So, I pick up my fellow teabagger OwningXylophone from his house on Tuesday night for some hardcore gaming, as I often do, and he’s all excited about something. He says he can win some VIP tickets to a Call of Duty promotional thing in London through Aceybongos, but that he’d need me to be able to get Friday afternoon off.

Thankfully, I have an understanding boss who is also a massive CoD fan, so he let me go. And so it was that, on an otherwise relatively normal Friday afternoon, I find myself on a train down to London. Half an hour or so of standing around outside a gay cinema in Soho, and we’re lured in to what looks like an NCP car park with promises of gaming.

As it happens, it was actually an NCP car park, and there was indeed gaming. So we weren’t going to be kidnapped and sold into the sex industry after all.

Sadly.

When we got inside, they’d done a pretty good job of transforming the top floor with an abandoned warehouse theme, which, with the smashed up cars and all, was a lot like Killhouse, one of the new maps. Also, watermelons with knives stuck in them were a nice touch, and they’d put on a nice spread with Subway sandwiches and proper army rations.

We got a goody bag with a T-shirt, some dog tags created especially for the event, a CoD quiz (two words: epic fail), an army ration pack and a code to download the new variety map pack for free. Well, in my case I didn’t get the map pack code because Activision are tards. Also, my pineapple and peach dessert was two years out of date. They laughed at me when I tried to complain – and I was really looking forward to that dessert.

So anyways, after grabbing myself a brew we proceeded to the basic training area, where there were rows of Xbox demo units set up with the game running, all networked up and lovely to show off the new maps. We had a go and were suitably impressed.

On another interesting note, OX overheard one of the devs saying something like “I can’t possibly comment on that. We’re just showing off the new maps today…” when asked if the map pack would add any new weapons or functionality – so I guess there’s some more stuff coming.

The tournament itself saw everyone divided into one of five groups, with each group split into three teams of twelve. The top 3 from each team then went on into the finals. The tournament was great – everyone go their own Samsung TV to play on (we didn’t get to keep them, unfortunately), and we got to set up the controls how we liked.

As far as the actual competition goes though, we didn’t make it past the first round. OX came fifth and I managed a mighty LAST place. Yep. In all fairness, I hadn’t had any practice on the map we played on, Creek, or that’s my excuse anyway. We then watched some guy beat one of the devs of the game to win himself an Xbox 360 and a load of other gubbins, but as we’re northern types and had to get home, we left before the actual finals started.

A good day out anyway, and although Activision didn’t bring along Rock Band for us to play on (what were they thinking?), we did get to meet Aceybongos himself (a bloody nice chap), play some new maps, get a load of free stuff, and more importantly, prove to the world that we really suck balls at Call of Duty.

(Check out the TTB Boot Camp Photo Gallery here)

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