Trapped in a maze of relationships

There’s something that really put things into perspective; It’s a lyric from Pursuing My True Self.

“We’re all trapped in a maze of relationships”

I’d never really thought about this before. In our lives we meet a lot of people, whether we would like it or not, that’s just a fact. We all have certain mannerisms and behaviours with different people. Talking and involving ourselves with different aspects of their lives and in turn we let them interact with us. It’s all a little bit unrelenting really, the whole connecting with people lark.

We’re lucky enough to live in a very global society, we’re starting to embrace beliefs and viewpoints that we would never of had if it was not for things like Twitter and the Internet. However you can argue that a lot of these relationships are trivial and amount to nothing, your life is just one more tweet on someone’s timeline, you’re not going to radically change their view of life, how can you? There’s only so much you can do with words behind a keyboard. What makes intimacy and relationships is not how you occasionally speak on Twitter but what stays with you are the times when you meet these people, of course you already know them but nothing really can compare to face to face human interaction. In many ways, Twitter can sometimes be more drowning, suffocating even. So many people to follow and so many stories to tell.

It’s like a condensed version of our world where everyone’s telepathic, we can hear everyone’s voice and every opinion but does any of it really matter? Sometimes it feels like white noise, nothing will profoundly affect me on Twitter, nothing will make its impression with me as the 140 character dance with your mind can only really say so much. Imagine if we could hear everyone’s thoughts out in the streets, each life just as complex and trivial as your own. Sometimes life can be scarier than death. Ultimately we thrive off of interactions and intimacy but you can argue that sometimes, it’s just better to shut yourself off and take some time away from the white noise on the Internet. Everyone has a voice, and sometimes. That’s not an entirely good thing.

An ode to classic Video Games

 

I’ll be straight up here; I’m 17. I don’t really know what the industry was like before the 00’s. I grew up playing SNES and PSX games. I don’t exactly have the knowledge of the more obscure titles other than a select few. I never knew what arcades were like.

At around 7 or 8 I started subscribing to the UK version of Nintendo Official Magazine and kept this up for around 5 years .Over that period where I obsessed over the newest Nintendo titles and found that the writers kept on referencing games which I never played before, and found myself frustrated that I had not played this so called “Link to the Past” the writers kept on hammering on about.

In a bout of curiosity, I went over to the internet and looked it up. I remember  saying “Legend of Zelda eh? Sounds pretty cool” I picked up the GBA Version of Link to the Past and found myself enthralled by the gameplay and intense storytelling. I never knew that a videogame as old as me could be anywhere near as good as Pokemon Ruby or Viewtiful Joe.  It was up to ye olde ninty.net forums to tell me that I had missed entire eras of videogames and masterpieces. However I saw that a few classics were being remade at the time so I borrowed a friend’s limited edition copy of Zelda: Windwaker, had no intention to actually play Windwaker and played Ocarina Of Time on it’s bonus disc all the way through instead... Then Master Quest.

Needless to say, I was hooked on “Classic” games. I picked up the Resident Evil remake on Gamecube and played entirely through that, which for a 10 year old was a pretty god damn scary game. I found out that some real gems had never been rereleased so I downloaded all sorts of seedy emulators and ROMs (I’m not going to discuss the grey area of downloading ROMs here, it was pretty hard for a 9 year old to find an NES game in 2003.)  

It was on my PC that I experienced many more games  and eventually became so deep into retro gaming I missed out on quite a few notable titles coming out at the time, namely Resident Evil 4 which in hindsight I really should have played at launch.

The sad thing is, most gamers my age will probably never find that same experience I had with a Link to the Past or Mega Man 2. Often citing that gameplay is obscenely outdated and pixels look like utter tosh. It’s a crime to miss out on what are not simply games but now important, culturally relevant pieces of popular culture. I had no nostalgia for any of the games I played back then, I welcomed and embraced them with open arms and they just so turned out to be some of the best games I had ever played at that time.

It takes a moment to really think, games back then were simply pure bursts of fun, be it lighthearted or dark in nature. No faffing around with bad anti-aliasing or games being non-HD in their native resolution. Games were what they were truly meant to be and embraced that. Now, in 2011 games have a chronic obsession over being cinematic and having “hollywood spectacle”. Gaming has not reached it’s peak. Not at all.  It’s sad to see that since the shift to 3D, we often see that games are more caught up with their visuals and budget than actual gameplay. (See: Final Fantasy XIII) 

With the industry rapidly changing each generation with massive paradigm shifts, it’s excellent to see that companies are catching on to the fact that they can finally have a reasonable distribution platform for their classic games and now have finely distilled archives of gaming’s greatest classics. It’s really a crime to think that some people have never experienced games such as Symphony of the
Night or Link to the Past. Even if the games are right under their noses. Some proclaim that classic gamers simply permanently have nostalgia goggles tacked on to their faces. It does not take a genius to know that I’m not exactly old. Dismissing classical games with the simple excuse of “nostalgia goggles” does not cut it anymore.

Today, there are dedicated podcasts such as InRetroSpect Podcast, run by fellow writer Peter Willington and his bandy cohort of gaming aficionado’s and Retronauts, run by 1up’s Editor In Chief Jeremy Parish. These podcasts discuss entire series’ that lived and died in the past. In addition to this, UK based publisher Imagine create a magazine named Retro Gamer, giving an insight into how gaming was birthed, the original reception to the greatest franchises of all time and more. The fact that things like these exist demonstrates how powerful and influential classical videogames really are to the industry as a whole.

While there are undisputed modern greats such as Shadow of the Colossus and Bioshock. It’s important to know your roots when it comes to gaming, because all it really comes down to is not the plot, not the sound or graphics. It’s here that gaming has a significant difference to every other artistic medium, you can’t simply read a synopsis of a game yourself. You can’t capture the magic of experiencing the entrance into Rapture in words, because games are not simply just plot driven, it’s the entire experience that counts.

No game should be dismissed simply because it’s old (maybe Daikatana) because in the end, all games are their own unique experience. Do not be afraid to reach back into gaming’s oldest tomes. Planescape: Torment is worthy of anyone’s time, as are many other forgotten and under rated games. Expand your horizons for gaming, do not simply play the newest releases. There are years of games available to you through Good Old Games, Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network and of course the Wii’s virtual console. Who knows? You may discover a hidden gem.

The thing about Google + and the state of social networking

The thing about twitter is that I can choose who I follow without the whole semantics of being "friends", whereas half of these people I have never talked to. People who want to follow me do, and if they're relevant to my interest I follow back, twitter's gotten me entire writing gigs through being tangentially relevant to someone else. You can't really fault how amazing twitter really is in comparison to FB. It's essentially extremely streamlined social networking. Find people through your social networks and follow people that you're interested in.

Of course talking in terms of the entire facebook/myspace architecture there is of course a niche for that. I find that sort of paradigm of thinking is due another shift towards a hybrid between that. We're seeing that at the moment with Google+. Allowing being added into anonymous "circles" as they call it melds it somewhere in between a cross between Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter minus the teenage girl spam, added ease of access and a more streamlined access toward having concise information on your profile like facebook, the posting system of Tumblr and finally the "circles" which may be likened to the stance on "Following" and "followers" that twitter has.

Writing Portfolio November 2011

www.MCMBUZZ.com

Time spent: 13 Months (Ongoing)

Contributor/Reviews

 www.midlifegamer.net

Time spent :  12 Months (Ongoing)

Freelancer/Reviews

MoochMarketing.co.uk

Time spent: 6 months (Ongoing)

Contracted Copywriter

vi.deoga.me.uk

Time Spent: 2 Months (Ongoing)

Freelancer/Reviews

Writing Samples*

An Ode to classic videogames

Asura's Wrath Hands on @ MCM Expo 

A Parents guide to the Xbox 360
Section 8: Prejudice Review
God Eater Burst Review
Deus Ex: Human Revolution Review

*More samples available upon request

Miracle of Sound

Miracle of sound has done some videogame tribute songs including a kickass Commander Shepard song and
now a Dragon Age song.I recommend you listen to them and buy their songs! They're too catchy to not be heard!

Small update

Mass Effect 2 Review
Gods Eater Burst Review

Aaand that's about it. I'll post more stuff I write including an upcoming Pokemon Review , Warriors: Legends of Troy and Dynasty Warriors 7.

My experience into Journalism and Games as art.

It's been just over a year since I started this site, where I posted a dreadfully formatted version of my initial thoughts on Star Ocean 4. I soon realised I had stumbled upon the world of Video Game Journalism, not something I initially set out on doing when I started this website.
A few months passed with me writing odd reviews in the middle of doing my GCSE's, developing my writing style and improving my structural integrity of writing. It was then that I knew I had a knack for this "writing" stuff.  I then set out upon my adventures of wanting to become a games journalist. I read up upon eras of games I've never even heard of, come to learn about more developers and overall, increased the spectrum of my gaming knowledge.

It was then, around September and October that I saw an ad being placed looking for writers, at a site called MCMBUZZ.com. I put in a few writing samples and the editor liked it. And so I was IN. Around this period, I attended London MCM expo, like comic con but in the UK. There I met several people in the games industry, even some of the team that developed Assassin's Creed. More importantly, I talked to other gaming journalists. It was there that I learnt that the industry was not all fun and games, with gaming being demonised in the media and coming under fire regularly, Journalists had to keep on their toes with what they say and do.  With Roger Ebert saying gaming was not art, the industry took a massive hit and the debate began on whether games were art or not.

Video games are a growing medium for expression, combining the aspects of music, pictures and video into one interactive experience. I saw that this was not being fully recognised and with critics like Roger Ebert's dismissal of the medium as art I saw the difficult world that journalists had before them. The industry itself is ruthless, with it being hard to actually get a job in the industry.

Needless to say, I left London expo apathetic about Game Journalism. With claims of being an enthusiast press, not being taken seriously. I thought that there was no way to even comprehend if Games could ever be taken seriously. To people, games are just a sidetrack, for kids. Somehow video games had to be taken seriously. Games like 6 Days to Fallujah were cancelled, something that in the medium of film would garner controversy but would be released for the public.
The history records show that there was another medium like this, in this situation. Comic Books. Claims of comic books being violent and causing kids to be violent were rampant. I look to the present and see that Video Games are the same thing. Comic books had a rebreanding to the general public. Not comic books, but Graphic novels. It was then that Comic Books were now a fully realised artistic medium. The things that took Graphic Novels to this stage were its strong community, its press and its industry.

Gaming needs to take that leap, for it to be taken seriously and reach it's peak. With more people experiencing games than ever before, it's up to the strong industry, a strong community and a strong press for it to be finally fully realised as an artistic medium.  Gaming is changing, falling into more people's hands than ever before. And it's up to us to give gaming the recognition it needs.
Today, I have review copies of a few video games at my desk, waiting to be played. Eagerly anticipating the day when gaming can finally be taken seriously.