Damn, I just got an email from GamesTM saying that they’re not sending anyone to TGS except me as a freelancer and my mate Jude, who just got a job on Play, their PlayStation magazine. That means I’m solely responsible for getting pictures and impressions of games, attending (and recording) interviews, and just general photography around the show.

One side of me is really excited but the other side really doesn’t want that amount of responsibility when I was going to be there for a holiday. There’s less than a month to go until I go to Japan and a little over a month until TGS so I’m sure I can sort out any concerns that I have in the meantime, but when my duties at trade shows so far have amounted to little more than playing new games and writing what I think about them this is a ton of responsibility. I’m sure I’ll benefit in the long run and it will mean that I can get more paid work in the time before I finish university, but still…damn.

Yay, it’s so good to be back into a Premiership season and have Match of the Day to watch again. My Dad was actually so desperate for some to watch yesterday that he paid £7 to watch Everton/Man United on PremPlus, which was worth it for the Rooney goal alone. And what I wouldn’t have given to have seen Chelsea draw or even lose at Wigan today…

Anyway, it’s gotten me in the mood so I’ve been playing a lot of the Winning Eleven 9 import. I’ve got some impressions that I’ve been working on so I’ll post them when I get around to finishing them. I’ll be getting the PSP version (Ubiquitous Edition = best title for a handheld game ever) and the UK version (as Pro Evolution Soccer 5) when they come out so I might even bother to write a full review then. I need to move over the reviews from the old site design as well because three reviews in over six months is pretty pathetic. I want to write more but playing a game as extensively as is necessary and sitting down for an hour or so to knock out a decent review is easier said than done now.

I’ll say right now that WE9 is an excellent game and fans of the series won’t be disappointed.

And it’s done. It got boring at times but I had fun, and thankfully today was a lot more interesting. Incidentally you can see the story that I wrote yesterday for the GamesTM site here.

When I got in I had some work to do for the Retro section of issue 37, where I finally got to write my Great Gaming Moment (went with my original intention and wrote about Rainbow Road in Super Mario Kart) and also got to write a full-page article on a retro game that should be remade. For that I went with one of my favourites that’s never had a huge amount of recognition, Unirally (Uniracers outside the UK). I got to play both of them in order to get screenshots, so no complaints here.

While I was taking the screenshots I got to see final builds of Total Overdose and Star Wars Battlefront II. TO was a blatant ripoff of Grand Theft Auto (free roaming mission-based gameplay) and Max Payne (bullet time and lots of diving around), but didn’t do either of them particularly well, and everything from the Mexican theme to the voice acting wasn’t particularly well done either. As for Battlefront II, I never thought too much of the first game but if you enjoyed that you’ll like this one because it’s very much more of the same. It had some cool touches (you can run down the inside of the Death Star’s superlaser as it fires, and you can hear Darth Vader breathing in the cave on Dagobah) and the space battles looked cool, but it seemed to be pushing the boundaries of the licence when you, as a low level rebel troop, have to kill the Emperor on the Death Star with your blaster rifle. Did that happen in one of the films?

I got my appraisal as well, which was very positive. I was given a B overall (A’s for journalistic ability and interest in the job) and they said that the work that I did was of a “very high quality” and that they’d keep me on in a freelance capacity, so that should go down well with the tutors when I go back to uni.

Actually they came yesterday, but I was too tired out to post about it then. I was hoping that I could scan them and post them here but there’s a lot of personal information on them so all you’d see was a piece of paper with lots of stuff blacked out “voucher for Ghibli Museum, Mitaka” at the top.

They came with some literature about the museum and stuff like directions on how to get there (20 minutes on the Chuo line from Shinjuku, apparently) so I’ve been reading up about it, and I found a decent article about surviving there as a foreigner here. I’m really getting excited about going as it’s only just over a month now – 34 days according to my countdown widget – and with any luck the museum will be one of the highlights.

Slow, boring-ass day.

I arrived slightly after 9:30 to find that Martin wasn’t in yet and so I couldn’t do anything, so I spent the 45 minutes until he finally arrived jumping between IGN Boards and the newly-discovered (by me, at least) but excellent NTSC-uk forums. My hopes that Martin would have something for me to do were dashed when we found out that there wasn’t actually anything to do on the new issue, so since the old phone that was used to receive text messages from readers was broken I was left to make some up. I tried to be interesting and witty with some of them (my favourite was when I criticised their negative editorial stance on Crazy Frog Racer) but that couldn’t stop the job feeling empty and even misleading. I was, after all, basically making up reader correspondence.

That was it until lunchtime, and after lunch I was back to forum-hopping until Jon, the staff writer, came to see what I was up to and found me bored out of my mind. He went off to find me something and came back with the task of finding the day’s biggest story and writing it into a 150-word story for the website. I went for the announcement of the games list for TGS 2005, knocked out the story in about ten minutes, dug out a nice MGS3 shot from one of the screenshot databases, and dropped it onto the team server.

Not long after that Ryan King from Cube Magazine came over because he’d heard that I was a journalism student at the Southampton Institute, the same course he’d graduated from the year before. We shared some stories about tutors and the Institute which was amusing (my News Practice tutor was an idiot when he was there, too), and he confirmed that shorthand is completely useless. In fact he went as far as to say that he’s only seen one person use it in a press conference and that guy was treated with disdain for being an ostentatious prick. There goes any plans that I might have had to take it seriously – my iHP-120 works as a dictaphone so I’m never using the scribbles.

And that was it. Nearly nine hours spent there and I did about 30 minutes of work and all I got to show for it was the memory of various obscene cake designs, but that’s another story. I should get my work experience appraisal back tomorrow so I’ll make sure to let you know what they think of me.