2011: A Year In Blogs Pt.2 - Chats, Charity and Cologne

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The first seven months of 2011 were pretty great - meeting my brilliant girlfriend, the beginnings of writing a book, a couple of trips to London, some game reviews and the birth of this very blog. Frankly, the second half blew me away with the amount of things that went on from August onwards.

August turned out to be a stunner of a month. In between taking pot shots at Cheryl Cole Cher Lloyd and trying Minecraft for the first time, I was to be sent off to Germany later in the month for Gamescom 2011 by Electronic Arts. In between writing up previews of Mass Effect 3, Star Wars: The Old Republic and Bethesda’s RAGEand interviewing Need for Speed: The Run’s Jason DeLong and the legendary Ken Rolston of Morrowind and Oblivion, I found a little time to explore an amazing city and perfect the art of asking Germans if they spoke English. And catch a stomach bug from the Harmonix boys, who agreed to back me once again for a Rock Band charity marathon, this time split into two 12-hour sessions of drumming for Edinburgh Sick Kids, to take place in October.

In September, part of me hoped for a quieter month but with Eurogamer Expo around the corner, it wasn’t to be. Eurogamer brought with it more insane experiences, between hosting two live podcasts with game industry elite and podcast fans alike and carrying out my first ever freelance work, interviewing Chris Rhinehart (Prey 2) and Tim Willits (RAGE) about their new titles. On top of that, I was able to interview the Bioware Doctors, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, about how they started out and built a career as two of the most prolific designers this industry has to offer. I’m not sure any interview will be able to top that.

Outside of interviews, there was plenty of time for gaming: previews from Eurogamer included Starhawk, Ridge Racer Unbounded and Uncharted: Golden Abyss on the PlayStation Vita; I even managed to review Resistance 3 in time for the game’s release, and worried about Nintendo’s ever-declining share price. Getting home from Eurogamer Expo proved tricky, as some light-fingered Londoner made off with my Oyster wallet, which had my train ticket home inside. Virgin Trains were not sympathetic, and it was only after an intense Twitter campaign and the support of some amazing followers that I was able to get home - you can read the entire saga here.

Outside of all of this excitement, I used September to discover The Twilight Zone for the first time, tell the entirety of Facebook to cheer the fuck up and try some excellent coffee from the guys at Loading in Falmouth.

October was, thankfully, a little quieter. Steve Jobs’ passing was given the appropriate attention and respect and I prepared a smorgasbord of reviews: Nicholas Lovell’s GamesBrief Unplugged Volume 2 (the review of which was later republished on his website); Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, which I called “a treasure trove of storytelling”; and RAGE, which I had to borrow an Xbox 360 for a week to review. I even found time to whinge about games and gamers alike, criticising Arkham City’s not-so-online Online Pass and those who treated Battlefield 3’s stress test beta like a demo representative of the final game.

I also, perhaps less notably, completed two 12 hour Rock Band drumming sessions, raising more than £800 for Edinburgh Sick Kids, who I also delivered a Rock Band drum set and some games to later that month for them to give away in a raffle later in the year; the raffle raised £1,300. After all that, I even found time to swear never to take a camera to a gig ever again. The unfortunate death of Stuart Walker, a man found burned to death on a lampost who just happened to be gay, prompted immediate calls from all sides that the killing was homophobic; I argued that jumping to that conclusion was probably homophobic in itself and so far, nothing has suggested the killing was motivated in any such way.

As November rolled around, my book was published. Global Game Jam: 48 Hours of Programming, Persistence and Pizza at Scottish Game Jam hit the figurative shelves of Amazon and its Kindle Store at the start of November. With the help of an elevator pitch of the book on here and pushing on Twitter, sales so far have been pretty steady: as far as I’m concerned, if it’s selling at all, I’m happy.

The Christmas deluge of games began too this month, and I found myself reviewing the so-so Medieval Moves, the terrible Ratchet and Clank: All 4 One and the equally bad (but ultimately disappointing) Need For Speed: The Run; if it’s any comfort, the review notes for NFS were pretty great. I also managed to get myself hounded out of an independent games store for daring to question their lenient attitude to game release dates, documented my first hands-on with Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, defended a game writer’s right to not give Zelda an automatic perfect score and talked to a camera about Grand Theft Auto V for a few minutes.

My inner music hound even got a few minutes at the helm of my fingers, tapping out pieces on the true purposes and best uses of both last.fm and Spotify; the former an exercise in extending your internet phallus, and the latter a music discovery service more than it is a channel to free songs.

As December rolled around, the final big steps of the year were taken. At the start of the month, I announced my departure from Sarcastic Gamer: the circumstances are unwritten and complicated, and will remain this way as long as I see fit. Outside of courting minor shock from my 2 entire superfans, I found time to write up my thoughts on the death of sarcasm (puns related to recent personal events should be kept to yourself), beg the transport network of the UK not to quiver at the sight of snow (they didn’t) as well as ponder the nature of the console fanboy and the average attention-seeking internet user - the outlook isn’t looking great.

Global Game Jam continues to sell and TheSixthAxis gave the book a strong write-up, along with some other gaming sites and Amazon users, as detailed here. The road to writing the book, while not detailed in the writing above and in the previous post, was a long and tricky one which took a lot of staying power, dedication and not getting distracted by the internet every five minutes. But finishing a book and having it published is ultimately extremely rewarding; my next goal is to have one published without pictures in, so it can be read by big people too.

As I sign off from 2011, I’m sort of worried for what 2012 might hold. With writing gigs at 7 Bit Arcade and hopefully more to come, I’ll be kept busy in front of the keyboard, but whether it will measure up to the bombastic explosion of awesome that has been this year remains to be seen. I suppose I’ll have to give 2012 the benefit of the doubt for now - at least I can look back and say this year has been the best I’ve lived yet.

Have a good New Year.

2011: A Year In Blogs Pt.1 - Games, Game Jams and Greatness

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It’s with a degree of surprise that the end of 2011 rolls around, from humble beginnings as a newly-redundant retail worker to a published author, international traveller and generally better person in the space of 12 relatively short and speedy months. For a large chunk of that time, this blog has been along for the ride, along with my writing and podcasts for gaming sites.

For the sake of record-keeping and misty-eyed retrospecting, I’ve taken half an hour out of the last day of 2011 to collect the best of it.

January saw me agree to write a book about the Global Game Jam, an international 48-hour game development marathon for programmers, designers and artists alike. Having popped in to previous Game Jams out of nothing more than gutsy curiosity, the prospect of staying at one for a weekend and turning a book out of it was, to say the least, terrifying. Nevertheless, the first 20,000 words were birthed during the Jam itself and the rest of the book, along with its collected doodles and interviews, would be carved out in the rest of the year.

Feburary heralded the end of being a teenager, my lovely girlfriend Louisa and, aside from going to see The Midnight Beast for some reason, didn’t feature much else, aside from the excellent, excellent Dead Space 2 and some ponderous thinking regarding PlayStation hacker George Hotz and why he was such a knob. Games reviewed this month included Media Molecule’s amazing LittleBigPlanet 2.

March came and went, with university and Fallout: New Vegas expansion Dead Money passing the time, but as of April things turned interesting, what with Kapow! Comic Con and a Gymkhana-tastic DiRT 3 preview event to pop along to down in London. Not long afterwords, I found myself back in the safe hands of a retail job, meaning 2011 wouldn’t be a year regulated to the dole queue, which is always a comforting thought - something Sony was lacking in following the collapse of the PlayStation Network, for which they gathered little sympathy.

May saw the launch of this blog, which I opened with witterings about the Alternative Vote and superinjunctions - fields which I didn’t really have the full collection of facts on but, hey, I’ve got a blog, I’ll write on it if I damn well want to. I dabbled in film reviews for the first time this month too, writing up Insidious (pretty great) and Pirates of the Carribbean: On Stranger Tides (not pretty great).

In June, university took its toll on writing for a while, the only piece on here being an instructive statement to publishers on how to save regular books - by mishmashing them with eBooks in what I touted as “eBooks 2.0”. Needless to say, I was never approached by Penguin or Bloomsbury about bringing the idea to life. I also reviewed the frustrating experience that was White Knight Chronicles II, and pondered why Microsoft was shoehorning the Kinect camera into titles that didn’t need it, rather than focusing on titles designed for it from the ground up such as Once Upon a Monster. Outside of this, I went to see Kung Fu Panda 2 which, as I wrote, was pretty excellent.

It took until July for the year to find some proper direction. Not long after making the jump to Mac, I decided that the world of software development wasn’t for me and left university. It took a lot of thinking but it’s a decision I still stand by today. Not so controversial were the leaked The Apprentice seriesregeneration ideas I got my hands on; frankly, whoever came up with them must’ve been a proper tosser, as they were all shit. Not so terrible was popping down to London again to catch up with friends for a few short hours and check out F1 2011; I might’ve been on a bus back home the same day, but when there’s a great game to preview I can’t say no.

July also saw me write up this year’s most popular article on why your Facebook photo is terrible, along words on the much-jibed passing of Amy Winehouse: not only should all death be respected, it shouldn’t be used as a shoebox to propel your morality above that of others, as I saw only a few hours later. As if that wasn’t enough, Louisa and I went to see the excellent close to the Harry Potter saga, the surprisingly alright Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Pixar’s Cars 2 which, while disappointing, was made richer by the accidental purchase of 2D tickets - it was an experience we both felt was made better without the gimmicky plastic specs.

The first half of 2011 was, it’s fair to say, pretty choc-a-bloc, and if you’d ended my year then I’d have been satisfied. The second half of the year, coming up in the next blog? It pretty much just spoiled me.

What Daniel Craig and Metal Gear have in common

Two events in television and the internet have reached a concurrent point tonight. Both are hugely disappointing, like meeting me in real life. The first trailers for the US remake of Steig Larssen’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and Platinum Games’ (Platinum Games’) Metal Gear Rising: Revengeraneance have hit both our first and second screens tonight, and they’re, um, pretty disappointing.

Both seem unnecessary and exist for the sake of it and, to nerd out on you, I can’t stand either of them. They drift so wonderfully far from their original vision that I just want to shoot myself in the face, and not because Celia Pacquola is performing “comedy” on BBC3 right now.

Dragon Tattoo is a David Fincher-directed (Se7en) remake of the Swedish original, itself based on the original novel by Larssen and the first of three films which made an international star out of leading lady Noomi Rapace. The trailers, the controversially nipple-tastic trailers and the overtly “actiony” font of the logo betray the original film’s sense of quiet unease in an otherwise apparently peaceful community, turning the film from a subtle story-telling into an all-out adrenalin shot of motorbikes, uneasily muscular magazine journalists, and Trent Renzor.

On top of that, a new trailer for Metal Gear Rising has been leaked before the Spike TV Video Game Awards, officially naming Vanquish developer Platinum Games as the developer with original Metal Gear developer Kojima Productions acting as, ominously, producers rather than direct creators. As one would expect (if you’re nerdy enough, anyway) from the developers of that and Bayonetta, the game has taken on a far more all-out approach than you might have expected from a Metal Gear game, held together with unfamiliar logos and an uncomfortable tone.

What both Fincher’s Dragon Tattoo remake and Platinum’s taking-on of Rising have in common is that both feel unnecessary. The Bondified Larssen novel is being readied for an audience that can’t be bothered reading subtitles and Platinum’s take on Rising is one bristling in adrenalin prepared for a Western audience that expects a title with a Japanese touch. They aren’t what people are probably pandering for, or want. The tone of each is totally off-tangent.

Are they brave? Undoubtably, if only because calling something “brave” suggests that it’s going against our expectations. But brave isn’t always good, and I’m worried that both of these will prove massive letdowns when they hit shelves and screens. Producing for the sake of producing, rather than admitting something is a lost cause, is a worrying element in both of these projects and one that I hope doesn’t continue should anything like this crop up in the future.

Lord knows we don’t need to see a remake of anything I’m doing, anyway.