Missed last week’s column since I was busy spending the day with the missus, celebrating our recent engagement.
Been busy with reviews for the last three weeks which has made me irritable. Making money is nice, but it seems like everything gets in the way of getting work done. It really shouldn’t take more than 3 hours to write a 1,200 word review, but it does.
N’Gai Croal quit Newsweek and gaming journalism, and headed over to the development side this week. While I respect the work he did, I rarely found myself agreeing with him, and often wished that he’d consider brevity and understandability when writing. That whole Resident Evil 5 racism thing was a bit ridiculous too.
I feel like I need 36 hour days at the moment. Seven reviews in the queue at the moment, with at least six more reviewable titles hitting on Thursday. Of course, this morning I remembered that it is February, and therefore three days shorter than every other month, which makes it harder to cram in reviews on a deadline so that they can make it onto the next bill.
Having to sit here and write reviews prevents anything else from getting done and makes it hard to have fun that doesn’t involve playing video games for said reviews. Charly and I are fitting in 2-3 episodes of Buffy in a day, and there’s the odd trip out to buy new games (since it’s faster and more reliable than waiting for review code at the moment), but not much else.
I did manage to squeeze a little Team Fortress 2 in, but I’m finding it very frustrating. Some teams you play with are very good, there’s sort of an unsaid teamwork and plan going on. Others are horrendously disorganised and have no idea, particularly when it comes to general defense, or the last push on offense. I don’t want to have to be the guy that gets on the headset and starts barking orders at people.
Was busy yesterday, so I didn’t get time to do this.
I noticed this week that The Simpsons (in the states, at least) debuted with a new intro. It made me feel physically ill, because it shows front-and-center many of the things that make the show bad. Lifeless and sterile animation, too many minor gimmick characters, lousy character expressions and couch gags that defeat the purpose of the couch gag. The only thing it doesn’t show is the lousy writing and phoned-in voice acting.
We left Melbourne at 4:30am on Thursday and arrived in Toowoomba about 4pm on Friday. Seems we left at the right time – had we waited until the 10th as was originally planned, we’d not been able to make it out.
Had a few expensive days at the shops, but we have more shelving requirements before we can be fully unpacked. My legs hurt from walking around so much, but I’ll get used to it. Looking forward to starting some sort of fitness routine tomorrow, though.
Work catchup begins tomorrow. It seems like I have quite a bit to do, but unpacking is the most important thing this week, and washing the car ranks pretty high up there too.
We move this Thursday. Two solid days of driving, four days of panicking that we won’t fit things in the car, things will be lost in the post, or that we’ll forget something important. Final packing of non-critical items today, postage tomorrow, clean up on Tuesday/Wednesday.
The heat killed most of my work this week. Had to delay the Skate 2 review, and The Warp Pipe took an entire day, when it was already 60% written at the start of said day. I need to sit down and construct a list of topics for the latter and commit to it, because it’d be nice to just spend a week grinding out columns so I don’t get into a panic.
The forces of nature around the Melbourne area seem determined to make my last two weeks in the city absolute hell. Five consecutive days of 36C+ weather this week. Trying to pack boxes and such in the middle of that is going a little too much for Charly and I.
That also means that I have to get the week’s work done today, as I won’t be able to concentrate with said heat. I’ve been putting the Skate 2 review off, but everything else should be remarkably straight forward. The flood of releases starts up again about a week after we get to Queensland, which is pretty good timing.
Only about 2-3 weeks left in Melbourne, depending on which day we decide to leave. Work is starting to ramp up – there’s at least two games worth reviewing this week. Last week’s Lord of the Rings: Conquest was abysmal, but fortunately very short and basic, so it only took two days to finish it and write the review.
I’ve been starting a lot of PC games but not sticking to them (Stalker and Medieval II), mainly due to distractions from achievement clean up. I’m trying not to fall back into bad habits (I’m still in the top 50 for Australia, though), but it is annoying seeing 50/1000 scores on my profile. I managed to beat Banjo-Kazooie – albeit the seemingly easier Xbox Live Arcade version – which I’d been trying to beat since 1999. I think the scale of the game and the tasks required have easily been superceded in the 10 years since it came out, which probably made it seem easier.
I started the original Diablo again last night, hoping to beat it without external assistance or hacked online loot. People warned me that it looks like crap now, but I think it holds up okay.
I’m officially starting work up again today. Apparently I had 24 days off. Feels like maybe 7. I’ve spent the last few days dashing through LucasArts’ various adventure games. You know, back when they didn’t just make Star Wars games.
I’ll be debuting a new column starting this Wednesday calling ‘Coming Attractions’, which is just a fancy way of addressing this week’s new releases. Nothing imaginative really, just taking those quarterly predictions I did in the Warp Pipe last week and doing them weekly. I’ll also be handling updates of Games On Net’s release schedule, so it should be nice, neat and up to date.
The Warp Pipe resumes next Sunday with a bunch of predictions about what will happen in 2009. Just a bit of fun – I always like looking back at the end of the year to see if these things are right. After that I think I might take the column in a more serious direction; I felt like I relied far too much on retro stuff to fill the gaps on the weeks where I had no ideas. The column is going to be a little leaner, but I hope it will be better for it.
Getting all ready to move to Queensland in just under a month. The SO is handing in her resignation today, and we’re going to start packing and posting stuff shortly. I would have liked to be up there sooner – Tuesday is apparently going to be 38C here. Once we’re up there I’m hoping I can find something to compliment my writing work, though that might just be the development of my planned video series or perhaps a simple XNA project or continued writing on the book that’ll probably never be published.
Being in other places of the country and a lack of Warp Pipe to solidify my routines resulted in a lack of blog entries in the last few weeks. Some work did appear on the Internode site, but I was happy to not think about work at all while I was away. There are a couple more to come yet.
Was meant to start my holidays today, but this week was a mess. Not a whole lot of work done; a lot of time spend introducing cats, taxiing people, consoling my dearest one about her treatment at the hands of the evil multinational games retailer and celebrating her awesome university results.
Work is now extended til Thursday night at the latest. The current count is seven, with EndWar currently being worked on. Two a day would seal it by Wednesday.
The last Warp Pipe bombed hard, proving nobody gives a damn about Midway.