Much like a Hollywood blockbuster, today was looking like a bit of a downer until a twist in the denouement game it all a happy ending.

The day started off with me happily liberated from my screenshot farming purgatory, as I was set with the task of just finishing up the news stories I’d written last week. It meant moving from the comparative bliss of Windows XP to that old iMac again but anything for a change of scenery. A couple of the stories were a bit too old for a new issue of the magazine so I wrote two more recent ones (I went for the South Korean guy who died after a fifty hour gaming marathon and the porting of Doom to the iPod). Jon said they were fine so I dropped them onto the team server, thinking nothing of it.

I then had to briefly go back to screenshotting from ScummVM to get some shots from a specific part of Monkey Island 2 to be a background for the feature. I could live with it because Monkey Island rules and it was only a very brief play. I’m actually tempted to start playing through that game again as soon as I get finished with this.

At this point the day started a downturn as I found out that my currently unwritten Great Gaming Moment wouldn’t make it into the new issue because there isn’t space. I’m not sure whether or not I’ll be writing it for the following issue instead, but I’m not holding my breath. Around this time it was lunch, and when I came back I was sat with nothing to do for the whole afternoon. I had my Japanese book on me so I could practice that while listening to the audio of An Evening with Kevin Smith on my MP3 player, and I had Internet access, so it wasn’t all bad. It’s just that I could have sat on the Internet at home…

Home time is at 6pm, and at about five minutes before the end Martin, the editor came up to me.

“I’m really pissed off”, he said.

Shit. What had I done now? My mind was scrolling through everything I’d done today to try to remember what I’d done wrong.

“Why’s that?”

“I’ve just read the newsfeeds you wrote and they’re really good…”

“Uh…OK…”

Turns out the reason for his being pissed off was that he was impressed with my writing (somehow having gone ten days without reading any of it) and wished that he’d given me more to write in the last week. He hadn’t actually been told that I was coming until the day before and most of the freelance had been submitted for this month, so there wasn’t much he had to give me. By the end of the conversation I’d been promised some bigger work for issue 37 (due in October) that I can crack on with over the next two days, a new freelance contract, and some more ad hoc freelance in the future. I’ll also be doing some work for them in Japan, but it’s unknown whether it will be paid or for experience alone.

I’m more than willing to put up with a boring afternoon and too many hours on ScummVM when it nets me a haul like that.

Not a particularly productive day, but enjoyable nonetheless.

Yet more screenshotting today, although today I thankfully got to play more than just adventures. As much as I love them three straight days would have left me never wanting to touch one again. First thing I did was to play Alien Breed on the Amiga (no idea why, but they needed screenshots so I got them). I used codes for infinite lives and infinite ammo and even then the aliens were swarming and overwhelmingly me, so I don’t know how anyone could finish that without cheats. I keep hearing that modern games are easier and I agree, but that was plain frustrating.

After that I found out that they still needed a few more shots of The Dig and Loom which I fired up ScummVM to grab. I didn’t go past the first screen of The Dig when I played it before but when I gave it some time I really got into it and ended up playing until I got stuck at around lunchtime. It has a Spielberg story credit and you can really see his touch in there along with more than a little 2001.

When I came back from lunch (Greggs in Bournemouth is always too damn busy – the staff speak crap English which means service is slow and queues are usually out the door) I didn’t really have a lot to do so I got to watch some FarCry Instincts which looks pretty good actually. The Xbox does a respectable job and even keeps a reasonable framerate, but there’s still something that looks slightly generic about it, and it was definitely more linear than the PC version – you’re tunnelled through ravines and valleys instead of given options on how to approach a scenario like in the original. Someone should also tell the developer that they don’t need to put bloom on everything as well. I swear that effect is becoming the new cel shading.

I also got to see a lot of the full version of Burnout Revenge on the Xbox (previous impressions of the PS2 version here) which looks very impressive. The PS2 version looked great but this is even better, and just as eye-bleedingly fast. I’ve seen it before but it still blew me away quite how fast it was going while remaining very playable, and we also managed to find a lot of alternate shortcuts that do cool things like send you flying over cliff edges and over rooftops. It should be great, even if I’m probably going for the PSP version first. Whether it will stay quite as fresh next year for the inevitable Burnout 5: Street remains to be seen because I can’t see much more to the formula.

Started the second and final week of my placement with a fairly uneventful day, spent completely on carrying on with my point-and-click adventure task. I didn’t really mind at all because they were three of my favourites. I spent the whole morning on Broken Sword which still holds up well (got back from the Ireland section when I stopped), then after lunch I moved on to Broken Sword II. I’m not actually sure which one I prefer, but I got past Marseilles before I needed a break from George Stobbart.

I then fired up Grim Fandango which I hadn’t played before and played it until the end of the day, ending up loving it. I’m now watching a few copies on eBay with the intention of getting my own copy and finishing it because it was one of the most genuinely funny games I’ve ever played, even if it could be occasionally abstract. Thankfully not as abstract as Day of the Tentacle, but it had me scratching my head a couple of times. How did people ever finish point-and-click games in the days before GameFAQs?

Nothing particularly interesting happened outside my little microcosm, either. I overheard some conversations about arrangements for the first reviews of Xbox 360 games which I won’t post here on pain of death, and I saw a decent amount of Moto GP 3 on the Xbox (as good as the others but not much different), but that was really about it. I should have something more interesting tomorrow because they’re getting me to do something else.

Wow…I just watched Hiroshima on the BBC (available on DVD from tomorrow), the new docu-drama about the Hiroshima bomb from the perspective of both the Americans and the Japanese. It was one of the most powerful and interesting factual programmes that I’ve seen in a long time, and really filled in the story of one of the most important events of the 20th Century that I’ve never really known a lot of the background to. No-one does documentaries like the BBC and this was one of the best in a while.

I don’t like getting too political around here because it always ends in tears, but this is one of the things that I have strong opinions about. Suffice it to say that the death of nearly 250,000 people, most of whom were civilians, can’t be justified even if it did end the war. I await the inevitable flame emails.

Whatever your opinions I still recommend you watch Hiroshima if you get the chance. Incredibly interesting.

First thing I did was finalise my choice of Great Gaming Moment. I went for Rainbow Road from Super Mario Kart, a moment as frustrating as it was great. Much like deciding which game I should write about…

After that I started on the task of collecting screenshots and artwork of various point-and-click adventures for use in a GamesTM feature on the genre. I spent the whole day with ScummVM and copies of Secret of Monkey Island 1 & 2, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit The Road, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Beneath a Steel Sky, and Grim Fandango. I love these games so spending the day playing through various sections and just grabbing screenshots of characters and scenes was great fun. It really reminded me of how ridiculous some of the puzzles in Day of the Tentacle were, but there are infinitely worse ways to spend a work day.

During the afternoon and amid the continuing flood of WE9 matches going on (at one point they had three tournaments going on concurrently on WE9, PES4, and FIFA 2006), one of the guys from Play magazine brought in the near-finished build of Burnout Revenge on the PS2, and from what I saw (quite a lot) it’s going to be fantastic. Firstly, it looked spectacular for a PS2 game. I thought it was the Xbox version that they were running, so I can’t wait to see how that one looks. The thing that struck me the most about it though is how ridiculously, unbelievably fast it is. Seriously, if it was supposed to be a futuristic racer where things are running at 600mph I’d think it was fast, but this game just has road cars. Road cars that do 0-100 in about three seconds. One of the guys raced in a dragster and put it into first person, and ended up going so fast that he crashed because a small bump in the road bounced him up into the roof of a tunnel. It does look like it’s going to be very similar to Burnout 3 gameplay-wise, but it’s EA so what did you expect?

By far the best thing about Burnout Revenge? They’ve gotten rid of that annoying Striker idiot. You now should be able to play the game without wanting to gnaw on the disc.

Started off the day by being given a whole page of the GamesTM retro section to myself. I’ve got the Games That Weren’t section (about games which were finished by never made it to market – in this case Gauntlet III on the C64) and the Great Gaming Moment, for which I haven’t decided what to write as a couple of my suggestions were shot down for being too similar to what they’d already done. As long as they haven’t already been covered one of those should be turning up in GamesTM issue 36.

I spent most of the morning doing research and writing the piece on Gauntlet III which, it turns out, has a fairly interesting story behind it. The game got some great reviews and was finished but never made it to market because the programmer was made redundant and without him they couldn’t master it onto tape from the development disk. You’d think they’d have brought him on as freelance or something just for that little job but they didn’t, so the game only saw the light of day on emulators.

Around this time word spread like wildfire that we had the import version of Winning Eleven 9, and throughout the day there was hardly a moment when there wasn’t an impromptu winner-stays-on tournament in progress. I didn’t get to play it but from what I hear it’s another subtle improvement on the last one with most of the kinks ironed out. As I was drafting this I heard someone behind me describe it as “fucking excellent”.

Ubisoft popped in as promised with copies of Darkwatch and Blazing Angels which I saw demonstrations of. Darkwatch is an FPS that essentially combines a western with Blade, as you play an outlaw who releases and gets bitten by a vampire and has to return him to captivity, either by being a hero or by feasting on the living and being evil. It looked great for a PS2 game (Xbox version is on the way, too) but the gameplay looked very similar to Return to Castle Wolfenstein – spooky catacombs and brainless zombie hordes abound – but with speed closer to that of Serious Sam. Blazing Angels is a WW2 dogfight game which looked great graphically but seemed very simple to play with very little enemy or ally AI to speak of. Could be fun with some work, though.

Most of the afternoon was spent going through retro catalogues to find a game to write the great gaming moment on. I wanted to do the swordfighting in Secret of Monkey Island or the vortex in Sam & Max (I’ve been on a ScummVM kick recently) but they were both no-gos, so at the moment I’m batting around the idea of the Hoth level from Shadows of the Empire (specifically when you drop the AT-ATs to their knees) because it really was a great moment at the time, but we’ll see tomorrow if that flies with the editor.

They’re also going to be getting me a press pass for the Tokyo Game Show so that I won’t have to brave the crowds during the public days. 41 days to go!