“Chapter Two: A Vignette Exploring Foreboding, Featuring a Description of the Author’s Misguided Fashion Choices“

Well would you look at that! The article I said would never be published only a short while ago finally online. As you can see, I haven’t linked much of the text because the very first line tells you all you need to know about it; it’s intentionally pretentious. It was heavily influenced by that great Scottish novel, Lanark, you see.

If you want to skip the (important!) literary framing, you can read a short history of medical simulation games in “Chapter Six: A Short History, to Remind Us Whence We Came, and Where We Currently Stand“, and you can read a comparison of Trauma Center DS and the cutting edge of medical simulations in “Chapter Seven: A Series of Tests is Performed“. I’d read it all anyway, as you’ll miss most of the jokes that way.

“This year in London there were three companies all offering handheld games machines with a difference – they all offer to do more than be simply a games machine. Nokia, who’ve been in the business for a while now with the N-Gage, Tapwave with their Zodiac PDA, and newcomer Gizmondo, with their handheld unit simply called ‘The Gizmondo’. While Nokia actually don’t ever use the phrase, these systems can all be loosely called ‘convergence devices’, a phrase which Gizmondo and Tapwave were certainly falling over themselves to use. I don’t intend to tell you which one is best for you here, each system has a lot to offer, and each system is different.”

As far as I can remember this is the last article that I have posted on Insert Credit, because by this time I became heartily sick of coding the HTML for each page. Admittedly the job is mostly copy and pasting, but I’d had enough of it. That’s not to say it’s the last article that I’ve written for Insert Credit. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to link to a new one (but don’t hold your breath.)

This is one of the oddest and most “of it’s time” articles I’ve ever written; an feature entirely about convergence devices, namely the N-Gage, Gizmondo and the Tapwave Zodiac. Which are now all quite deceased. It’s fun to laugh at them now, but each one had their unique plus points; Stuart Campbell has covered the many positives of the N-Gage quite fully, the Tapwave was a cross between a PSP and a DS (and was simply crying out for some decent support), and the Gizmondo… Well, the Gizmondo felt really, really nice.

Special thanks must be made at this point to my good friend Alex Duin, one of the creative masterminds behind the BBC’s interesting alternate reality game Jamie Kane, for putting me up in London and accompanying me on all of my crazy adventures. The poor sod bought a Zodiac after this article. My bad!

“I just lost the game.

As a side effect, so did you.”

It’s entirely unfortunate that whenever I, you, or anybody else reads this article they lose “The Game” (and now, of course, anyone who reads this blog.) Still, if it works to spread this little viral bit of magic even further, then it makes me happy.

A short while ago I was contacted entirely randomly by someone who was trying to prove The Game exists to Wikipedia, and I’m gratified to find out the legendarily insane Wikipedia overlords now admit it does. People are even selling t-shirts, but as you can see from this article, I was not thinking of The Game back when it was cool to not think of it. That’s “not think of it”, not “not have heard of it”; there’s a crucial difference.

Anyway, this article shows the sad, confused state of London’s trade shows in 2004, with 3 different floor shows an 2 different developers conferences. ECTS was by this point little more than a hollow shell, with the Koreans the only shining light. The Korean stand at any trade show has always been one of the highlights, usually a lavishly laid out affair, but yet somehow they would never bother to make sure they were using proper English on their pamphlets, allowing hilarity to ensue. As far as anyone can tell the Korean games industry gets piles of cash from their government to take their wares across the world, but whether they’ve ever had anything to show for it is another matter.

This trip was however personally gratifying, because I got to chat to Warren Spector for a while. I found him astoundingly pleasant and interesting.

I hadn’t played Deus Ex: Invisible War by that point. A good thing, really.

“And so it was I found myself in the Waterstones on Princes Street trying to read The Birthday Party in half an hour. Which I managed. But considering that a great deal of the atmosphere of the play is (apparently) in Pinter’s use of silence, my ultra fast version kind of lost a bit of the charm. I wondered, rushing back to the Royal Museum for 12 to save the princess meet my girlfriend – is what I’ve done perhaps some metaphor for man’s need to play games? To challenge himself? To set himself tasks and quests?”

Ah, we’ve come full circle, it would feel like, if my career hadn’t continued on extensively past this, my coverage of the second Edinburgh International Games Festival. Remarkable for the gratuitous section I’ve quoted part of, in which I read a Harold Pinter play. Definitely on the wanky side of new games journalism, that. I do like my conclusion of the entire article, though, and Mark Rein is a fun guy. This piece also features the first mention of my (then still quite new) girlfriend, but they only get more regular and detailed from this point on.

I’m sad, actually, that I haven’t been able to cover the re-branded Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival for the last two years. Edinburgh is fun during the festival (though I have both bad and good memories of it) and I hope I’ll be able to visit again sometime.

“I visited Japan in February of this year, and during my stay, Asobitcity announced its closure, and Yamagiwa Soft burned to the ground.

It’s unusual, I guess, that my most concrete memories of both stores are of their pornography sections. “

I’ve been taking a short break from filling in my archive chronologically, but here’s the piece of writing which followed on from my Viewtiful Joe review in November 2003; it might seem strange that I took a gap of about 7 months between articles, but I was working through my third year of university at the time. Which sounds very noble and productive, however I did miss the first week of the second term to visit Japan.

Shortly after the visit I wrote at least one article about the trip, but they never really amounted to much more than “What I Did On My Holidays, by Mathew Kumar, age 22 and 2 months” so I shelved (and have subsequently lost) them, but they turned into the first page of this review. This is probably one of those articles that people would refer to as “new games journalism”, because the definition of NGJ is trapped somewhere between Kieron Gillen’s “gaming discussed as personal experience” and Tim Rogers’ “personal experience as a framework for discussing gaming”. This is the latter; I use my personal experience of playing Taisen Hot Gimmick in an arcade in Harajuku to explain the rules of Mahjong, before writing a fairly straightforward review on the second page.

I like this piece – it’s was written confidently and covers a genre that is given next to no coverage in English. I haven’t played Mahjong in ages (my set weighs an ton, so I didn’t bring it with me to Toronto) and I’ve wanted to review one of the many Mahjong titles for DS for quite a while (the Mario branded Yakuman DS, perhaps), but sadly I don’t really have the money for such frivolities.

This article is a good example of why I started this workblog, too – the Insert Credit archives are so broken not one of my articles after the Viewtiful Joe review are actually linked to on an easily accessible page!

“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.

Actually, Real journalists not only don’t wear t-shirts with their credentials pasted all over them (Dude, I am so legitimate. Would I have this T-shirt if I wasn’t?), they actually don’t appear to do any work at all. They stand at the ECTS bar all day from… Ooh, 10am, drinking solidly, and consider creating a feature on people cheating on their spouse at ECTS.

Real journalists don’t queue for a cubicle when there are plenty of urinals empty and waiting. Actually, I don’t know if that’s true, but GDCE is the only place on earth I’ve observed a line of 10 guys waiting on 2 cubicles while 8 urinals are empty. If they were all doing coke, fair enough, but I doubt it. (note: We here at Insert Credit in no way advocate the using of drugs. We barely tolerated Tim drinking Dr Pepper.)

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.

More people should have that feeling.

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!