I Wrote A List Of Things: Top Five RPG Maker Games @ PC Gamer

My first piece for PC Gamer went up today, a top-five list of RPG Maker games. The idea was to offer a counterpoint to the weight of words on games like Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer and Space Funeral - while they certainly deserve a spot in the list, I wanted to give a shout-out to some more traditional projects.

As I've said before, PCG was my games magazine of choice when I was a kid - it's a strange thing to see my name on there. Good strange, for the most part, though I suspect that I might have ruined it. Particularly when the piece first went up without a break tag, and killed the homepage. Oops.

I Wrote A Series Of Things: Blight of the Immortals Journal Part 2 @ GamingDaily.co.uk

The second half of Gaming Daily's romp through Blight of the Immortals is now up, detailing our final adventures, misadventures, and unadventures in Iron Helmet's indie browser strategy thing. Spoiler: absolutely nothing happens to me, but you do get to watch me amuse myself. I'm not selling this, am I?

http://www.gamingdaily.co.uk/2011/the-great-battle-of-fantasy-world-%E2%80%93-blight-of-the-immortals-%E2%80%93-part-ii/

Fun to be part of, though, when all's said and done - and I'm going to sort of miss the Dwarves of Love.

I Wrote A Series Of Things: Blight of the Immortals Journal Part 1 @ GamingDaily.co.uk

So a little while ago the Gaming Daily folks and I played a game of Neptune's Bounty sequel Blight of the Immortals. You can read about the first six days of play by clicking the following "hyper-link":

http://www.gamingdaily.co.uk/2011/the-great-battle-of-fantasy-world-blight-of-the-immortals-part-i/

Here's an excerpt:

It is the third day, and death has come to the Dwarves of Love. We commend the souls of the fallen to the deep as tradition demands: with solemn hymns and fervent, mournful krumping.

I'm not really sure what I was going for, stylistically. Metro Tolkein, I guess.

Here Comes The Serious Bit

Wasn't planning on returning to the scene of the crime, but I came across this piece from last year in the comments thread of Kieron Gillen's response to Games Journo Story and wanted to get something down - for my own sake as much as anything else.

When it comes to making a living writing about games - writing about anything - I try to manage my expectations very carefully. I know how hard it is, how naive I am, how privileged my generation is and how sour my sense of entitlement tastes to those older and wiser than me. How anything I have to say on the matter will be self-indulgent until I've succeeded: or at the very least, until I've accepted failure.

No Manifesto: Thoughts on Games Journo Story

"Mythologising makes me uncomfortable, which for someone who splits his time between trying to be a games journalist and trying to be a theatre producer is frank fucking madness."

Would you like to hear a confession? I had not actually played Games Journo Story when I wrote that sentence. I wrote it in advance. I wrote it because I didn't really want to play Games Journo Story, but felt like I had to, and wanted to go in armed. I wrote it because I'm a twenty-three year old aspiring games writer who met Kieron Gillen in the pub after the 2010 Eurogamer Expo and you know what fuck Brendan Caldwell.