Affectionate Diary

Games journalism is an exciting field to work in - I should know, I’ve written more than three pieces for national publications. But it can be hard to know where to direct your energies as there are so many different types of journalist you can be. So allow Affectionate Diary to provide - the Definitive Guide to Different Kinds of Games Journalism.

Professional blogging.

Kotaku accepts the following copy as acceptable for a Hands On of Virtua Fighter 5, a fighting game series that is known for inspiring near-insane levels of dedication in its players - “The game was fun to play, and I suppose that’s what really matters.”

Thanks, Kotaku!

That was an excellent post for them because it they labelled it “Virtua Fighter 5 Hands On”, which was a bold move as the post contained absolutely no information on how the game played at all. It did, however, drive what was probably a lot of hits to the site. Which is what it’s all about - getting the hits no matter how little your writers know. If you can lie like this and fill up approximately half a page with text that says nothing, you would make an excellent professional blogger.

Proper internet journalism.

Why bother? Blogging pays about the same if you’re prolific enough, and you’ll only need to worry about things like knowledge, passion, actual writing ability and knowledge.

Written journalism.

I’m not sure about this one. Every journalist I know has a blog, and they write as least as much on the blog as they do in their publications. Which leads me to believe that they must have a lot of free time. In conclusion, working on a magazine is a total doss. Just send in a CV that says ‘I can do reviews what are good’ and then sit back and let the good times roll. You will get to play games all day, which is what any job in the games industry consists of.

Freelancing.

First you need to suck off the editors of magazines like FHM and Front. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to write the reviews columns for these magazines. They’re really important because they are read by The Whole World, which means PRs will suck you off to get their games in. That’s brilliant because you will be a couple of sucking-offs down after scoring the columns. Remember, you will need to regularly suck off the editors to keep your column, because there’s always competition, so get regular payback from the PRs. Ideally speak to only the hot girl PRs, even though they are unlikely to give as good head as the guys, who play with (their own) cocks every day (at least).
These columns are particularly great because you don’t need to write more than about 10 words about each game, and the pay is often about £500 per word. In addition, you can put the games up on eBay afterwards for big bucks!!!

This has been the best guide to games journalism you’ve ever read, but that’s only because it’s the only one you’ve ever read. For further information on glory holes, Test Drive Unlimited and the internet, check out these other AMAZING guides to games journalism -

http://www.disappointment.com/wordpress/archives/171
http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/?p=1192
http://www.thetriforce.com/newblog/?p=813
http://thermosflaks.blogspot.com/2006/10/so-you-want-to-be-games-journalist.html
http://botherer.cream.org/?p=631
http://dubiousquality.blogspot.com/2006/10/so-you-want-to-be-games-journalist_30.html
http://www.mathewkumar.com/2006/10/30/170/
http://www.richardcobbett.co.uk/codex/journal/filingcabinet/so_you_want_to_be_a_games_journalist/
http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/soyouwant.htm
http://pcgtim.wordpress.com/2006/10/30/how-to-be-a-games-journalist/
http://idealproject.blogspot.com/2006/10/so-you-want-to-be-games-journalist-im_30.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L0o3wC9iLc&eurl=

That there is a link to video showing Mr. P. Harrison wanking on about the PS3 front end. I would embed it but I don’t know how.

Anyway, the point being that I have never heard such a load of unalduterated fucking crap talked about anything ever in my whole life, and I’ve watched some shite corporate presentations in my time. Combining the power of RSX and Cell and the metadata of my photos to render them in a rich media way to SHOW SOME FUCKING PHOTOS.

Has it come to this? It makes me not only ashamed to be involved in video games, but almost ashamed to be a human.

REAL TIME VIDEO TRAILER PREVIEWS. I mean, for fucks sake.

Just so that I don’t piss off Boss Nonnu too much, there’s plenty that is just mind-fuckingly brilliant about TDU. And I do love it. But, I’m about to stop playing it. And I’m really close to getting to the final rank, which will no doubt unlock a shit load of amazing challenges, but there comes a point with any modern game where you just have to say enough is enough. I’m done here. I’m not going to get anything more out of it, so let’s move on. I wish I could get more of the old fashioned kind of I’ve Completed It closure, but that just doesn’t really happen anymore. I will never get that with TDU, I know that, so I have to choose a point to put the pad down and I’m at that point. And this is why:

The whole of Hawaii. Brilliant. A staggering achievement. And it’s really pretty. It’s not pretty like PGR3, but it’s pretty enough to make you want to go exploring, just to find a new field or grove of trees. And it’s so huge! Imagine PGR3 but all the tracks were interconnected and you could drive around at your own leisure, but drop in and out of races TDU-style. Imagine it much bigger than that, though. That would be the best thing ever, because PGR3 is the best thing ever. TDU is more PGR1 than PGR3, though.

Let’s ignore MSR for the moment and head straight to PGR. PGR brought to life cities, let you drive around them in real cars and had a fantastic driving model. For many, many hours it was just enough to drive up and down the streets, at speed, in amazing cars. It got boring pretty quickly, though, because that’s what you were doing - driving up and down streets. Loads of 90 degree turns and narrow straights. If you took away the setting you had the most boring race tracks ever known to man. And that’s what you have with TDU.

Hawaii might be pretty, but its roads sure weren’t designed to be raced on. You go straight, at really fast speeds, and then you have a slight curve, maybe, or a 90 degree right hand turn. You have very little in the way of indication as to when the turn is, especially if you’re in car with the camera on the road. You are basically on an approximation of an actual road.

What PGR2 did was lie to you. It lied about the width of pavements. It lied about the inclines in the road. It gave you huge signs letting you know the dimensions of the corner you were approaching. It gave you every indicator you needed to make turns as fast as you can intuitively. It gave you race tracks in cities. Race tracks are so much more than a looped piece of road, and I can’t wait for the TDU team to give me race tracks on a tropical island. Right now, they haven’t.

While they’re at it, they need to address the handling quite seriously. Perhaps it’s the lack of information given to me about the roads I’m on, but I never, ever seem to be thinking about breaking points and corner entry points and how much to squeeze the accelerator pedal when exiting a corner. I’m not making any of the decisions I make when I’m racing in any other driving game, and I’m not engaging any of the skills I’ve learnt about driving cars fast. I’m just slowing down a bit, turning, speeding up a bit. I couldn’t refine my description any more than that because I can’t seem to refine my technique any more than that. And I so badly want to, because the game expects me to drive A LOT.

TDU is an excellent showcase for how much driving games can change, and has shown me that there’s more to life than PGR, Gran Turismo and Forza. I really can’t wait for them to get it right. But right now, I’m done with the driving in TDU. Although there’s loads more ‘content’, there’s nothing more for me to do.

When we moved over from Blogger we lost Itsy and Shigsy, which gives me the perfect opportunity to repost them as I upload them to this new server. The author, who isn’t any of us, has sadly since passed away. What could be a more fitting tribute than to re-immortalise his work on what is clearly the best website ever. Here’s the first -

This is sex:

LOOK at how FUCKING BADASS that logo is. The ship is a bit too kitsch to be truly fucking amazing, but the letting is SUPREME. I want a T-shirt of that motherfucker. That said, you should see the Tempest one. It’ll blow your fucking mind.
It’s not just the logo that’s wicked - there’s the schematic itself. It’s fucking beautiful. All those clean lines and rigid angles. It’s a stark yet complex beauty and it details the basic structure of Gravitar’s electronics. The way it’s topped off with that Atari information box on the bottom right is SWEET.
I got this unique image from an arcade manual PDF. I fucking love them. Atari manuals are by far the best, but they’re all full of fantastic geek information and are a wondrous mine of SICK imagery. Check out this cocksucker right here:

How fucking cool is arcade manual Bombjack? That motherfucker’s SICK. His wickedness game is INTENSE.
I am DEFINITELY making T-shirts out of all of these, so fuck off. I’ve also made a pendant out of a genuine Commodore 64 SID chip ( a 6581). Beat that, you cunts.

I will also do another post on this shit, once I can be fucked to PRTSCRN some more PDFs up. Yeah, it’ll look weird with this one being first, but I don’t care.
Overall, I give schematics 10/10, with a platinum joystick for arcade ones.

HOLY FUCK THAT’S THE BEST SHIT I’VE EVER SEEN IN MY FUCKING LIFE.

I think that’s his name. He’s going to write things. He used to be good at words, but he’s not done anything in ages so excuse him if he’s total rubbish. What he is definitely good at is making things pretty, so expect Affectionate Diary to look HOT in the next, er, year or so.

That dog drawing game (Okami) has something like 93 out of 100 on Metacritic, and most people what play games regularly would agree it’s pretty sweet. Our standards are much too low though.

After watching a film with my wife I often ask her what she would give it out of ten, it’s sort like a traditional comment. Anyway, she almost always gives films between seven and ten out of ten, which is ridiculous. Not entirely because films just can’t all be that good, but also because giving a film nine or ten out of ten gives you nowhere to go in the future.

So a really good film like Children of Men should get about a three, giving the filmmakers of the future seven more increasingly good marks to create masterpieces in, which isn’t much considering we could make films for 10,000 more years.

Same with games – dog drawing game getting nines everywhere is entirely stupid because it gives us no room for the really fucking amazing games that might be made in the future. Imagine if Okami didn’t have a really boring beginning bit with way too much dialogue you can’t skip, wasn’t too big, didn’t have loads of dull shit about Gods and nature, wasn’t pretty much just mainly like Zelda with a nice graphics filter – even then I’d give it 4. Max.

Imagine a game made by a perfect collaboration of fifty of the most creative and talented video game designers who have ever lived. Every pixel of every texture of every triangle drawn by top artists from a field of thousands, then checked, optimised and encoded by a parliament of the highest achieving coders ever conceived. The most arresting, emotionally powerful story ever written wrapped around the whole thing then squadrons of testers, designers, game play experts from every corner of gaming left to mould it over five years of constant testing and localising with no budgetary limits.
A game that when you played it made you feel like you never had before, or ever would again.

That game would be pretty fucking good, and maybe worth a six.

This has been my commute game for the last month. Terrible, isn’t it?

Quite why I decided to take on this lumbering dinosaur of hideous, unrefined and monotonous RPG stereotypes is still a matter for some internal debate. Mostly, it’s due to me losing a save of FF4 and feeling a deep, spiritual need to pick it up and finish what I had started.*

 I’m fucking regretting it, though. Stuck at an end-game boss rush, the cunts keep fucking me by the third Elemental God. I’m too proud to Gamefaq my way through, so it’s back to the soul-destroying monotony of GRIND LEVELLING in order to gimp my way to the end of the mind-fuckingly shit story. Oh well, at least I’m trapped inside a giant robot. Mind you, it looks fucking shit.

 * This is an outright lie. I bought Golden Sun at the same time, but elected to give it to my girlfriend, so she could sample a fine handheld RPG. Has she finished it yet? Has she fuck. It’s not even been in her fucking DS. Cow. I did kind of force it on her, though. Right. I’m stealing it back tonight. I bet she won’t even notice.

Well, it seems that the long-awaited downloadable content has been delayed until ‘before mid November’, according to an admin post on the Atari forums.

 This is, of course, hideously distressing. Quite what this has to do with Infogrames’ (twice delayed) re-financing meeting on November 15th isn’t clear, but there’s a damn good chance it plays a role in delaying content that really should have been on the disk and in the game from day one.

The patch (which again is delayed until November) is a separate issue - TDU obviously needs it, if only to sort out the insanely spastic shit like the game prioritising who appears in your local space without paying any attention to your friends list. NICE ONE. Quite why I can’t lock to a mate through the GPS interface is something I’d like explained. Yes. With massive technical documents and everything. 

If you entitle a piece “Virtua Fighter 5 Hands On” it’s expected that you actually talk about how the game plays in some way. Thanks for letting me know how good the graphics are, though - there’s not a single video or screenshot anywhere.