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Sunday, February 12, 2006
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Review of the Xbox 360. It's a bit long, I know, but there's a fair amount to the console - certainly more stuff of interest straight out of the box than usual. It's a machine that you can play on immediately, without having to purchase a full-price, regular release. It's also a very unreliable bit of hardware at this moment in time.
Apologies, once more, for the total absence of substantial updates to the blog. Finally getting a job in January means that I'm only just getting to the stage where I'm *not* shagged out the second I get home - going from two years of nocturnal living straight into a standard working day has seen me jetlagged for over a month. Starting to acclimatise now.
The job itself? Good. It doesn't feel like a job yet, though. This whole business of working sat down, where the work itself is largely paper- and/or computer-based, is totally alien to me. And I'm enjoying it. The fact that it's only a six-month contract makes it impossible to get stressed out about things that would previously have pissed me off, as does the fact that it's fundamentally less soul-destroying than the old job. Money is pants, but as I'm not stressed out, most people I'm working with are great and it's going to be fantastic for my CV, that hardly matters at all. It's enough to live on, enough that I can still afford to buy myself nice things every now and again. That'll do me for now.
Then there's the Pixelsurgeon thing. That's great - very grateful to Alex for asking me to get involved there. There are also plans to start writing articles and whatnot for Greenhill Zone, although they'll be in a different style. Trying to figure out how I can piece together some guides for the Nippon Ichi strategy titles that have made their way over to the UK - guides that cover all the important and all the potentially confusing aspects of those games (and there's a lot of them) while still remaining interesting and readable to people not already familiar with the subject matter. Proving quite difficult to get the balance right at the moment.
The GHZ writing team on the whole are having some difficulty in getting stuff out of the door, quite possibly because nobody's sure exactly what the house style is supposed to be and so we're all waiting for somebody else to make the first move. All we know for sure is that we don't want it to be anything like the emotionless, tired shit that NTSC-uk has been pumping out for ages (speaking of which, there seems to be something of a mini-exodus happening there again. Such a shame).
The Hardcore Gaming 101 site linked to down there on the right somewhere is also going through an unfortunate downward slump. Dude, 'cranky gamers'? Fuck that noise - that's just lazy shit. Spend your energies enthusing about the games you love - it makes for a far better read. The archives are still well worth a trawl.
E. Randy Dupre's brain told him to write this at 23:02
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Losing the fight against mediocrity for the last few years. Fire a volley |
