VG247 Easter Staff Meeting: minutes with annotations

Enjoying a break this weekend? The VG247 crew is. Four days off means plenty of catch-up gaming, plenty of food, and plenty of bunnies. Yes, bunnies. Also: chickens.

Working at VG247 doesn't mean playing games all the time, unfortunately, which means we look forward to a good catch up session over the Easter weekend as much as anyone does. Before taking off on our respective holidays, we touched base to discuss our plans. Here's the official record of what went down.

What are you doing? It certainly isn't work.
Brenna has been playing a lot of Tropico recently, and was hoping to be able to put paid to the campaign missions before Tuesday. When the RSI gets too much, she's been replaying Dark Souls - but a thunderstorm has played hell with her nerves and her left hand has developed Shield Syndrome.

Johnny expected to use the weekend to get back to Halo: Reach, but also to revisit L.A. Noire and Saints Row: The Third. Whether he got around to it we're not sure; he promised to finish Borderlands, too.

As usual, Pat just wants to play Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2, especially as he's likely to find good co-op buddies during the day, but he's also making a sterling effort to finish Mass Effect 2 so he can finally start Mass Effect 3, something he resolved to do months ago. "I have three children and a business, so that was stupid, wasn't it?" he said.

Newcomer Sam had some mysterious plans lined up, but he also wanted to spend some quality time with both Blur and Split/Second.

Steph's also got some catching up to do, especially on her guiltily lapsed Lord of the Rings Online habit. "I am sure my Kinship thinks I am lying dead in a ditch someplace," she said. However, she also said she was going to play "a bit of Skyrim" and we all know how "a bit" of Elder Scrolls games turns into four days with no sleep.

What about Easter Eggs?
Some of us - not to name any names - have been gorging on chocolate in a most disgusting manner all weekend, but catching up on games is a great opportunity to turn up Easter Eggs. Here are the team's favourites

"There were many in both Fallout 2 and Morrowind that I found hilarious, but I have to say finding the remains of 'Indie' in the latter was one of the best," Steph volunteered.

"Then again, I did use the Scroll of Icarian Flight when I found it as well. Probably shouldn't have despite the hilarious results. There's also the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog located in LOTRO as well which got a hearty chuckle out of me."

"Finding wheels of cheese in Perfect Dark, at least I think it was cheese..." Sam offered.

Johnny wandered slightly off topic, but in an awesome direction. "Maybe not an easter egg as such, the mission in Saints Row: The Third where you have to drive a car around with a tiger beside you," he said.

"It's now clicked that it's somewhat loosely based from Talladega Nights when Ricky Bobby gets his confidence back by driving around with a cheetah in similar circumstances, having recently watched the movie for the first time in ages."

"The elevator dance party in Crysis 2," YouTube addict Brenna suggested.

"I particularly like how some videos of it show the player glancing around rapidly before closing the door and walking quickly away, as if terrified and affronted."

Bunnies and Chicks
If you've been in a supermarket lately you're probably all too aware of the cultural associations with April weekends and adorable bunnies and chickens. In the course of our conversation, we discovered that the VG247 team really likes bunnies and chickens.

According to Steph, the Rabites from the Mana series are the best bunnies, being both cute and formidable. Brenna is pretty fond of Ubisoft's mascot, the Rabbids, while Pat professes to love all bunnies. Wait till one gets into his lettuce patch.

Sam and Johnny both nominated Fable's famous kickable, chasable chickens for an honourable mention, but Steph plumped for the Cuccos from the Legend of Zelda series, "because when you harass them enough you get attacked".

Sam countered with the "demented" chickens of Red Neck Rampage, and we all quickly changed the subject when Pat brought up "the chickens in Chuckie Egg, obviously", a game released in 1983.

Feast-ival
Eventually, someone had to mention the fact that chickens are for eating, and we communed on our shared love of all things edible.

At some point we remembered we're supposed to be talking about games, and Pat said his favourite edible chicken in a game is the health gauge in Atic Atac, another 1983 release.

"I always remember thinking how awesome it would be if chicken really was like that to eat, like the boars in Asterix," he said.

Steph said her most memorable gaming memories include turning to cannibalism in Skyrim and consuming things in LOTRO "which make you vomit, or end up without pants someplace in the world".

On a more savoury note, she cast a fond memory back to long-weekend gaming binges - Super Mario 3 with her best friend during sleepovers.

"We would stay up all night eating cool ranch Doritos with cheddar cheese dip, Baby Ruths, and drinking Mountain Dew until we crashed from too much Goomba stomping and temporary bouts of hypoglycaemia from the junk food," she reminisced.

Johnny jumped in at this moment with a PSA regarding soft drinks and gaming, which he warns is a dangerous combination, having spilled an entire bottle of Pepsi over his US import copy of the Metal Gear Solid HD collection bare hours after delivery.

Sam added his own cautionary tale, of a friend who once got some form of candy stick in an N64 cartridge.

At this point, our wildly varying international timezones kicked in, and the meeting adjourned for a Left 4 Dead session.

Wrapping Up
If you guessed "VG247 wants to know what you're up to over the break", you're absolutely right. What are you playing? What are you eating? What are you eating in the games? What new Easter Eggs or just plain delights have you discovered while getting in some solid sessions? Let us know in the comments.

Whether you celebrate Easter with chocolate or church, or even not at all, we hope you're having a safe and more importantly splendid public holiday break.