Remember
At some point towards the end of my past career writing about games, I tried to add up roughly how many articles I'd written over the years. It was a lot. For Gamers.com and 1UP alone I wrote...well, let's see...maybe an average of eight news stories a day for two years, forty a week, about two thousand a year, plus reviews and features and other stuff. Add in IGN, Gamers' Republic, freelance work, the barrage of output twice a year at E3 and the Tokyo Game Show, and you get more than ten thousand stories over the course of the whole fiasco, I think.
Most of which were trash. The nature of games coverage on the web, back then at least, was that you spat it on the page and got the hell on to the next thing. I never worked anywhere that wasn't badly understaffed. Combine that with my natural tendency to crap writing and there you go.
A lot of people used to tell me I was one of the better writers in the business. That might have even been true, but if so, I suspect that it was down to the terrible standards of the time. For my part, when I can bring myself to even think about my old stuff, I hate it.
Except for a few things. Let me try and remember some.
Back when I wrote a goodly chunk of GMR, I did a big feature story about Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. I remember it had a clever line for the lead. Writing for GMR was a good time, until James Mielke realized I wasn't actually joking when I said that he and I and just about everyone else in the enthusiast press were employed in a contemptible shuck that nobody should have been funding with real money.
The first thing -- er, no, the second, the first was some nothing DVD review -- I wrote for Newtype USA was a big preview story about Final Fantasy VII Advent Children. I consider it an impressive feat of craftsmanship, in that I got through something like 3500 words about the film without making fun of it. Eventually I became a regular contributor to Newtype and mostly enjoyed the work, although at some point it became uncomfortably obvious to me that I don't know how to critique comic books in any kind of useful detail. Better writers of my acquantaince were working for Otaku USA and getting less than half as much money, which was kind of embarrassing.
A 1UP feature I was very fond of was part of Jeremy Parish's "Essential 50" series, a year-long thing we did on various important and influential games. I remember writing three entries on the list. Maybe I did more? I forget. But I did one on Dragon's Lair, one on Elite, and one on the importance of early Macintosh gaming, focusing on the old platformer Dark Castle and the ICOM Simulations point-and-click games, like Deja Vu and Shadowgate. My dad was an Apple partisan from the very beginning -- he brought home one of the original 128K Macs -- and most of the home gaming I did in my formative years was on a Mac. It was a neat nostalgia trip, and those really were important games, even though not so many people remember them anymore.
Official US PlayStation Magazine once published a review of this terrible little Gundam game I did. That was one of the few times I successfully put together a sort of concept gag review, the kind that Parish is so good at. "This game gets one star," I said, and broke down exactly what the one star was for. (One-fourth of the star was for a cute cartoon on the loading screen.) It made the poor beleagured woman who ran Bandai's American gaming PR very angry, which I kind of felt bad about later on.
Speaking of, I have a perverse fondness for my old review of Deus Ex on PlayStation 2, because it made a lot of people very angry, not least among them Warren Spector himself. If I were Warren Spector I wouldn't care much about what the press thought of me, but then I'm not Warren Spector. The review itself was one of those situations where I'd hit upon the right conclusion, but I didn't quite realize it at the time, and I didn't know how to articulate it properly. It's actually pretty badly written. Years later, when I played Bioshock, I figured it all out, because Irrational Games had figured it out as well -- that Deus Ex was a fine RPG wrapped inside a clumsy, awkward, not-very-fun first-person shooter. Fat lot of good it did me finding the answer eight years later, but at least it did Ken Levine and company a lot of good, since they got to be rich and famous. I was very glad for them, since I'd been a fan of theirs for many years. I was lucky enough to meet and speak with Levine back in 2000. Hell of a bright guy.
My favorite thing I wrote for IGN, though, was the last one, an article about Xenosaga Episode I. It was the day we were finally allowed to post whatever media we wanted from the game, and coincidentally also the day I got fired. I decided to do a feature showcasing the English voice acting for as many characters as possible, captured a bunch of movies and wrote up accompany descriptive text, along with a funny self-deprecating intro about how dorks like me are shitty judges of English voice acting because in our snobbery we always think the Japanese stuff is better.
Anyway. Halfway through the job, they took me aside and said you're outta here, so I said okay and went back to my desk and finished the feature. I liked it because it presented the reader with material they could use to make their own mind up about a game. 'Stead of just making them wade through my crap writing.
Most of which were trash. The nature of games coverage on the web, back then at least, was that you spat it on the page and got the hell on to the next thing. I never worked anywhere that wasn't badly understaffed. Combine that with my natural tendency to crap writing and there you go.
A lot of people used to tell me I was one of the better writers in the business. That might have even been true, but if so, I suspect that it was down to the terrible standards of the time. For my part, when I can bring myself to even think about my old stuff, I hate it.
Except for a few things. Let me try and remember some.
Back when I wrote a goodly chunk of GMR, I did a big feature story about Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. I remember it had a clever line for the lead. Writing for GMR was a good time, until James Mielke realized I wasn't actually joking when I said that he and I and just about everyone else in the enthusiast press were employed in a contemptible shuck that nobody should have been funding with real money.
The first thing -- er, no, the second, the first was some nothing DVD review -- I wrote for Newtype USA was a big preview story about Final Fantasy VII Advent Children. I consider it an impressive feat of craftsmanship, in that I got through something like 3500 words about the film without making fun of it. Eventually I became a regular contributor to Newtype and mostly enjoyed the work, although at some point it became uncomfortably obvious to me that I don't know how to critique comic books in any kind of useful detail. Better writers of my acquantaince were working for Otaku USA and getting less than half as much money, which was kind of embarrassing.
A 1UP feature I was very fond of was part of Jeremy Parish's "Essential 50" series, a year-long thing we did on various important and influential games. I remember writing three entries on the list. Maybe I did more? I forget. But I did one on Dragon's Lair, one on Elite, and one on the importance of early Macintosh gaming, focusing on the old platformer Dark Castle and the ICOM Simulations point-and-click games, like Deja Vu and Shadowgate. My dad was an Apple partisan from the very beginning -- he brought home one of the original 128K Macs -- and most of the home gaming I did in my formative years was on a Mac. It was a neat nostalgia trip, and those really were important games, even though not so many people remember them anymore.
Official US PlayStation Magazine once published a review of this terrible little Gundam game I did. That was one of the few times I successfully put together a sort of concept gag review, the kind that Parish is so good at. "This game gets one star," I said, and broke down exactly what the one star was for. (One-fourth of the star was for a cute cartoon on the loading screen.) It made the poor beleagured woman who ran Bandai's American gaming PR very angry, which I kind of felt bad about later on.
Speaking of, I have a perverse fondness for my old review of Deus Ex on PlayStation 2, because it made a lot of people very angry, not least among them Warren Spector himself. If I were Warren Spector I wouldn't care much about what the press thought of me, but then I'm not Warren Spector. The review itself was one of those situations where I'd hit upon the right conclusion, but I didn't quite realize it at the time, and I didn't know how to articulate it properly. It's actually pretty badly written. Years later, when I played Bioshock, I figured it all out, because Irrational Games had figured it out as well -- that Deus Ex was a fine RPG wrapped inside a clumsy, awkward, not-very-fun first-person shooter. Fat lot of good it did me finding the answer eight years later, but at least it did Ken Levine and company a lot of good, since they got to be rich and famous. I was very glad for them, since I'd been a fan of theirs for many years. I was lucky enough to meet and speak with Levine back in 2000. Hell of a bright guy.
My favorite thing I wrote for IGN, though, was the last one, an article about Xenosaga Episode I. It was the day we were finally allowed to post whatever media we wanted from the game, and coincidentally also the day I got fired. I decided to do a feature showcasing the English voice acting for as many characters as possible, captured a bunch of movies and wrote up accompany descriptive text, along with a funny self-deprecating intro about how dorks like me are shitty judges of English voice acting because in our snobbery we always think the Japanese stuff is better.
Anyway. Halfway through the job, they took me aside and said you're outta here, so I said okay and went back to my desk and finished the feature. I liked it because it presented the reader with material they could use to make their own mind up about a game. 'Stead of just making them wade through my crap writing.