Somehow managed to allow time to escape me yesterday, forgetting to do the blog post or my weekly numbers. Got too busy writing a review forWheelman; have got four more reviews to complete before the week is out, and probably half a dozen already lined up for May. This makes my wallet happy, especially after I spent an estimated $2k on games this month.
eBay is the devil – just as soon as I decide to take a hiatus, some of the less common NES games we want show up complete and in good condition. We just need to give it three months; by then everyone will have exhausted their Ruddbucks, and prices will be sane again.
Going out to the Tender Centre shortly to hunt for gaming stuff. Probably should have hit the markets, but I wasn’t in the mood, and the term “flea market” always makes me think of vermin, go figure.
Too many reviews of shitty games to write – only one game at this stage is going to get more than a 6. Kind of want this quarter to be over – yeah, it seemed like it was going to be great three months ago, and it was – if you only have to play games you like. Desperately want to do some of my own gaming and/or go out and visit the friends I haven’t yet seen since moving up here two months ago.
I didn’t make it to the finals for the Best Reviewer or Columnist awards at the Lizzies. I think it’s probably because I’m low profile and not from Sydney. I mean they can’t hardly award them based on quality if IGN AU is up for awards. No offense guys, but Fox desperately needs to put up the cash for some copy editors.
Driving back and forth from Melbourne resulted in blog entries being missed. Tired and have lots of work to do, and am trying to stem the flow of money from my accounts. Buying like 15 games in the last week didn’t help.
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.