The day began...damply. Not promising. But five hours and four train rides later it had brightened up, and I was standing on the threshold of the Tower of London. If you can call it a threshold. It's more of a giant bridge with an intimidating gate, adorned with glass-covered fourteenth century graffiti. Around me slouched my crack team of testing personnel, a mixture of new-age boffins (me, Jahan and Stan), sprinkled with innocent sugars and spices (my sister and Stan's), baked with a vintage, old-style gas oven (My mum, John and Constance). I don't know why I've set us out as a recipe. I'm hungry, okay?
After a quick brief, we bombed up to the boardroom and got our pods and phones set up. Because my device was of the pod variety I had to take a nonGPS route through the application, which meant I had a little less down time because (having ignored the brief) I spent most of my boardroom time pretending to be Lord Sugar and trying to work out how to operate the system.
In the end I found it was rather simple, and I was ready to go seconds behind the others. We bundled down to the entrance, while the vintage team struggled through some hiccups in the GPS location.
That aside, we were presented with four prisoners to free, and for the sake of politeness, we all decided to choose the same one (the polar bear), and were thusly thrust - at different paces - upon the same mission across the tower. I took the lead, investing a certain gamer's enthusiasm in the format, and we rendezvoused at the end of that mission by the tower gate, at which point we fumbled through a little pop-up quiz, then received our reward for our errand-running. For some reason though, a ghost in the machine extracted a large quantity of my friends' money, and I was left the pompous landlord, milking his Apple iCashCow.
I've forgotten to mention that I was filming the entire thing, and juggling a map, an iPod and a camcorder was getting to be tricky, and continued to be tricky throughout. But it was fun enough to justify some strains and bumps, the characters loveable and ridiculous enough to keep you going, even though when you looked back you realised the majority of what you'd been doing was walking and tapping. Because while you knew that, you also knew that you'd enjoyed it, and that along the way you got to see some neato historical structuros, perhaps scrounged some advice from the odd guard or even a beefeater, learnt a thing or two and kept the kids from puncturing your skull with their horrible little voices for a couple of hours (except if you're me, in which case you only have to open your mouth to be wrenched back to the joyous world of childhood). After ambling through 3 of the 4 missions we packed up for lunch, then munched our way back to the boardroom. We wrote up reviews and did several pieces to camera.
Overall, a definite "experience". I can't say word-for-word what I said to that camera but I think you'll find an approximation of it above, along with an enormous recount of the day. From that I hope you can make your own opinion about how well the app works. I, for one would like to say that it definitely succeeds in its objective, that being to distract the public from the terrible prison of overpriced tedium that is the Tower of London. No but really, it's a great place, you should go.
Robbie out.
You like that? That's my sign off.
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