making competition, now in its 9th year, with 17 teams, based in five cities, all of whom have 10 weeks to make a playable prototype and which seems to be over-flowing with an embarrassment of good ideas. Channel 4 is the main sponsor this year, so as part of my work with them I’ve been running around poking my nose in, having a chat with the teams, and getting to play their games. I’ve been round about half so far, and I’ve genuinely been more excited about what I’ve seen there than anything that came out of E3. With the possibly exception of the life-changing  Duke Nukem Trilogy trailer.

So if E3 has left you a bit deflated, and you’d rather be fantasising about being a spring-loaded, magnetically-armed, bitmap-trailing, colour-coded, shoe-tree battling, origami-folding photographer than trying to get excited about Tomb Raider Underworld, then head over to the website and send some votes and encouragements to the team you think looks the most promising. The games will all be available to play at Protoplay from 10-12th August in Edinburgh, so you’ll be able to see for yourself whether or not I’m over-stating the case that it’s in these kind of environments that the interesting stuff is happening.

I don’t usually post about things from the past, but I couldn’t quite let these comments on the Next-Gen/Edge re- branding go unrevised. It’s understandable that Colin’s got a bit muddled, since he wasn’t involved with Edge at the time, but it’s not quite right to say that Edge had ‘never much bothered with the web’. It certainly isn’t how I would characterise the great deal of hard work that went in to the old Edge Online - initially from Jim Rossingol, and then latterly Brandon Boyer, as well as a number of Edge staffers over the years. Thanks to their efforts and general brilliance, Edge Online was one of Future’s most successful blog-based sites, and much loved by many, including me, even though it’s very un-British to admit to loving the things you make yourself. When I moved up to editor it wasn’t part of my remit any more, and it lay mostly dormant for a while before Next-Gen stepped into the breech. I’m sure the new Edge site will prove a huge success, but I’ll always miss the old one, even if I won’t miss laboriously hacking out all the wrongly-coded quotation marks. And it’s nice to have a chance to say thanks to Brandon and Jim and Steve and Ben and Duncan and all the other excellent chaps who made it such a uniquely omnivorous, considered, accurate, eloquent and wry place to be. The new crew have a lot to live up to.