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.

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.