Innosomnia: 2011

So seeing as people on the twitters are making fun of me for my love for Edge and all the writers that used to be on that mag, allow me to elucidate.

Okay, so let's take it to the beginning.

In 1996 I was 10 years old, and I loved video games. I would go to friend's houses who had consoles or computers and play their games for hours, while they would be like "come on, i'm bored" etc. They would drop less than subtle hints like "yeah, the thing I like about Freddy is that he isn't friends with me for my cool computer." I didn't give a fuck. I remember playing some side-scrolling shooter on like an Amiga or something? You could duck behind stuff and there would be people up in windows on like the Y-axis and you could press the C-button and fire up at them.
I remember playing some platformer on PC where you're this little dude who runs around and collects coloured keys and shoots turrets. I played Simon the Sorceror on the same guy's PC but I think it might have been just a demo version or something. I thought it was cool though.

I would go to my uncle's house in St. Albans for family Christmas visits and would spend hours playing Wolfenstein 3D on their computer. I would get stuck in the mazes, and ask my uncle for help, his advice was usually along the lines of "go back and check every route, take your time, you might have missed one". Completed that game by getting the secret chamber before the final boss that had a fuck ton of guns and ammo etc.

I would go to people's houses I barely knew, to play games. I remember playing Missile Command at my brother's friend's house, that was cool. They had a NES too, and we played Battletoads and Mario Bros.

I remember being up in Scotland to visit my uncle on a summer holiday, and we went to some carnival or something, which was ok, but I really wanted to be back in these kids' house playing Lemmings. I remember going on summer camp in Year 5 of primary school and seeing some kid's Game Gear with Sonic on it. That thing was treated so reverently by the kids, and guarded so jealously by the owner. I don't think I got to play it, I did get to see it in action which was sweet as fuck. I remember lying in the grass eating rhubarb and custard sweets and thinking how cool it would be if I had one of those things.

I remember going to arcades at bowling alleys, the place near us had a Sega Park which was the best thing ever. I played Time Crisis and Sega Rally and House of the Dead, and that four-player tank game, and everything else.

I would go to my dad's work and sit in the meeting room or in his office playing Solitaire and Minesweeper. Solitaire was pretty cool, I liked changing the pictures on the back of the cards to pretty scenes, cos the game itself was a bit boring. Minesweeper, I couldn't really play since I didn't know the rules and would just randomly click squares until I hit a mine. Hearts was some weird shit I didn't understand at all.

At home we had a 386 with Windows 3.1 (with a turbo button!) I would press the turbo button in and out cos it was chunky and satisfying to press, and it didn't actually seem to do anything. I had a Young Telegraph floppy disk of games, which I played to death. My favourite was some quiz one where you had to answer questions or you got eaten up by some robot monster. I eat that thing up, and would reel off random historical facts from it to everyone I came across.

So when I was about 10 or so, I remember going ice-skating with a family who lived across the road from us. We would go on Christmas morning, before lunch, because it was free on Christmas day. I remember skating round and having that Wham song about giving his heart away at christmas because they played that shit like non-stop.

Anyway, so my friend's older brother had a Game Boy with Super Mario Land. I though it was amazing, and I decided I had to have it. I went down to town with my dad, took out however much I needed in cash from my building society, and bought a Game Boy with a purple box that proclaimed something like "Over 100 million sold!". I bought just the one game with it I think, which was Super Mario Land. I remember taking it into the "back room", my dad's study, putting it on the thick dark turquoise shag carpet and opening the box and being SO excited! It was amazing.

So I expanded my collection of games, starting with Donkey Kong Land after I read an article about it in some games magazine I stole from a schoolmate's backpack. I thought it was amazing, the music was so awesome, those first bars of the first jungle level, like BA BA badabadbada BA BA. Heh, I can link that now, can't I? Yay internet.

Haha, well I remember it sounding chunkier, oh well! :D

But yeah, it was so good. And the gameplay was awesome, with all the secrets to find and so on. I remember being really challenged by the game, like those wasps on the ice levels? And you have to time your jump out of a barrel or off a rubber tyre to avoid their stinger. Shit was hard. And I remember the Nautilus thing on an underwater level on the second world, that thing was fucking scary!! It would appear and fill most of the screen and you had to swim for your life to avoid it.

I remember the first time I completed Super Mario Land, pretty vividly actually. I was at my uncle's flat in Edinburgh in Scotland. I think I was a bit ill, so was on the toilet playing it, and I got to the flying level and then to the cloud boss, and then to the alien in the spaceship who fires a fuck-ton of bubbles at you that split off into threes, for like at least 3 or 4 minutes, non-stop. I had always died there, but that day something clicked and I was able to anticipate the bubbles' motions and avoid them and kill him. That was so amazing, the ending of that game where they fly off in the little rocket ship, oh my god that was so cool!

So yeah, I played the shit out of that Gameboy. My parents would keep me supplied with 12-packs of Duracell AA batteries, and to this day I still love a brand new pack of unopened batteries. I mean think about it, they were power, they were games, they were life! I didn't know about rechargeable battery packs at the time.

Other games I played were Kirby's Dreamland, which was great fun, and again I had a lot of trouble with the last boss battle against King Dedede until I asked someone at school how to defeat him, and he was like "you can suck in the stars he makes when he jumps". I was like, ohhhhhh there you go. That game had epic music too, especially the boss battles.

Youtube only has the last boss battle, which is a bit of a travesty. I remember the one against the airship was epic as fuck. You went up to the clouds, eat a firepepper, flew off the edge and the airship flew out and the health bars went across the screen with like a "dillililili" and the battle starts and you're spewing hot fire breath against a freaking airship that has bullets and spin charges you!

Heh, found one on youtube with 11 views. Fuck yeah!

So yeah, loved the Game Boy to bits. I remember being in a car with a friend from school driving to his house, and we swapped games: he gave me his copy of Link's Awakening, and I gave him my copy of Donkey Kong Land. After 45 minutes or so we got to his house, and gave him his game back and told him that it was really weird. He told me the same about DKL :D

So yeah, fast forward to the summer of 1998. I was 12 and had seen adverts for the Nintendo 64 on tv, and thought it looked amazing. There was one game in particular, that I had played in a shop while in a visit to town, while on Scout camp, that I had to play. That game was Banjo-Kazooie, and I bought it and an N64 with a gold controller from a big toy shop in town. I bought it with all my own money, saved up from birthdays and christmas and pocket money over the years. I was a good little saver, and had several hundred pounds in my building society then, which I used to buy the N64 and its games with. Yeah they were expensive, at £40 or £50 a pop, £60 in the case of Donkey Kong 64 with the included Expansion Pak. But it was worth it, and besides, a game those days lasted me like a month or more due to only having a couple hours after school every day to play them, and a bit more at weekends, but my parents didn't let me stay indoors all day playing them.

So yeah, I bought the N64 in late August of that year, with Banjo-Kazooie, and alongside it I picked up a copy of N64 Magazine by Future Publishing in Bath, 10 miles from my home town of Bristol. I think it was issue 19? It had a thing about Wipeout 64 on the cover I think. I had missed the previous month's issue which had B-K on it's cover, but I got it anyway.

So yeah, Banjo Kazooie was awesome, but equally, so was N64 Magazine. It had been created by many of the same people who made Super Play, a SNES magazine, which apparently was really good. I've never seen an issue though I don't think. But yeah, N64 Magazine was a fucking revelation to me at the time.

It was full of these larger than life characters, the staff of about 8 or 10 writers all had these funny, outlandish personalities and the start page for the review section every month was one of my favorite parts of the magazine, reading about what they were doing that month. There was James Ashton, and Tim Weaver, the editors of the magazine for the first year of issues I read, and Martin 'Kitsy' Kitts who had this angry demeanour, and Andrea Ball, who was apparently obsessed with fake suntan, and Will 'FuSoYa' Overton, who produced wonderful artwork for the magazine and would later go on to work at Rare after one of his covers featuring Joanna Dark caught their eye. Oh, it caught mine too, let me tell you!! ;) There was Jes Bickham, who looked a bit like the guy from the pop band 'Aqua' at the time, so pretended he was him.

And the reviews themselves, and every word and page in that magazine were just fantastic, especially to me aged 13 or 14. The letters page was brilliant, and they had competitions and like a leaderboard club thing where they would set challenges for games like complete Banjo-Kazooie in under 4 hours, or do a certain lap time on Big Blue in F-Zero X, or what have you. Readers had to send in pictorial or videotaped evidence of their times and scores, and the people who had completed the most challenges would be printed on the leaderboard page every month. I don't think I bothered with trying to do those though, mainly cos I didn't have a VCR player at the time to tape my speed runs.

So yeah, it was awesome. Reading the magazine informed me of the impending release of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which looked amazing, so I pre-ordered a copy at the EB in town. I went there on release day, ponied up my fifty english pounds, and started to play the best game that I had ever played in my life. I remember going to school a few days later, and someone asked me how I managed to get a copy as it was sold out everywhere. I was kind of half mystified, and half proud that I had known that it would be a huge game, and that he hadn't, and now had to wait until after Christmas to play it!!

So over 1999 I went back in the N64's catalogue, filling in the games I had missed like Super Mario 64, and Goldeneye 007 and Mario Kart and Blast Corps and everything else. I remember in the summer of that year, going to buy some football manager game, but it wasn't released yet, so instead I picked up Space Station Sillicon Valley, which was amazing luck since it was a freaking brilliant game, full of invention and fun.

So Christmas 1999 was an amazing time for the N64, there were so many amazing games that came out that December, and it yet would be the last time the N64 was a serious commercial entity. There was Smash Bros, and Donkey Kong 64, and Worms Armageddon, and Jet Force Gemini. Meanwhile, the old Game Boy 'brick' was being re-energised by a certain Japanese phenomenon about some kid who travels round the place collecting and battling monsters. It's pretty obscure, you probably haven't heard of it.

Just a staggering profusion of incredible games and fun. I remember getting the Star Letter in N64 Magazine that Christmas, writing about how hardly anyone I knew still had a Gameboy Brick and everyone had moved on to the Gameboy Colour, and why had Nintendo bothered releasing Pokemon on the obsolete system? Tim Weaver who was the editor at the time said something like "maybe, but it's still a great game and aren't you glad they released it at all?". I won a steering wheel and pedals which I sold to my mate for £20 cos I didn't really like proper racing games, I preferred Mario Kart-type ones. (Not DKR though, I thought that was jank compared to Mario Kart!!)

So yeah, the year 2000 came around, and my 2 best friends and I played the shit out of Smash Bros. Of course, as was the custom, you picked a main character, and stuck to it. My friend Tally was probably the best out of us 3, though I thought that may have had something to do with how overpowered his choice of Link was, especially the Up+B spin slash move aka the "SHAAAAAARD!!!" (Hey, why call something by it's real name when you can call it what it does?) I was a close second with Captain Falcon, and became a major irritation to the guys with my use and abuse of the Falcon Kick and the upwards jump-grab thing. They of course would refer to these moves as the Falcon Dick, and his taunt as the "Show me your boobs!". My friend Steve played Kirby, and he did his best, but was usually outclassed by us other two.

My favourite thing was to play with a lot of items on, the good ones like the Light sabers, Pokeballs and Bob-Ombs, the bumpers and fans etc were just annoying and pointless. You haven't lived until you've played a game of Smash Bros with just Bob-Ombs and Pokeballs, on max drop rate. Setting off 3 Pokeballs at once and then getting blasted off the stage by a chain reaction of like 5 Bob-Ombs is the best thing ever! :D

Anyway the rest of that year was fun, and then Perfect Dark came out in the summer. Oh yes. PD was just amazing, incredible. The multiplayer had so many options, and stat tracking, and bots to play against, and an amazing selection of brilliantly fun weapons.

It featured dual-wielding, years before the Halo series had it in Halo 2. We were all mystified why everyone though Halo was so fucking amazing, having played the far superior Perfect Dark just a year or so earlier.

But yeah, the weapons and multiplayer were so amazing. Dual Cyclones on magazine discharge, oh my god!! And I remember the first time we used the Farsight. I spawned next to it, in a duct system on a new map that we hadn't played before. I spent most of the match sniping them through the walls as they didn't know how to get to me! Oh how they raged. :D And the first time you set off an N-Bomb, you're like WHAT IS HAPPENING? And the laptop gun, so sweet! And the SuperDragon with grenade launcher, and the RCP-120 with a built-in cloak.... Just so good.

We spent many a night playing those games. We would get in to mine at like 5pm on a friday or saturday night, and play till like 2 or so am, alternating between Smash Bros and Perfect Dark, with a bit of Mario Kart and Party and Rakuga Kids and whatever else thrown in. I remember once we stayed up playing till like 5am, went to sleep on the sofas, and were woken up by my brother at about 7am wanting to watch cartoons! Felt so weird walking up the hill to the sweet shop that morning. Weird, but good.
Once, we even played a game of Smash Bros with the timer set to an hour, that was so intense. We were so knackered afterwards that we barely played anything else though, so that wasn't tried again. (Our normal battles were usually 10 minutes on the timer, we didn't like stock as that meant at the end one person would have used all their lives and wouldn't be able to play.) I remember playing a few races in F-Zero X and them bitching at me that it was unfair because I had the game and could practise on single player and time attack. Yeah? So what, suck it up losers!! :D

Ok, so I guess i've typed for like 2 hours without even getting to Edge magazine! Haha. So yeah, Christmas 2000 came and went, Majora's Mask was brilliant, Pokemon Snap was not... I remember driving back from my aunties with my dad feeling really pissed off, due to the stupid carnivore's turkey taking like all day to cook, and me having to wait to eat with them when I wasn't having any of the stupid meat. I remember that quite clearly actually, I remember sitting in the front, driving down the road back home, with the setting sun ahead of us in the west, with trees either side of the car, and my dad on my side. It felt good, and it felt right.

I got back to school at the start of term in 2001, and everything had changed. For some reason, never explained to me, my best friends in the whole world suddenly did not want to be friends with me any more. I think I wasn't cool enough for them any more? They wanted to be cool, and were sick of being nerds. They started experimenting with weed, and later stuff like ecstasy and whatever else. I had pretty strong views against drugs of any kind, which I credit to my mother and her strong moral values imparted to her by her parents. So yeah, over the year, my friends and I had huge fallouts, arguments and fights, and eventually stopped talking to each other except by necessity. I ended up becoming friends with a couple of other guys, Mark and Jagdjit, who I intially thought were poor substitutions, but we got on pretty well, and it was hassle-free as they were both a lot more mellow people than my other friends who were both pretty highly strung-people.

So yeah. In early 2001, our house got burgled, and my N64 and all my games, about 20 or more, stolen. I was devastated, but the house was insured, and I got a letter with a big voucher for £500 pounds credit at Dixons, a local electronics retailer, after listing my games at their new prices, instead of their actual worth as second-hand games!
So, in the market for a new console, I picked up a copy of Edge Magazine in January 2001, I think. It had Phantasy Star Online on the cover, with a glowing nine out of ten review inside. I don't know how i'd missed the magazine before, perhaps some kind of weird mental block that shut off my vision in the WH Smiths newsagents, to the side marked multi-platform. Yeah, I was a pretty enormous N64 fanboy.

Anyway, so I went up to the new mall off the motorway, walked into Dixons and bought a Dreamcast with PSO, Sonic Adventure, and a copy of Chu Chu Rocket, that I insisted, after reading a copy of DC-UK, that was sold free alongside all Dreamcasts. I was completely honest in my belief that it was the case, and the shop gave it me as they didn't know any better. I would later find out that the promo offer was a limited-time only thing to coincide with the launch of the Dreamcast's online service, but I honestly did not know that in the shop!

So I took the DC home, unboxed it carefully, and started up Sonic Adventure. I was blown away by the intro movie, and even more blown away by the first beach level. It was so unbelievably beautiful, I had tears in my eyes.

Can't find a video of the game that isn't the later DX port for Gamecube, so that will have to do.

To a 14 year old kid coming off the N64 to the Dreamcast, it was utterly mind-blowing, the graphics were night and day, and the games were so different! The N64 and Nintendo games seemed very familiar, very homey; but the Dreamcast games were so weird! They seemed a lot more Japanese somehow, crazy and mad and beguiling and wonderful.

I would later buy a Mega Drive and go back and play some of the classic Sonic games and wonder how I had managed to miss them and end up with the game boy instead!

Anyway so that night, my mum came home and seeing the white phone line snaking in from the hall socket to the front room, as I attempted to set up the Dreamcast online; she absolutely forbade me from using it online because of the phone bills. I never did get to play PSO online, which was sad, but there was plenty else to play. I took it back to EB at the top of Debenhams in town, as they had a pretty good secondhand bin, and exhanged it for I think, Shenmue and Grandia II.

I took the console in a big cardboard tomato box from the tills at supermarkets that my mum always had millions of, and I took it to my dad's for the weekend. I was really proud of my new console, I remember my dad remarking on how small it was. So I plugged it in to the big tv in the lounge area next to the kitchen and started playing Shenmue while they were cooking tea. It was really cool, really different, and the graphics were gorgeous, though the controls with the d-pad used to move were not to my liking of course. So I was playing along, and I got to the bit where Ryu's looking for some dude in the town? And you have to go and ask the townspeople about it, and every time you do, Ryu says something like "have you seen my friend i'm looking for?" or whatever. And my dad's then "partner" remarked, "it's a bit repetitive, isn't it?" Well I wasn't going to sit there and let her insult my new baby, so I took it downstairs to my bedroom, plugged it into the small tv there and played Grandia II, which was just brilliant.

So I started playing the Dreamcast in earnest, buying and playing incredible titles such as Jet Set Radio, or Soul Calibur, or Crazy Taxi or Metropolis Street Racer, Skies of Arcadia, everything.

Oh my god, Skies was so good!!!! So good.

And JSR was the coolest damn game i'd ever seen!

And right there with me, was Edge.

Edge was something completely different than what I was used to. It was grown-up writing about videogames. They would have long, in-depth articles about games and developers and gamer culture and retrospectives on old games and systems, and thought pieces on where games might be going or where they had been and how they had got there. It was amazing.
My favourite part though, was the columns. At that time, I think there were just the three. There was RedEye, which was Ste Curran, a staff writer for the magazine, writing under that psuedonymn, there was Trigger Happy, with Steven Poole, and there was a column with Toshirio Nagoshi of Amusement Vision, which I unfortunately can't recall the name of off the top of my head.

So every month, I would buy my copy of Edge, and dispense with all formalities and skip straight to RedEye. Yeah Ste, there were people who did that, as you remarked in your E100 column. Then I would read Trigger Happy, then Nagoshi's column. Then I would usually read the editor's leader, then check the reviews, read the first few main ones, then the letters page, and skip all over after that, reading the magazine end-to end in a couple of hours.
The thing I most enjoyed about the three columnists there, besides the incredible quality of writing, was how they complemented each other all lined up one after the other, in three pages, one a piece. RedEye was a persona of a "veteran videogame journalist whose views do not necessarily coincide with Edge's". He was brilliant, sharp and incisive, cutting and vicious when he needed to be, yet always eloquent and always with a real point to make. I enjoyed the first-person perspective style a lot, getting sucked in to his world of press parties with the disgust at the fanboys with their "ghostly-white rolls of flab, or the other sort, which was stick thin. There were never any normal-sized ones". I remember that line, and I also remember the one where he is sent to cover a show about 80's videogame music and told to stay off the drugs, yet he feels in his pocket a bag of white powder, and then the room explodes, people leaving trails of images behind them, the sad people from the 80's who can't let the past go. Well that was the gist of it.

Then there was Trigger Happy, with Steven Poole, which was sort of a compatriot to RedEye, but in a completely different style. Poole was sober, intellectual, and measured. He had previously written a book of the same name, and he drew on that and experience writing literary reviews for other publications to produce a frankly brilliant column every month. It was full of amazing imagery, he would slap a laptop gun against a wall as he rounded a corner and listen to the sounds of gunfire and the machine killing the enemies for him. He would be traversing an ice-bitten wasteland, the heavy mist of his breath reflected in the visor, the dead world groaning, and the eldritch crackle of the lightning arm cannon. He would be playing Time Crisis on the PS2, sat on his sofa with light gun in one hand, and cigar in the other. It was so real, and so good.

Nagoshi was fun, and provided a cool insight into Japanese game development. Then later on, after a bit of a misfire with a young guy who was a developer at Square of FFXI, ("hey let's have someone talk about these newfangled MMOs" I figured was the kind of idea :p ), it got even better, with Biffovision, which was written by Paul Rose who had been a pioneer of teletext graphics and had stuck to that format long after the internet had made it completely obsolete.
But yeah, it was so fun. They would have little in-jokes, and references to each other, like one column, after F-Zero GX was released for the Gamecube, RedEye woke up in bed with Nagoshi (the lead developer of the game), and imagined sharing a flat with his co-columnists. Nagoshi would have whisky on his cornflakes in the morning, Poole would be reading some dense literature while smoking a cigar, and Biffo would be doodling on the walls of the flat! It was so good.

So my best friends had left me, and I was doing shit at school, and fighting with my father and brother, but I didn't care. I had my Dreamcast, and I had Edge.

I mean lookit, I would lie there on my bed on a summer afternoon, reading a videogame magazine, with an Oxford English Dictionary next to me, where I would look up words like intransigent, which I recall was used to describe real-world car manufacturers that would not allow their cars to look damaged in the latest version of Gran Turismo. A videogame magazine that required a dictionary to fully read and understand it. That's something pretty special, right?

Anyway, time moved on, I bought a Nintendo Gamecube, which had some very good games, and that I would infinitely prefer playing than I wanted to play an Xbox or Playstation 2- I thought of them as inferior machines with inferior games. But it lacked third-party support, and the games, though brilliant to play, and gorgeous to look at, somehow lacked the punch and impact of the previous console.

I remember in 2005, being stuck in my mum's flat, with no money, and basically no hope after dropping out of college for the second time. I would go online on our slow as molasses Pentium 1 machine with dial-up internet, and would spend hours on the forums and community at Totse, as it was text-based, with no frills or graphics that would slow my chugging machine down. So I would sit there and post, and talk to people and shoot the shit. I would also visit Penny Arcade, which despite the jpegs taking a good couple minutes to load on my machine, was a real highlight of my week. I would wake up on a tuesday or a thursday, and feel doubly shit, because there was no new PA that day to make me laugh and give me something interesting to read about. I would also visit the comedy website Progressive Boink which would take fucking hilarious shots at nerd culture and pop culture and reminisce about stuff in the 80's, like the quintessential question of who was the best Ninja Turtle. Most of the articles were text also, but on the ones with a lot of images I remember there was sometimes a little thing saying, "if you're on 56k, go and make a sandwich while this page loads." I was! And I did just that!

And of course there was Edge. By this time I had amassed quite the collection, and laid them out in date order, in neat folders in rows on my shelves. I didn't miss an issue for a good period of time, probably 5 years. And I was only subscribed for one of those years I think, as I didn't like the way the postman dropped the magazines through the letterbox and onto the stone floor of the entrance hall, which sometimes damaged the spines. So the entire rest of the time I would go out to a newsagents or down to town and to a games shop and pick up my copy, every month. It really meant a hell of a lot to me.

Anyway, so in the summer, Battlefield 2 came out, and I would go to my local pc gaming cafe, and go downstairs and play for eight hours and forget my life. I kept blagging the £5 offer for a full day of computer time, long after the offer had expired. Mainly I think due to the staff being your regular clueless students, and also I like to think, due to the fact that they didn't have anything to lose by pretending the offer was still running. They got my fiver, and I sat in the corner of an empty basement with 20 PCs humming away beside me and forgot myself in the crucible of online play. I revelled in the sweetly-handling Blackhawk, and the sense of respect that those guys gave a pilot who wouldn't fuck around and crash the thing, and who could keep it out of enemy fire through deft piloting, and developing new and unexpected routes into the enemy base. And stuff like sitting there at maximum altitiude where the jets couldnt get you due to the pecularities of trying to fly a jet close to the top of the skybox, as a squad commander, allowing a full squad of 6 to spawn constantly on you, and halo onto an enemy flag until it was captured, and then moving onto the next one. You wouldn't get shit for points on a round like that, but you helped your team win it, and people began to trust you as a pilot, and would not hesitate to hop in, or to form a specific loadout for the chopper if you wanted to try that.

In late 2005, my grandparents died, and I used some of the money they left me, a full one thousand pounds, to buy upgrades for our home PC which at that point had been upgraded to an AMD Sempron 2600+ processor, which combined with a cheap graphics card, and 2 gigs of ram, was more than enough to run BF2 smoothly at low settings. I spent away the rest of it on comic books such as Spawn, and Witchblade, and Sci-Fi novels, and Yugioh cards to play local tournaments at a comic shop up the road from me.

So I started writing, and you can see the first thing I wrote in a serious manner on the first post of this blog, if you'd like. I had joined the Triforce forum, and they were understandably sceptical of me and my writing.

The oft-quoted saying is that you should never meet your heroes, lest they disappoint you. For me, it was more like, you should never talk to your heroes on an internet website, and find out that they are not the persona you thought they were, and sperg out all over their forum in a thoroughly embarassing manner for everybody present.

So yeah, there was that. I wrote a bit in that first year, but after that it was very sporadic, due to serious long-term depression, inspiration was hard to come by. But when that veil lifted, and I found a window in my concentration, god damn I took that motherfucker by the scruff of the neck and wrote my little heart out.

So the influence of print magazines on my life gradually faded, due to having broadband internet at my fingertips, and the free price of admission being a lot less onerous than the £4 for a copy of Edge at the time. I discovered blogs, and I discovered youtube, and all those good and great things that the internet we know today is made up of.

And I discovered a writer called Leigh Alexander, from a small piece in the Escapist magazine she wrote very early in her career. I enjoyed her writing a lot, and her blog was always at the top of my 'blogs' folder of my bookmarks, through browsers and hard drive failures, and new computers... It was always the first link I would add to my bookmarks when installing a new computer and loading up Firefox for the first time. (I didn't trust RSS feeds or sites like delicious at the time, so I just stuck to a good old fashioned bookmarks bar with tens and hundreds of writers and bloggers and games news sites on it, divided into categories. And she was always at the top.)

And so when she got a column for Edge, expanding on the type of writing she had previously done, I thought that was really cool. She had come up into game journalism the hard way, writing hundreds of blog posts and articles for many websites, impressing them and everyone else with her personal style that was matched by an ability to remain detached and analytical about the games industry. She was doing what I wanted to be doing, writing about games, in Edge no less, and she'd come from where I had, being unemployed and writing for the love of games. Except she was vastly more talented and hard-working than I was.

Not that I hadn't disagreed with her opinions in the past, and indeed I found her continual commentary on the feminism or sexual equality side of the games industry pretty tiresome, but I really respected her as a writer (still do). Anyway so she posted an article disagreeing with a caustic review that Jim Sterling had written on Duke Nukem Forever. What made me angry about this was the part where she stated that she "doesn't really review games any more" but yet was perfectly willing to cast judgement on people who do, and telling them that they shouldn't write a review in the way that they want to.

I took it up with her on the comments of her blog, though the post was a few days old and people had already had their say, so I took it to Twitter, where she and her friends basically laughed at me as a crazy person, just one of the internet's many hater trolls. I wasn't that at all Leigh, you didn't take the time to read my reaction to your article, and you instantly dismissed me as a loser troll and then your friends laughed at me for some comment i'd made about Edge and how much I liked it and how you should up your game if you were going to write for them. So I thought i'd write this post explaining what it meant to me, what great videogame journalism meant to me, and that I was not just a dumb troll. I took it too personally, and was too angry about it, but that's the power of the internet and Twitter now, where you can instantly reach any person on it and demand their attention. It was silly and i'm sorry, though you probably don't even remember the incident.

I wrote most of this article a year ago, and it devolved into a rambling personal mess about my own life and mental health at the time, which part I chopped off the end and left. I've now ended the article with the point I was driving at, and I hope it reads better now, though i'm not going to go back and edit the whole thing for readability, way too much work. Plus I kind of like the rambling style. Kinda Tim Rodgers-esque in it's length and off-topic rambling wouldn't you say? ;)

Innosomnia

Friday, July 15, 2011

Battlefield 2 in pictures

Edge Magazine and what it meant to me

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Battlefield 3

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Eve 2011