Every week on Torontoist, the Toronto arm of the (rather celebrated) Gothamist line of blogs, I file at the very least my “Film Friday” column, though often, depending on the week, I’ll post a few more bits and bobs, usually related to film.

I became a regular member of the Torontoist team shortly after I arrived in Toronto, as I had contacted several of the local publications and websites interested in doing some sort of coverage of the then upcoming Toronto International Film Festival 2005. TIFF is an unusual festival: arguably the biggest in the world, yet under-reported compared to a disgusting paparazzi chum-bucket like Cannes. That’s largely to do with the Toronto International Film Festival Group’s strict policy with journalists and photographers; I think they accredit about 10% of the numbers at Cannes. Which means there are a lot of unaccredited journalists in the city at the same time, who have to have a little extra fight in them to get good coverage, and with luck, get noticed by the group for the following year. Un-accredited, I pitched coverage anyway, eventually settling on covering the festival for Twitch Film and Torontoist, as I thought both outlets would have serveral people covering the festival. I was right about Twitch, but surprisingly I wrote roughly all of the coverage on Torontoist, and it’s that, I think, that helped me become and accredited journalist under their banner at the festival this year.

Pre-festival, I wrote 4 festival preview articles, concentrating on a few programmes at a time (written without having seen the majority of the films, educated guesses and the wonderful TIFF programme book helped me out):

TIFFist: Let the Film Fest Coverage Begin (The Midnight Madness programme)
TiFFist: Galas and Masters
TIFFist: Contemporary World Cinema, Reel to Reel
TIFFist: Visions, Special Presentations, Discovery, and Canada First!

Post-festival:

TIFFist: Reviews Round-Up
Does what it says on the tin, featuring capsule reviews of Evil Aliens; Isolation; Dave Chappelle’s Block Party; Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story; The Duelist; The District!; Citizen Dog; Pusher I, II, III; SPL; The Wayward Cloud; Drawing Restraint 9; and Hostel. Phew!

TIFFist: Festival Farewell
A final short little piece on why the festival is a good thing for Toronto, and why we shouldn’t forget about the Toronto International Film Festival Group either. A perhaps out of character article, as pleasant as it was, but I was so heartily sick of the festival by that point I think I needed to remind myself what an amazing thing it really is.

“Oh Second Life. We’ve had some interesting times, you and me, over the past 8 weeks we’ve been together. Mostly, I must admit, I’ve been complaining about the games I’ve played with you. ‘Too glitchy!’ I’d think, bemoaning a lack of polish, or ‘Not user friendly!’ I’d sigh, wishing for a better interface with the world the game was trying to present to me. I’m beginning to think I’ve been a little too harsh on all of those bedroom coders and Second Life architects. You see, maybe it’s not them. It’s you.”

Speak of the devil! My most recent article. Probably the weariest I’ve written so far, as I was genuinely intrigued by “The Pot Healer’s Adventure” but was completely and utterly turned off by the quirks of the Second Life engine. I’m still not going to give up exploring the games on offer in Second Life, though. I’ve just given up hope that they’ll be any good.

As I suspect my most recent “Letters from the Metaverse” column should be posted on GameSetWatch today, I should really cover the pieces that are already up.

“Letters from the Metaverse” (named from Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash; it was only later that I remembered that it was “letter”, not “letters”) was a column several months in the making, as I’d been interesting in writing a column for GameSetWatch for a while, and discussed it with proprietor Simon Carless, but we never quite managed to settle on a topic. When Simon put out an open call for a Second Life column, I jumped at the chance, as I’d heard so bloody much about Second Life by then I just had to give it a shot.

I haven’t been too impressed, let’s say.

Despite that, it’s nice enough to have joined the 553,721 people who, at the precise minute, are Second Life users, and of whom about 90% are probably journalists or students writing their thesis about it. The other 10% are the sexual deviants who really drive the economy…

1: “Escape from Orientation Island”
“Fancy putting on a diaper and being teabagged by someone dressed in a raccoon suit? You can probably do that in Second Life.”

2: “American Apparel in a Parallel World”
“Second Life does seem a bit overexposed, doesn’t it? (Not that I’m trying to put you off this column, or anything.)”

3: “Take Shelter”
“I don’t think I’m quite ready to talk about the trauma I experienced teleporting somewhere only to find myself trapped in a cage by a huge muscular goth. Let me just say I’d noticed he was already dragging around two naked slaves on a chain and I decided he didn’t need a third.”

I think I had accidentally found myself on a “Gor” sim, which Warren Ellis blogged about recently. I’d never heard of the Gor series until I started playing Second Life, so I wonder why it is the culture is so big, and so apparent, within the world? (I don’t really want to explore it any more than I have to.)

4: “You Know When You’ve Been Tringo’ed”
“Really, the past few weeks I haven’t managed to prove to anyone, least of all myself, that Second Life is much more than a glorified chat room, with a dress-up doll attached.”

I finally get around to exploring the games available in Second Life (my original intention with the column) and do so with a snappy reference to the old Tango ads. I don’t know if anyone reading my column picked up on it.

5: “A Good Flight Spoilt”
“It must say something that the two sports I’m most aware of in Second Life are golf and sailing. I like to imagine it says, ‘All of the denizens of Second Life might be massive sexual deviants, but they’re also WASPy as hell.’ But I digress.”

6: “My Dark Life”
“It’s all because of that bloody Givan dagger.”

7: “Turning Japanese”
“I wonder, do the adult movie studios have a Second Life presence? Can you rent videos that aren’t porn in other stores? Both, I imagine, are also good ideas.”

Last week’s article, and probably my favourite area in the world so far – a samurai combat sim. Shame it costs so much.

“If you ignore the gradings and play through the game from beginning to end, Viewtiful Joe is a short, fast paced, no brain summer blockbuster type of game. Maybe that’s all Atsushi Inaba wanted to create. I, sadly, wanted more.”

And so we reach my first review. It’s possibly a bit over-egged, but I agree with it even now; a harsh piece of criticism, but a fair one.

As this was a game that was getting almost universally excellent reviews at the time it didn’t go down too well, with people mostly blaming me for just taking the whole thing too seriously. I was, however, amazed at some of the vitriol I got for my complaint “The game does not include an option for subtitles, so all deaf gamers, or even gamers who have to keep the sound down, will miss what little storyline there is.”

It wasn’t merely that which gave it a six, I argued. It was just something worth noting in the body of the review, and who doesn’t think games should be more inclusive, eh?

I remember Brandon (Sheffield) liked the review but didn’t agree with my reasons for disliking the game; he disliked it for a whole other set of reasons. Sadly he never bothered to write his rebuttal. Brandon also likes (liked?) having a system of individual ratings, not just a final score, which is why I created what I consider to be the perfect set conceivable – ratings for Visuals, Audio, Design and Narrative.

Obviously that breaks down if you’re reviewing a game with no story (you’d have to give narrative a zero), but that’s why individual ratings systems are stupid and rubbish. So there!

“To truly love games, you must hate the games industry.

If the unreached potential of a game is what can make you hate it, the games industry is the peak of unreached potential. It continues to give birth to one of the most exciting form of entertainment possible. An entertainment that everyone could enjoy, but very few do. An industry full of creativity, being stifled.”

A solid article with a rather dour outlook on the games industry, featuring discussion of the state of mobile phone games in 2003, some major cussing of Naughty Dog founder Jason Rubin, and I get 73/100 in the pub quiz.

Conference and trade show coverage is interesting, in that the things discussed are rather temporary, and in retrospect only reflect the time in which they were written. Then again, it’s kind of hard to write something timeless in the games journalism biz, right? Enjoy it anyway!

“I might be wrong, but just about the most uncool thing to do at a game expo is for everyone in your crew to wear T-shirts emblazoned with the name of your website. Real videogame journalists don’t do that. They don’t sit in the press office media room posting “OMG I AM AT ECTS LOLLERS!” on Forum X, Y, then Z, while there’s a queue of people behind them, either.

There are rules as to how you act as a journalist at a games expo. I have learned. At least I wasn’t wearing a dorky t-shirt. “

Crikey, only on my forth article and I’m already lecturing people on what a “real journalist” is. You can see I had ambition (and most of what I say is true, anyway.) The journalist that spent all day, every day at the ECTS bar was, in fact, Ste Curran, admittedly however he was actually writing an article about it.

This article is notable for being my first interview (with Tom Sekine, of Capcom USA) which I performed without a dictaphone or an ability to do shorthand. I’ve learned my lesson since then, though (I own a dictaphone now.) It’s also notable for being from a time when people still thought the N-Gage could succeed. We’ve all learned our lesson since then.

“Nintendo are a company who, surprisingly, are sticking to their guns and quietly creating innovation and, above all, fun products that make me feel like a kid again.

And unless Nintendo start letting people know they can, things aren’t going to go any better for them. “

Apparently they did start letting people know, and things did! (See: Nintendo DS). An interesting little article about Nintendo’s unusual choice to have their own mini “Nintendo Experience” out the back of Earls Court on a truck. For trade only, admittedly, but I thank god now that it was, having seen the horrors of Nintendo fans crammed into a small space at E3 2006 (“Stop going on about it!”-Disgruntled Eurogamer readers).

Zelda: Four Swords was so brilliant that day, and yet when it was released, the sheer hassle of getting 4 people with GBAs and link cables together stopped me from bothering to pick it up. I imagine many others felt the same. Gosh, if we’d only just all found each other, eh?

As soon as I heard Kojima was going to be at ECTS I knew I had to find him and give him my card. Tim tried and… Didn’t quite succeed. Was this my Insert Credit proving ground? Could I GET KOJIMA?

For some reason I don’t remember this as being the second article I ever wrote, but there you go. This must however be the second ECTS I attended, which means I attended my first ECTS with fake credentials, a rites of passage to any regular trade show attendee, particularly when it comes to trade shows of the video game variety*. Of course, this time, even with real credentials I still found myself having to sneak into the Playstation Experience, which was a strange sort of public games show that Sony ran for one year, before it was superseded by Games Stars Live!, and the year after that nothing at all due to the final, merciful death of ECTS.

Despite being such an early article it is one I remember with great fondness – the somewhat silly premise of meeting Kojima (which was all IC contributor Tim Rogers ever talked about at the time, it felt like) and the difficulties we had covering the show just made it all the sweeter to have successfully covered it. It reads a little bit too full of youthful vigor and enthusiasm, but it’s still a fun read, and one I’m proud of.

*Edit, 21st August 2006: I realise now that I didn’t attend my first ECTS with fake credentials. I actually attended with my credentials as a senior tester for Absolute Quality, the video games quality assurance company I was working for at the time. Which means I’ve never attended a trade show with fake credentials. Ah well!

Hello and welcome to my workblog. If you’ve stumbled here by accident, drunkenly blinded or traumatised by the other dark corners of the Internet, then perhaps you might like to find out more about me at my biography, or if you’re in the mood to hire me, you might want to check out my resume. If you’re the patient type, though, you might prefer to stick around here, as I’ll be going through my archives and posting up links and commentary of all of my writing until now, daily, until I run out. Then this will probably turn into the usual ramblings these things end up as.

“August is festival month in Edinburgh – there’s the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the world famous ‘Fringe’ festival… There’s also a load of other festivals – Edinburgh will always pride itself on having a month where the inhabitants and many visitors to the city can experience and enjoy all the art forms available to man.

Until this year, all the art forms but one. This year marked the introduction of the Edinburgh International Games Festival – a festival dedicating itself to ‘celebrating the cultural impact of video games’, which hoped to validate gaming as an art through a public gaming exhibition, a ‘Game Over Film’ debate in conjunction with the Edinburgh Film Festival, and an industry day of discussions and lectures. But was it successful?”

It’s only fitting that I begin my workblog with a link to my first published work online, and it is, roughly, the first piece of video games journalism I ever wrote. My first draft was an insanely dull explanation of everything that happened, written in a kind of “he said this, then she said that, then he said this” way, and it’s thankful that Brandon Sheffield (editor of Insert Credit) knocked it back more or less instantly. Of course, he didn’t actually approve this version, which was posted up by Vincent Diamante (co-creator of IC) so I don’t know what he thinks about it, even now.

This was written in the dark old days when you had to HTML your own articles for them to get posted up (a system, actually, that Insert Credit is still using, which is why articles are posted so rarely). This is the reason the formatting is occasionally iffy. Still! My first article, and I’d already rubbed shoulders with the delightful Ste Curran and David McCarthy (previously Edge staffers, now sworn protectors of the wonderful Triforce) and I wrote a fairly amusing, and only slightly libellous, appendix.