I get asked questions a lot, comes with the job I guess. Probably the most common question, besides "How can I get into the industry?" has to be "What are you playing now?" Well, of course not counting the obligatory "When does beta start? How can I get into beta? Betazorz PLZKKTKZZ?!?!?!" that I got prolly several hundred to thousands of times a day as the WAR CM...

So what am I playing now...

Well, and I know judging from the forums some of you will have some pretty harsh criticism for this one, but yes, I'm still subbed to AoC. I'm enjoying it for what it is. I feel it has a great foundation to work from and if they can fix some problems can be a really great game. I don't know if I'll be around long enough for them to do so, who knows. And that isn't necessarily because of the game itself, I just around from game to game a lot... So even if I do cancel my sub to AoC I'll definitely be back to it in a couple months, that's just how the cycle goes for me.

I was playing and absolutely loving and enjoying Mythos up until the recent problems with Flagship. I'm also in a couple betas. And I've been playing my 360 more and more these days.

Gaming had definitely taken a back burner over the past couple months since we just had a new baby, and while my wife came with 2 boys as a package deal, this was my first kid, so I took a lot of time off just to hang around and experience it as much as I could. Now he's about 7 weeks and things are settled down into more of a routine it's opened my gaming time back up.

Unfortunately it's a horrible time for gaming. Summers are never good for game releases and this summer seems particularly dreadful. With all the BIG BIG titles coming out this fall you think someone of them would try to break apart from the crowd and release in the gaming drought of late summer... Specially when the Fable 2 guys get up on stage and declares "Fable 2 is finished!" Ok, that's great, but can I have it now? No... I still have to wait until October... Well then why do I care if it's finished? Oh, you want to release it this fall clumped in the same gaming cloud with Fallout 3, Spore, FOUR, yes, thats right, count them, FOUR RPGs from Square Enix, WAR, and a bunch of other good games... The logic fails me, I know the holiday season is your bread and butter, but with that many great games releasing a matter of weeks apart, it's going to lower sales versus if you release earlier then just do a major marketing campaign for the holiday season...

Oh well, those are just my thoughts on the matter.

So yeah, wow, I'm back.

I've been involved with online communities since the days of BBSes and MUDs, but never much in an official capacity until I started writing for this site back in 2003. It's funny actually, all through high school and college all of my english/lit/comp teachers and professors always told me I should be a writer. I guess I just had a natural knack for it in their opinions. One of my comp professors, believe it was Eng Comp 2, gave me the only perfect score on a 12+ page paper in her 20+ years of teaching. Of course now everyone is going to nitpick this thing for every single mistake they can possibly find. And I'm absolutely positive you'll find plenty, since this is just rambling, I'm not really too worried about how it comes out. I'm just typing and whatever ends up here, ends up here.

Anyway, back on topic, all the years of hearing I should be a writer, I never gave it a second thought. Writing wasn't something that interested me in the slightest really. Beyond the fact that I considered those classes to basically be blowoff classes. I'm going to incriminate myself a bit here, but in college I used to write papers for people for money. Minimum charge of $75 and going up from there based on length and topic. And to top it off I guaranteed the paper would get an A, if it didn't, you got your money back. Prolly the best I ever got was a girl came to me on Thursday night, she had a 12 page paper on "Religious Art in History" that was due by 8am Friday morning. Personally I'm not a fan of art OR religion, so this was definitely something I had little interest in doing, much less on such short notice, but she offered me $250 up front and another $250 if I got an A on it. Couldn't pass up that kinda money, so I did it, and I got the A.

Argh, see, I did it again, this thing is very aptly called rambling I guess. Anyway, long story short, I've never cared for writing but have always been good at it. It wasn't until I combined it with online gaming that I actually started enjoying it. The first article I ever wrote for this site was a review of Horizons. I had been playing it at the time, it has been out for a little while and I noticed that the site didn't have a review posted yet, so I emailed Admin and asked if I could write one. The response I got back basically said I was welcome to submit one, but he didn't guarantee they'd use it, etc. Basically it seemed like he got a ton of requests like this, a ton of submitted articles that were written by people with little to no real writing skill and he fully expected mine to be the same. But, fortunately for me, it wasn't and it got used and I was a very happy camper and started writing more and more for the site.

Anyone who is looking to get a foot in the door of the video game industry should definitely consider being a volunteer writer for the site. An article, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant, has the chance of getting noticed. I was contacted several times by devs of various companies about articles/reviews I wrote about their products. It isn't so much showing off your writing skills, though those are also important, but moreso showing off your knowledge and passion for the industry.

Ok, I have no idea how I got off on the writing tangent, I meant to just post a quick blurb about how happy I was to be back working on the site, etc. Anyway, enough rambling from me for now, more to come soon!