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Into gaming? You’ll love this.
The basement in Game’s Wardour Street branch has been transformed into Belong, a gaming Mecca where users can book in and get down to some serious gaming across a range of platform and consoles. The Soho branch, along with other Belong centres around the UK, will provide dedicated spaces for the nation’s 19 million gamers to play with friends, compete in tournaments, enjoy gaming nights, celebrate new games and technology launches and share video-game themed events and experiences.
It's all free, and visitors can play on PlayStation and Xbox classics like ‘Gears of War’, ‘Rocket League’ and ‘Forza’. To play on Belong's professional gaming rings, prices in London (yep, everything's more expensive here, even gaming) start from £8/hour for a quickie lunch sesh, right up to full day passes.
Included is the use of two huge 65-inch screens, perfect for settling grudge matches with your mates across multiplayer favourites like ‘Street Fighter’ and ‘Fifa’.
But the pick of the bunch is PlayStation VR, priced at £5 for 10 minutes (refundable against a purchase of the kit), where users can sample a range of uncannily realistic virtual-reality gaming experiences, from heroic space battles to near-perfect racing sims. ‘Kitchen’, a teaser of the long awaited release of ‘Resident Evil 7: Biohazard’, is a terrifyingly immersive horror pitched somewhere between 'Black Mirror' and your worst nightmare. If you think you can handle it, think again – you can't. It will scare the shit out of you. You have been warned.
Belong welcomes both avid and casual players, and the dedicated zones will also have themed nights, tournaments and tech launches to bring gamers of all stripes together.
Martyn Gibbs, CEO of Game, said, 'gaming is more fun with friends, whether that is face to face or online and that is what Belong is all about'.
What's that? You can binge on games and still have a social life? We're sold.
Picture credit: John Nguyen/Press Association