I had hoped to write this blog last night, but by the time I was onto "must... write... blog...” I had been awake a little over forty hours, so instead I fell asleep for a nice long time.

Wow. A two day event (plus a few hours of EAS), but it sure felt as long as the five days at an I-Series. If I was talking to Tim from PC Gamer right now I know he would ask "is that a good or a bad thing?", and I guess it was a bit of both. Mostly good, though, I think. On the subject of Tim Edwards, he's the deputy editor of PC Gamer, he has the most awesome pair of glasses, and a lengthy interview with him will be going up here on Cadred in the next few days.

While I'm trying to work out what exactly was in my head last night that I wanted to write about, this seems as good a time as any to thank the staff we had at the event. We had five guys there, which is definitely a record for us, and which ReDeYe thinks may be a record for any coverage site at a LAN (but I wouldn't know if that's the case). But yeah, as well as myself and Max, we had Tom Nevill there covering CoD4, doing the majority of the live blog, and making sure I kept up with him in pints, we had Sam Parsons keeping up with TF2, who did a great job, and we had James Lawson snapping away with his camera, getting some great shots in.

I've already mentioned Tim Edwards, he mentioned that the question most people asked was "Will you be doing another event?" (Don’t worry, we asked him that in our interview too!), but strangely that was also one of the most common things people asked me. I'm not going to answer the question of will they run another event, but I will for should they. My answer is yes, happy Tim? Sure, there's plenty of room for improvement, but can anyone name an event where that isn't the case, yet alone a company's first attempt, and PC Gamer Showdown as a brand could be very, very good.

I don't want this blog to turn into a list of complaints, but it just wouldn't be a blog about PCGS if I didn't mention security. While I was there I didn't come across any nasty security guards, and I had a chats with a few of them who were really nice, but the security policies at the event were far-from-perfect. Late in the night after Saturday we were heading back to our hotel in Leamington Spa, when we were told we couldn't take our laptops with us. Hold on, what? Good security is all very fine, but it's my laptop, I have signed nothing to say I am happy for them to deny my right to take it out, and, had I called the police, I would have been legally in the right.

There are two things that *really* annoyed me about this situation. Firstly, on entering the building, we were given a speech by the girls on the front desk about how all our property was 100% our liability, not PC Gamer's, not Multiplay's, not the security guards'. Yet after that, they wanted to force us to leave our laptops with them. Either they need to take liability for my equipment, or they need to allow us the ability to take liability for it ourselves (I personally had a driver's license I was willing to leave behind, a staff wristband on, and a laptop with built in finger print scanner that matches all 8 of my fingers). The other thing that was annoying was that all this security was for nothing. Come Sunday, the security had two options, they could either detain all computers at the venue permanently, or they could say "that your laptop? promise it is? ok then". End of rant.

I can't think of a huge amount more to say... they definitely need to improve food there: there was a stand offering free rustlers, which I'd far rather had offered free used tissues, a burger van outside, and a small shop selling snacks - we went off to a nearby village, and also to Leamington Spa, for meals.

I think I should also address "what made this different from an I-Series?", and hopeful anyone who was at the event and is reading this can give their thoughts on this question, and indeed on anything else I've written about (or failed to write about!). The basic concept behind PCGS is a good one. Leave the running of the event, and the tournaments, to Multiplay, who already have the staff and the experience, while PC Gamer adds funds, and pulls in exhibitors that wouldn't attend an I-Series - the best example being Valve coming along with Left4Dead, a stand which had a permanent queue to try the game out.

On top of that, although I have to admit I don't read PC Gamer, or other games magazines, for those people who do (and there are a hell of a lot of people around the country that do), it's a great chance to come and meet the PC Gamer staff (and though I only spoke to Ross and Tim, the Editor and deputy Editor, I can vouch that they're all really nice guys).

And finally, while I'm not going to start analysing anything here, I feel I have to mention the tournaments. Despite the relatively poor level of signups, we saw the best event in TF2's history, a good CSS tournament, showing that Salvo may not always be the number one team around, and a decent CoD4 event too. I guess it's time for us to sit down and think about the words "top" and "ten" again....

Oh, and I think I forgot to mention... I've had a chat with Steve, i35 will now be using the old World Cup Classic elimination.