This news page is updated very infrequently, as the GameBlogr tool is serving me fairly well. It is therefore significant that I am putting a post here.

I recently ran across this article on a blog about video games called Hit Self-Destruct. Since I write about most of the games I play, and my writing is available online, the discussion about game journalism hit close to home. That is not to say that I am a game journalist, far from it. In fact, I am probably guilty of contributing nothing but the "bad writing" they refer to. Nonetheless, I enjoy writing about the games that I play and, more importantly, about trying to improve my approach to writing and the writing itself.

Over time, my writing has evolved from attempts at the "review" format to a more emotion-in-the-moment driven blog style to a more formulaic analysis of key aspects of game design and development. While each of these has been important and produced some meaningful and insightful results, each has left something to be desired. One quote in particular stuck with me from the article:

"...true job satisfaction... can be the moment you describe a game world or system in a way that puts into words what readers were feeling but unable to articulate themselves, or the moment that you make some fresh analysis that frames the discussion in a new way."

This has inspired me to attempt yet another direction in my game writing. That is, to try and capture the flavor of any game I play, that part of the experience which has the greatest impact on me. To find the meaningful statement about a game that provides this "fresh analysis". I have started this with my writing about Demon's Souls. It is more challenging and requires a deeper level of introspection, but I think it will be worth the effort. Stay tuned (see that is bad writing right there, "stay tuned", weak).

It has been a long time since any news was posted, but for good reason. Aside from adding new games and fixing an occassional bug, the site has remained largely unchanged. That is not to say that the site is useless or unused, quite the contrary.

Today we are releasing player stats, which you can see here. After writing many blogs for the site over the last 1.5 years, I was asked by a friend how I tend to rate games based on platform or genre. I realized two things from this question. First, the site's database does contain this type of valuable information. Second, generating stats like these and others would be very informative and (I hope) interesting.

After some discussion, we are shifting directions with the site. Many websites, commercial sites and others, allow users to maintain personal profiles and write their own reviews for games. However, the model for most of these remains the same: one game, one review. We believe that an experience playing a game is not necessarily bound by this constraint.

To facilitate a more open approach, as well as emulate another successful model, we are moving to a more blog style structure. The new structure will allow users to blog a game one or more times, providing a score for each entry. The average of all of these entries will be the user's composite score for a game. For each game, the website will display the users who have blogged the game, along with an intro for each blog entry and the composite score. The overall score for a game will still be the simple average of all the scores from all the users who have rated the game.

We hope this will allow you to keep a better record of your experiences playing games. Maybe you want to write about and rate the prerelease hype surrounding a new game. Maybe you want to record your feelings right after experiencing the first five minutes of a new and exciting title. Or maybe you want to impart your feelings of despair or elation shortly after a major event in the game. Whatever, whenever you want to write, this site will allow you to keep your ideas and feelings up-to-date as you play your games.

We believe that video games are more than a collection of graphics and physics and scripts, they are a reflection of us. They tell us stories about fantatic places and people. Games give us amazing heroes and memorable characters. But more than that, they let us play as those characters. Games let us see the fantastic places and live the exciting stories. Video games are not a passing fancy that you pick up in your youth and discard when you are \"grown up\". We play games for fun. We play for entertainment. We play for life. This is your life. These are your games.

I added some additional features and functions this week. Users can now have graphics, although the image management has not been added yet. Blogs now have a proper appearance, mimicing the game overview page. The cover image on a blog entry links back to the game overview. \"Show Users\" link now shows the users and links to all the blogs by each user.

School has started up, so I doubt that I will have more than a few more days to tinker with the site, but most of the alpha functionality is in place and tested so that we can add entries for our records.

I start my summer internship tomorrow, plus I have a ton of games to play, so work on this site will be sporadic. I cut off the game lists at 50 entries simply because I have not implemented paged results yet. With hundreds of games per platform, it takes way too much time and bandwidth to just splat the whole list on the page. You can search for titles anyway, so just ignore those platform lists.

Welcome to our review site. This is a personal review site, not cluttered or supported by the big game sites. This is a place for me and some friends to keep records of the games we play and to rate and review those games. This allows us to return later to see what we thought about a game and to read what our friends think about the games they play. This is not a commercial venture and has no revenue potential. It is simply a place for us to keep our reviews independent of some corporate site.

This is the first news item, but I am writing it after the fact, so it will not be entirely timely or accurrate for the date posted. The basic framework for the site is in place. There is an error with the entries and punctuation marks causing problems with the db, but I will have that fixed within the next few weeks. None of the pages have any kind of pretty formatting right now, they simply dump data results into basic HTML tables.