Dublin Games Festival event review

by Zeph Faulkner

Dublin games festival was held on 24 November in the RDS from 9am to 6pm.

First impressions
Upon entering the hall, you were greeted with a quite impressive Monster stand who were sponsoring the event. To the left was a collection of merchandise stall who were selling good artwork and creations next to a virtual reality showcase featuring beat saber among other things. To the left of the entrance was a miniature version of a Mario Kart game with a collection of interesting indie games next to it. In the second hall was the esports area with seats and a large stage. At the back of the main hall was the main stage, the cosplay setup area, the retro gaming area and the Fortnite competition. There appeared to be quite a few people attending the event and the majority were congregated around the back with the games consoles. There was numerous people around the main stage as the was usually a collection of streamers or Youtubers talking or playing games.

Activities
The main events that day were in no particular order, the costume competition, an interview with John Romero and the esports tournament. There were a few other events that happened, for instance Monster giving away drinks every hour and and live music being played for most of the day.

Down sides
There was only one real main flaw and that was that it turned out that two of the main activities, the VR and some of the older retro consoles would set you back up to €10 to play. This was a problem as these often were the only activities happening for around half an hour. The other problem was that there was often large queue for the games that didn’t cost money.

Summary
The convention was enjoyable and did not suffer from issues such as overbooking, but it suffered from some minor faults of its own. Those flaws were that there wasn’t really enough to do without paying extra. It had some impressive speakers and a great esports final but in between there wasn’t much interactive events to participate in.

So overall I enjoyed it but would recommend that some interactive activities for people not willing or able to spend additional money.