Day 1 at Gamania: A Second Opinion

After breakfast in the hotel, we took the bus down to a traditional Taiwanese lunch place where we had lots of dumplings and soup. That includes dumplings with soup in them, which should be very familiar to any of our Asian readers. After that it was off to Gamania headquarters where we stopped... at their in-house cafe. Are you starting to see a pattern here?

After a delicious banana latte, it was time to actually talk video games. Gamania is a serious powerhouse over here, with a huge HQ and tons of cool projects going on. They had a very CIA-interrogation looking room where they conduct studies on gamers playing their MMOs behind one-way reflective mirrors, designed to track players' eye movements while they are unaware that they're being watched.

The earthquake-proof server room looked like something right out of the USS Enterprise circa TNG. Then we got a chance to watch Gamania's own in-house E-sports team, the Gama Bears, play some intense Starcraft II and Counter-Strike Online matches. I took footage of renowned SC2 pro, Sen, deep in a match, from right over his shoulder. He didn't even notice we were there - like some super gaming version of a Buckingham Palace guard (sans the funny hats).

Then we went to the Taiepei 101, second tallest building in the world, for dinner and... well, it's kind of hazy from that point on. The restaurant was amazing, but there was way too much food and an endless stream of our Taiwanese hosts coming by to take shots with the table. I think when I started drinking this thing, whatever it was, is the point where I started to lose track of everything:



And last but not least, I was able to try a beer float for the first time ever. No, I didn't leave out the "root"; this was a turbulent concoction of ice cream and terrible Taiwanese Draft beer. Fuckin' disgusting - although I do imagine if you made it with Guiness it would taste delicious. I know what I'm trying when I get home!