Broken Comments

It has been brought to my attention that the comments are busted. I have no idea why they are, but they are. I'll work on a fix.

New post soon! It has been busy around here, will get to it!

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Bad Business Practice

So, after more than a decade of promising the next episode in their formally flagship franchise Duke Nukem, 3D Realms has gone out of business. A new victim of the recession, but I'm surprised it lasted past the likes of Midway and co. Why? Because they had shitty business practice.

Anybody who has some basic knowledge of the development business has a good idea of how development companies get their funding. The rough outline is that the publisher pays the dev to produce a game, and then once the game is out of the devs hands the publisher makes its money back (and pays a percentage to the dev company in most cases) through sales. This model is why piracy effects publishers more than developers - the devs already have most of the cash they are going to get for a product.

The idea is that the money the developer gets from the publisher is the entire companies budget. If the company has nothing to pitch, then they don't get paid, and as such they will struggle. This is what happened to Free Radical Design - the fact that Haze flopped mattered as little as the fact Timesplitters was a huge hit. After Haze, they had nothing - and they knew it. They most likely knew that they were doomed months before Haze was released.

This leads me onto 3D Realms. You see because Duke Nukem Forever took over a decade to make (and still wasn't finished when the company closed) and gave very little proof that it was actually being created, there wasn't a single publisher who would even consider paying them for it. Yes there were publishers who would release it, in this case Take Two, but that deal didn't include ongoing funds for production.

This is where I come to my point. Sure, maybe eleven years ago it seemed a good idea to work on a game on a "when its done" basis, but we're not in 1998 anymore. What killed 3D Realms is the fact that when the entire industry moved on, they didn't. Half Life saw the age of run-and-gun kickass come to an end, and over the last seven years or so developers have gotten into the habit of keeping their mouths shut about a project until there is something tangible there to have a look at.

If 3D Realms had put its hands up even eight years ago and said "Well, we announced the next Duke Nukem, but we haven't actually started working on it yet" rather than this whole bullshit "when its done" attitude, they might have actually had a chance. But no, you can't teach and old dog new tricks.

Before the comments about the company being small, and duke being big, have you looked at the screenshots? Unless they remade their engine every year, there is no way in hell they have been working on that game since they announced it. Not that it matters anyway, Duke Nukem Forever would have been a flop.

You see, these days shooters are a penny for twelve, and most of them are quite frankly crap. After the release of Half Life, any shooter that did not reach this general level of quality (or the equivalent for the time) was looked down upon. There are some good ones, and better, I will grant you that, but they are few and far between.

The problem with DNF is that it wasn't going to be one of these games. The development cycle for it was so long that the game itself became a euphemism for vaporware. It literally became a running joke for games that took a while to get off the ground, and then became a joke that was so old everybody had heard it before.

I do feel for the staff of 3D Realms, but to be honest, you sowed the seeds of your own demise. You dragged that one announcement out to the point where the entire games industry changed not once but twice, your product became a running joke and people stopped caring. As such, the only people who would have bothered buying Duke Nukem Forever would have only done it as a curio.

They would be the ones who didn't know how to pirate software.

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Generations of Gaming: The First Generation

These days, people refer to this era of gaming as many things based upon the idea of the "generation" structure. It has been called everything from the Casual Generation (based upon the glut of casual games such as Cooking Mama) to the Short Generation (apparently, any game with more than ten hours worth of story is now considered "long"). It sounds silly, but its not without merit.

I now present to you the rundown of the seven true generations of gaming, in seven parts. Where to start? Well, the beginning of course.

The First Generation

A surprising number of people think that videogames didn't really hit the commercial circuit until the release of the classic arcade cabinet of Pong in 1972 - a release that, surprisingly enough considering the general expansion of the videogame industry in the east, actually occurred in the USA a full year ahead of Japan. More people still consider the NES, released in 1983, the true birth of videogame popularity.

But when you inform people that not only was videogaming born in the early 1950's, but when Pong was sweeping the arcades there was already a home-based multi-cartridge console for consumers, most of them draw a blank face. That is until you mention the Odyssey.

In 1951, a man by the name of Ralph Baer came up with an idea for interactive television. His first creation was eventually finished in 1966, and was named Chase. It was a very simple thing, where two players could control a dot each on the screen. The gameplay was simply to chase the other player around the screen. This was very early remember, so there were no lives, no set of rules besides what the players had decided. It was literally imagination with a television set.

Over the next few years, they (Baer and a few more people who joined on the way) developed this prototype into what became known as the "Brown Box" - a colour producing home console with two controllers and a light gun. That's right, a light gun. A lot of people attribute this invention to Nintendo with the NES blasters, but in 1967 they have a fully working light gun that controls the movement of objects on the screen. Not only that, by 1968 they had a created a ping pong game for their machine, a full four years before Pong hit it big. Great fun!

Using this prototype, Baer approaches various companies and eventually in 1969, Magnavox bought into it. Traditional marketing style meant some changes had to be made in order to cut costs. One of them would become the mainstay of home consoles, and another would set development back years.

The innovation began before there was much to innovate - Magnavox decided that in order to provide potential future sale opportunities, the games for the new machine - now named the Odyssey (and eventually released in 1972), should come on interchangeable cartridges rather than being built into a closed box. Imagine if this had not happened. We may not have seen this little brain child until the NES release in 1983, a full 10 years later. 

Of course with the good came the bad, and the bad set development back a few years without even knowing it at the time. In order to cut costs - bare in mind that this was bleeding-edge home technology at release - Magnavox pulled colour support from the Odyssey, instead relying on the cheaper method of supplying plastic overlays for your TV screen. Unfortunately, and I may be wrong here as this particular bit is interjection on my part, it probably prevented other companies following suit for a good while.

Hell, why spend lots of money on colour production when the competition manages fine without it? Note: Remember this was at the genesis point, before the videogame industry ever existed let alone reached today's size. There was no need to spend lots of money on this new "toy", as long as it sold enough to make a profit during the cable TV shortfall of the 60's and 70's. The issue is, when competition gets lazy, technology doesn't advance. By killing colour support at this early stage, we had slowed development for this period and in retrospect we could be on the eighth rather than the seventh generation of gaming by now if they had not.

Of course, they did not know this.

The Odyssey spawned a fair few clones, including the very first Atari release of, you guessed it, Pong arcade and Pong for home TVs. The lawsuit was settled out of court, with Atari becoming a licensee to Magnavox for $700,000 - or roughly half of the company's total worth. Atari soon became one of the greater companies in the early generations, but that is for later.

The Odyssey also spawned two sequel releases - the Odyssey 200, which was essentially a closed box housing nothing but an updated, recoded version of Pong, and the Odyssey², which I will discuss when talking about the Second Generation of videogames.

Summary

The First Generation consisted pretty much entirely of the development, release and cloning of the Magnavox Odyssey and its various ripoffs. Ironically, one of said ripoffs was the start of what was to become one of the most successful companies of the next two generations.

For a review of the console itself, I can only point to the comedic genius of the man I only know as James Rolfe, but many of you will know as the Angry Videogame Nerd. Stay tuned for the second generation when I can write it - trying to fix my sisters wireless, its not playing ball.

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"Microsoft owns the office; Sony owns the living room; and Wii owns the closet." - Jack Tretton

It's not the most perfect of quotes, but it is quite apt. Nintendo's console has been hailed as a success from sheer sales volume alone, let alone the demographics it has managed to break into when compared to "traditional" gaming. So why does the Wii sit in the closet?

The answer is simple - its less a console, more a toy. A board game that just happens to be electronic. There is very little out for the console that actually caters to solo gaming, and as such unless you are a party animal or the supplier of electronics to some form of student common room, there is no reason you should play that over a 360, PS3 or your PC.

To add to this distinct lack of solo games, there is a distinct lack of quality in what there is. For every decent Wii-exclusive single player game (Madworld, Super Mario Galaxy) there are several incredibly poor excuses for releases. Admittedly, none of which are really memorable, so I'll leave you the Wii Metacritic Scorepage.

Basically, Nintendo has turned both of its flagship consoles (the Wii and the DS) into the casual gaming equivalent of the PS2, and even earlier on than that the SNES. When a console becomes a household name - a console rather than a company - a lot of the smaller development companies release a large quantity of low-quality games in order to try and cash in on the console boom. This rarely worked, as along with your fifty pieces of crap programming there were several hundred other bits of crap programming from your rival small dev houses. but it worked often enough for people to keep doing it.

The Wii, and to a lesser extent the DS, has become the basis for the seventh generation crap generator. However! Despite the stupid amount of sales of the console, the attach rate (that is, the number of games a Wii owner owns for the console) is really low. So low, in fact, that you actually make less profit producing games for Nintendo consoles than for the now rather out of date PS2. There have only been a few games that have sold over a million units on the Wii, and most of those were in-house Nintendo titles.

So despite being a family console with large sales figures, very few Wii owners actually own more than a couple games, if even that. This scares away the bigger developers, which means it scares away the major producers of decent single player games. This is before we even consider the profit, or rather the lack of it.

This Kotaku article gives a basic overview of why, via the New York Times. Basically, a Nintendo exec - the Nintendo exec, Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo America - stated that in order for a game to make a profit on the wii, it simply has to sell a million units. Sounds easy, until you remember that very few games on the Wii have actually sold a million copies (sixteen, at the time of the article's writing), and nine of those are Nintendo releases in the first place.

To be honest, it matters little for Nintendo itself. They sell the hardware, as soon as it leaves their hands they don't really care. They are rapidly catching up the PS2 in total sales for the Wii and if you take in the fact the DS has sold more than a hundred million units world wide, they are probably the only major company in the industry right now that isn't panicking about the recession.

But if you, the consumer, want to buy a console, dont be fooled by Wii's cheap price point compared to the 360 or PS3. What makes the console is the games, and right now, the Wii is 94% dust collector.

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Depression Sucks

OK so occasionally I have a low point and this ends up kicking me in the butt. I'm on a constant rollarcoaster with my own mentality, and as such when I'm at the bottom, all my creativity and urge to write dies.

As such, I haven't been keeping up with this blog like I was planning to.

Today though, I'll catch up. I should be ok now.

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Pirate Bay: Guilty

The owners of The Pirate Bay, a well known torrent tracker, was found guilty today in court of 'assisting in making copyright content available'.

The ironic thing was that the verdict was leaked from court about an hour before the defendants themselves. Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström were all given a year in prison and a $905,000 fine for knowingly allowing piracy on their website. Oops.

Being honest I am surprised it took this long. You see, the site is called "The Pirate Bay", the the logo for it consists of the original anti-piracy campaign logo (from the era when audio cassette recorders arrived and radio recording was common place) imposed upon the sail of what seams to be a pirate sailing vessel, riding the waves. However, with the Swedish law being as it is, they were technically not doing anything wrong, as they were not physically supplying the pirated information.

In fact, from what I recall, this was the first actual charge levied against them in the full case, but it was thrown out of court - mostly because the lawyer who was prosecuting had assumed that a torrent tracker was a direct download link, supplying evidence that was useless to the case and that particular charge (a few screen shots of the pirate bay tracker completely unconnected to anything at all, I don't think there was even data).

Either or, they were convicted. They will appeal, of course, and in this kind of case there is no real precedent set for the results. However, it is somewhat obvious that the companies involved in the suit will now try to prosecute those actually using the service, so if anyone reading uses the 'Bay, then bare in mind that you may be watched.

The site itself will stay up, watch the after-verdict audience conference here.

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It's Dead, Dave.

In my opinion, the latest Red Dwarf three episode stint was so bad, so mind numbingly awful, that Rob Grant has died simply to perform the act of rolling in his grave.

Lets wind it back.

Red Dwarf was a British TV comedy series following the story of Dave Lister, a general slob and the lowest ranking member of the crew of the big red mining ship that gave the series name. As punishment for bringing an unquarantined animal - a pregnant cat - onboard, Lister is put into cryostasis for 18 months.

However, due to a shoddy repair job on a reactor plate by the man one rank above him (Arnold J. Rimmer) the entire ship is flooded with radiation. The ships computer throws Red Dwarf into deep space to avoid contaminating the solar system until the radiation dies down to a safe level.

Three million years later, Lister is woken by the ship computer (an AI with an IQ of 6,000 by the name of Holly) and informed of the situation.

In order to avoid Lister falling into madness, Holly creates a hologram of Rimmer using his personnel profile. Holly had deducted that Rimmer, being the exact polar opposite to Lister, would be the best choice to avoid insanity. As holograms take up a lot of power, Red Dwarf could only run one at a time. Rimmer starts out as a "soft light" hologram - one that cannot touch anything. Later on in the program, he gains a hard light drive from a super advanced holographic lifeform which allows him to do everything he used to.

Also joining Lister and Rimmer in the first episode, is Cat. A creature that has evolved from the original litter of Frankenstein, the cat that landed Lister where he was. Come third series, they were also joined by Kryten, a "mechanoid" who was programmed to serve (and had been serving a collection of very dead crew members for hundreds of years when they found him).

Lister's struggle with being the last human in the universe (as Holly correctly pointed out, no known race of creatures had ever lasted a million years, let alone three), Rimmer's struggle with his past, Kryten's constant search for humanity and Cat's constant indecision over what suits to wear became good watching over the first six seasons, with great comedy writing from Rob Grant and great science fiction writing from Doug Naylor complimenting eachother.

Then the partnership came to an end. At the end of series six, the crew of Red Dwarf were destroyed by their future selves - please don't ask me to explain it. This was supposed to be the end of Red Dwarf and it was a fitting end indeed. 

However, Naylor wanted to continue with more series, something Grant was against. Naylor eventually got the go ahead to make a seventh and then an eighth series - without Grant - using some time paradox to explain why the crew were not dead.

The general consensus is that while Naylor is a competent writer, he is not a competent comedian and as such the series suffered a great loss when Grant departed. By the end of the eigth series, the entire crew of Red Dwarf had been brought back to life by Kryten's repair nanobots, which had also mutated a little and forced a full evacuation of Red Dwarf.

The final scene of the series was of Rimmer, who had been left onboard, punching the Grim Reaper in the crotch.

Naylor pushed for a film to be made, and had support from all the actors, however nobody would fund it for various reasons - one company that stands out would only fund it if the characters were played by Hollywood actors rather than the original cast, for example.

Ten years past with them trying to get funding for this film, and all hope had been lost. Then, the British TV channel Dave, who had been running re-runs of the original series to good ratings, decided to fund a three part special to celebrate 10 years since the end of the last series.

The title was soon released as "Back to Earth" and while fans were dubious, we had hopes. We thought that maybe, possibly, they were using the plot from the film and putting it into episodes. We thought that we would finally be getting a just end to the series that ended on a cliffhanger.

Instead, what we got was the red Dwarf crew breaking the fourth wall. Hell, smashing it into millions of little pieces. We even had Lister speaking to Craig Charles (the actor that plays him) and then calling Charles a smeg head for being an actor. The jokes were bad, with it only managing to draw one laugh from me in the whole 75 minutes total screen time.

The kicker? In the end, it turns out the whole episode is an illusion brought on by the female version of the Despair Squid - a creature found by the red dwarf crew in series 5 (a personal favourite episode of most the Red Dwarf fanbase). 

This is the Red Dwarf equivalent of the main character waking up at the end of a horror film to find it was all a dream, and whats worse they use one of the most popular episodes in Red Dwarf history to explain it.

I had hopes, silly as they were, that the episodes would finally tie up the story of the Red Dwarf crew. Instead, we got zero closure from the series 8 cliffhanger, zero closure for the entire world of Lister, and 75 minutes of poor writing and bad story.

Naylor managed to kill a classic series in three episodes. The worse thing? If the response to this travesty is good, Dave will consider funding a ninth and tenth series. If the writing of the latest episodes are anything to go by, I'd rather it stayed buried.

It's dead, Dave, all of it is dead.

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RE5 DLC not on disc, High Def gaming now fits on Floppy

I had a little rant earlier about how the DLC for Resident Evil 5 is on the disc, with you downloading the bare minimum to access it when you paid for the content.

Turns out, this is not the case. According to MTV Multiplayer, you are indeed downloading code that is a crucial component of the multiplayer experience, whereas the code utilises assets from the single player game. 

However, said code being small enough to fit on a 3½ inch floppy disc still reaks to me of "we could of released this for free but wanted to milk the punters" syndrome.

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Damn You, Jonathan Blow

Game Title: Braid

Genre: Puzzle Platformer

Players: 1

Platforms: PC, Mac, XBOX 360

Good For: Bending your mind, Depth, Brain busting puzzles

Bad For:  Casual Gaming

I have seen enough interviews, both written and filmed, and enough press releases from the man himself to know that - in my opinion - when it comes to public image, Jon Blow gives the impression that he is a bit... scrap that, very arrogant.

But be that as he may, I have come to the conclusion that he could well be a creative genius.

I was well aware of the premise of his one release, Braid, well before it was announced for PC. It's a puzzle platformer based on time manipulation, following the journey of the character - known only as Tim - as he searched for his Princess. Its pretty textbook stuff on paper. Time manipulation has been done before many times (not least in the sixth generation Prince of Persia games) and the "lead character looking for his princess" story in video games is as old as the original Mario.

So when I grabbed the demo, I was a little shocked to find that while both of these game play mechanics are present, neither of them are how I expected. If anything, it redefines these classic elements in its own way, and the experience is quite frankly hard to put on paper.

You have an unlimited ability to reverse time - well, unlimited in that you can go all the way to where and when you first entered the level. That seems like an easy route, as you can't die. True, however other factors come in to play that start to twist your mind.

You see Braid tells a story, it doesn't matter that you can't die, its up to you to discover what that story is. The idea behind the main portion of the game is to collect puzzle pieces - 12 per world - and then to put them together to make up a single image from Tim's past. A picture paints a thousand words indeed.

Any extra narrative is told by short paragraphs found in the what I call "world cloud" - the first part of any world you see. You wont miss them, as you walk past the indicators while heading to the first world level, which is a nice touch I feel.

Each world has its own way of manipulating time. An example would be the fourth world, where the time goes forward or backwards depending on which direction you are running. This means that while you are hunting puzzle pieces, using keys and dodging walking heads (which I can only assume, due to the short narrative between levels, are the faces of Tim's mother), you also have to learn how to use the time you have.

I say "hunting" but in reality, you can see almost every piece's location with one quick run through of a level. The hunt comes from finding a way to get to that piece, and this is where Braid really shines.

The puzzles are constructed in a way that results in multiple styles of thinking. A piece that looks hard to get to could well be the easiest in that level, while at the same time the most obvious piece could be the hardest. They are hard, but not frustrating even when you think you know the answer but just can't get there.

Basically the core game play, while based on established ideas, twists said ideas enough to give a thoroughly thought provoking experience - and that is before we come to the art style.

Braid's graphics consist entirely of the work of David Hellman, a man I have no limit of my respect towards. This hand painted look gives the game a strong storybook feel, something akin to the fairytale books I saw a lot when I was a child.

Musically, I have to give big credit to Cheryl Ann Fulton, Shira Kammen and Jami Sieber. Somehow, these artists managed to create music that sounds just as fantastic backwards as well as forwards. The audio effects are also of top quality - you don't see or hear it until the sixth world, but once you see how that particular time manipulation mechanic works, you get an appreciation for the engine the game is running on.

Add this all up and you realise that Braid it not all it seems, even when at the end of the worlds you have a little stuffed dinosaur telling you the Princess is in another castle. Hell, the ending scene is so deep and ingenius that it is quite possibly the greatest level in history. I love it!

But, frankly, this love I have for it annoys me.

You see, I was willing to hate Braid. While I do believe in the "give everything a go" idea, I really really wanted to dislike this game simply based on my perceived arrogance of the designer. 

But now I have played the demo (and subsequently bought the full game) and given it the chance, I am in awe. There is no way in hell I could be as creative as Blow in designing such a game - I don't know how he managed it, but he somehow put more depth, game play and fun into Braid than pretty much any release in the past couple of years, and for that I have to bow to him.

Damn you, Jonathan Blow, damn you for creating the greatest game I have played in the last five years. But no, I still find you arrogant. Trying to charge PC users more than Live users for Braid was a bad stunt to pull, good man for changing your idea on that, even if it did take an outcry.

Braid is available for $15/£10 on Steam and various other pay-for-download sites, as well as the Xbox Live Arcade. A demo is available for both PC and Xbox 360.

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Resident Evil 5 DLC is setting a bad example.

Once upon a time, not that long ago, it used to be the case that when you bought a game on disc, you would know without a shadow of a doubt that everything that was on the disc was accessable. At the very least that what was not accessable was locked out for good reason (glitch, unfinished but unremoved, etc). Now, this is not the case.

For those who don't know, DLC - Downloadable Content - is content you pay for to add extra to a game you have in your posession. A good example of DLC would be, say, Operation Anchorage or The Pitt for Bethesda's Fallout 3. Of course with the good come the bad, and you also have examples such as Horse Armor for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which was barely worth the money spent on the bandwidth to download it.

The idea is that DLC is supposed to add more to the game you have, say as a new form of cheap expansion pack system that PC users are used to with their videogames. However, recently it has become more apparent that companies are including so called "downloadable" content on the very disc you have bought already.

This means you are paying for a key to unlock data you have already paid for!

Now this is hardly a new practice, hell even this topic from NeoGAF was started in December 2006 (updates regularly), however probably one of the most high profile games that use this practice was released very recently.

Resident Evil 5 is no stranger to controversy - half the internet was up in arms about its apparent racism (even after a senior university lecturer in anthropology claimed otherwise) - but this one really took the cake, most likely due to Capcom's comments.

You see while you would expect a company such as Capcom - the most high profile member of the PC Gaming Alliance and one of the few members of the Entertainment Software Association that doesn't consider the entire thing an overpriced joke - to just raise their hands and say "Yes, its what we're doing, we need the money in this economy." Instead they gave a reason that made almost every single fan connect their palms with their faces.

Resident Evil 5 recently has a Versus Mode released as DLC. However, checking the file, some people raised a valid point that there is no possible way such a mode, which would obviously include a lot of new assets, should have a DLC of less than 2megabytes in size.

While that is bigger in size than most unlock keys, the realisation dawned that the information was already (mostly) on the disc, merely a small patch away from being within everyones grasp. As previously mentioned some games such as Viva Pinata, Lego Starwars II and Beautiful Katamari have data on the disc that can only be unlocked via a little extra cash, none of them were as big as release as RE5.

So, naturally, when probed for comment, more people than usual wanted to find out why Capcom would do this to the fanbase. Their response?

"Verses mode represents content that was created outside the scope of the original design of Resident Evil 5. This is an all new mode that required additional resources to create, not to mention the additional bandwidth costs"

- Speaking to IGN

What, so we are paying $5 extra to cover the cost of additional resources that were on the disc in the first place? Bandwidth costs? Heh. While it is true that SONY recently started charging developers for any bandwidth used on the Playstation Network (in order to keep the service free for the players), Microsoft does not charge for that service (it is covered in the Live fee). Even if they did, I don't see how a one-off purchase will cover never-ending bandwidth costs, can you?

I know it doesn't sound like much, but if you bought $60 worth of gas - a full tank - and then were told you can't have access to a quater of that tank before you paid an extra $5 (despite it being available for free before) then you would not be happy.

The point I am coming to is one of worrying possibility. While formally it was simply a case that small things would be unlocked (such as a new set of clothes), Capcom have now done the major-DLC-on-a-disc route, which paves the way for even larger companies to do it. 

The main badboys behind it would be obvious - Activision-Blizzard and Electronic Arts to name just two - and I have a distinct feeling that Capcom have either set a very bad example on how to handle some major DLC releases, or have given us a glimpse at where we are going in the industry.

I do know they cannot go too far, as with most things, if the punters are angry they will vote with their wallets and refuse to buy. Plus, if they tried the same thing on PC, the users would have access to it long before they could even announce the release.

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Party: Part 2

That was a good party.

We didn't get overly drunk, we didn't get overly rowdy and we didn't get hurt...

...Or at least I didn't until we played Dance Dance Revolution the next day. I will go into my love for that arcade title in a future post. Right now, all I want to do is relax for today and let my leg recover.

More posts will be coming tomorrow, promise.

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Party: Part 1

I'm going to a party in about half an hour and by God am I nervous. Partly because of my usual apprehension with large collections of people, but also because I am seeing some people I haven't seen for years. At least one of them a close friend of mine in college. We shall see!

I have a couple long posts to come, but I will most probably post those on Friday.

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Blog Names Annoy Me

The first thing anyone notices about this Blog is how entirely unoriginal and boring the web address is.

I can't afford a domain name, and I can't afford web hosting (which, quite frankly, would be a waste for the content of this blog), so I had to use the standard Blogger (Blogspot) layout for the address. This is where I hit a snag.

The problem with there being literally millions of blogs on the Internet is that, statistically, no matter how original you are with your blog name, somebody would have come up with it before.

This makes it hell on the domain.

Lets take this very website. Blogger has at least two blogs using a phrase based on "I, Gamer". The first one is nothing more than an incredibly out of date collection of flash video games with no real description or musings other than a name and a link - all posted on the same day, and last updated in 2005, I must point out.

The second one is empty. I am not even kidding. Just a profile to the side. Just a waste of a blog URL created using an account designed solely for advertising some other worthless blog on the same account that has links to some episodes of Family Guy. Incidentally, the blog doesn't actually show up on his list, meaning he is using the old URL exploit anyway.

Those are just two I picked out using a variation on "I, Gamer" on this particular slice of the blogosphere, and I guarantee there are others else where on other sites. This is what drives me a little insane, as none of these blogs have any notable content. I personally think that blogger should delete blogs that have not had any entries in years.

However they don't, so I to have to use a different URL.

Well, as I mentioned previously, the statistics were against me, so I just settled on my real name. Why not? Half the purpose of this blog is so I have an outlet. Why not be that personal?

As a side note, I finally got my times sorted with this page. I Will be trying to update at least three times a week. It shouldn't tell me its Sunday when I post it on Monday!

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Regrets

Have you ever regretted not doing something?

We have all had that moment, I think, where we have decided against doing something and told ourselves that we would regret it at a later date. But how often does this turn out to be the truth?

Unfortunately for me, I recently had such an experience. I am trying to keep this blog reasonably impersonal, so there will be very little emotional playback in my writing regardless about how I feel. However I have to give some details.

There was this person that I rapidly fell for when in college. From what I could tell by her general behaviour towards me and how close we had gotten as companions, she was forming a similar opinion towards me. Unfortunately, I am also not a particularly confident man, and as such I never asked her out on a date for fear of jeopardising what relationship I had with her.

This and the fact that she was with a man already, and while I have seen happier couples they were obviously content with each other. I am not in the business of breaking up relationships and making anybody unhappy and so I left it.

I knew, back then, I would regret it.

I, mainly on my blame, lost contact with her shortly after the end of college but I could never get her off my mind. Eventually I plucked up the courage to text (for I had no credit to call), see how she was and eventually ask if she wanted to go out for a drink.

It turns out that this woman, at 19 years of age, had a baby not two weeks before my text. The biological father was the man from college, but she only found out about her pregnancy after leaving him for another man. She can handle it, she is a wonderful person there is nothing preventing her from being a wonderful mother.

Now as her once close friend, and the generally charitable bloke that I am, I am obliged to make sure that she and her child are well protected and cared for. This is not devaluing her current boyfriend because, hell, he stuck with her throughout the whole ordeal. I have countless amounts of respect for him. No, it is simply my duty.

But I can't get this feeling off my mind. Maybe had I asked her in college she would not be in this predicament? Maybe if I simply hadn't lost contact I would have been able to provide support through the most difficult time? I feel I have failed as a friend because of this and it is weighing down on my soul.

My only confort is the fact that we can't change the past, only look to the future.

But that doesn't stop me feeling regrets.
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...and thus I join the blogging masses.

It took me a while to get to this.

I am sat here, in my bedroom, looking out the window at the sunlight. Its a nice day, good for walking, but as usual I am indoors doing absolutely nothing on my computer.

I was out there, cutting the hedge down. The local kids were giving me grief again, but they soon run when you chase after them with an electric hedge trimmer. I cut down, tidied up and relaxed. So now I am here, in my bedroom, drinking coke and listening to Beethoven, while writing this blog.

I'm also, at the same time, logged into an MMORPG by the name of EVE Online, a long running and constantly updating game within which I have played for many years with little break.

You see, I am a videogamer. I have within five feet of me enough hardware and software from so many "generations" of consoles that I have literally travelled back in time to before my birth in the search for a good gameplay experience. But this is not why I post this.

I have a love for writing that I never really expressed in the same way as my love for Music or the visual media of Film and Videogames. Sure, I have tried to write a book a couple of times but I could never really articulate myself over such a long period. As such, I turn to Journalism.

I am not as well educated as people first assume when they meet me or read my words. The education I do have is geared more towards the practical side of Film production rather than the theoretical side, and I have very little to no qualifications in the English language or writing as an art form.

Nor am I as old as people first assume when they meet me or read my words, for while you may assume I am in my late twenties or even my early thirties (as some have suggested), I am only twenty years old, and not that long by it either.

As it stands, I am unemployed, and as such the sands of time are giving me a break. I have enough to spare that if I could motivate myself I could write an entire novel in a week. However, I look at such a  project and while I have had a story idea in my mind since I was nine years old, I could not and will not for a while be able to manage such an undertaking.

So, here I am, becoming one of literally millions and millions of people who are charting, have charted, or will start to chart their life to the rest of the millions and millions of people who have nothing better to do than to read them.

However, I want to. I want to get more of my work out there so people will look at me as a serious writer. I want to get my views and experiences out there so people will see me as more than just some empty shell in today's society.

I want to be allowed to be myself, and thus I join the blogging masses.

- Jon Shire

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