“To be frank (don’t worry, you can still be Shirley) the first thing that disturbs me about writing about how gaming made me is that so many of you reading this won’t be old enough to remember going into a John Menzies and browsing the racks and racks of games between £1.99 and £2.99, buying one almost certainly on the basis of how interesting the cover was (or sometimes how many games they’d managed to crush on; Codesmasters sticking four, usually terrible, games on some of their tapes got me more than once) and then going home and waiting for the tape to load while reading the insert.”

I take part in Rock Paper Shotgun‘s absolutely fantastic “Gaming Made Me” series. Read them all! Mine’s best, obviously, but they’re all good.

RPS-ish At-Ish E3: Housecleaning – Capcom, Warner – More chat about Street Fighter IV, because it’s coming out for PC, and I really liked it a lot. Also a little about Lego Batman: The Videogame and Project Origin.

RPSish At-Ish E3: Housecleaning – EA – a lot of writing about EA’s upcoming stuff. I’m especially impressed by Dead Space – it’s very atmospheric and very fun – but also quite fancy Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Mostly because of my previously mentioned like for Games Workshop properties, but also because it doesn’t look like an annoying, grind-heavy MMORPG. But we’ll see.

Interview: GSC on STALKER: Clear Sky – My final bit of E3 coverage for RPS, even though it hasn’t been titled as such. There are some more of my final thoughts on E3 in this article too, if you read it all the way to the bottom.

RPS-ish At-ish E3: Day 3 – Sega – Now anyone who knows me that I spend quite a lot of time railing against how much the larger blogs, specifically Kotaku, suck. I spent a lot of time doing this – usually moaning about their ridiculous post titles, their lack of fact checking, etc.

So it was incredibly disappointing to learn that the minute I was under time pressure I did the exact same thing when it came to fact checking – I didn’t bother. In fact, it’s rather amusing that the Kotaku poster who covered Alpha Protocol wrote mostly the same thing as me (that it looks exactly the same as Mass Effect) but bothered to check his facts.

Boy, is my face red. Still, I have to say – I will never commit the crime of assumption again. Never.

RPS-ish At-Ish E3: Day 4 – Bethesda Softworks – Oh well, at least this post got a good response from the RPS readers. I do wish I’d been able to talk more about the questing/NPC interaction, but I was generally warned against it and frankly, half an hour wasn’t enough to learn more than “it’s really quite a lot like Oblivion” so I didn’t go too deeply into it.

RPS-ish At-Ish E3: Housecleaning – SOE – My first post on RPS post-E3, as I saw a lot of stuff I just couldn’t get written up in time (and my Sega post reminded me not to rush out a post just to get something up, as you’re more likely to get something wrong/overlook something). SOE’s showing was rather weak – very little in the way of content, and most shown using video – so it surprises me I wrote as much about it as I did.

I guess I just thought it was all kind of interesting.

RPS-ish At-ish E3: Day 2, Part 1 – Valve – In restrospect, this article makes me cringe a little. Left 4 Dead was great fun to play, but I do myself no favours by fawning over Chet Faliszek (from Old Man Murray/Portal of Evil) because in person he was so nice (and ordinary) and online he’s rip me apart for it (isn’t it interesting how people’s on and offline personalities differ so?)

Anyway, people still don’t like the character redesigns, even though they’re so obviously influenced by Team Fortress 2′s “silhouette” philosophy (Gabe Newell even said this.) Can’t please everyone, I guess.

RPS-ish At-ish E3: Day 2, Part 2 – Atari – Some coverage of the new version of The Witcher and the latest Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion. Doesn’t sound that exciting, but it was. Well, at the time, anyway.

So as you can see there’s a reason E3 was a bit of a blur – I decided to blog about it for two different outlets. To be honest, I probably shouldn’t have, but before heading out I thought it was going to be totally easy to write multiple blog posts a day while also spending a full day in meetings to give me the material for said blog posts.

It wasn’t! But still, it was absolutely my pleasure to write some coverage for PC gaming blog Rock Paper Shotgun, not least because it’s run by several gentlemen I respect very much indeed. The posts are less analysis heavy than my coverage for CBC, instead interviews, hands-on impressions and so on written with a sense of humour about it, but I thought the different style would suit RPS better.

RPS-ish at-ish E3: Day 1, Part 1 – MS – This first post has a “letter” feel because I initially wasn’t given my own posting title. But they retroactively changed that so it seems a little silly. As I said, this is broader and more light-hearted coverage than what I wrote for CBC – including reference to “speed dobbers” and cute sparrows.

RPS-ish At-ish E3: Day 1, Part 2 – EA – I witter on about film in this one at the beginning, but do redeem it by talking about games for the rest of it. Well, apart from the bit where I express my surprise that David Lynch has created a monster in Spore – something I still find surprising. What on earth would he make of the iPhone version, eh?