Hmm, the ability to blog... or should that be 'blag'?

[Nick]

You know, I can't quite believe that HEXUS has trusted me with a blog. After all, half the fun of working for HEXUS.net is writing up a review, bunging it in our system to simmer for two days and watching David and PD pop their brains into orbit over the latest libellous comment I salt my articles with.

Now they've gone and trusted me with stuff they won't see until it's on here? Mad, mad, mad....

So, a little about what I do might be in order, I guess.

Well, I'm the guy with the dream job. Ok, to the outside world it's a dream job, but sitting on my fat bum playing video games all day can be a really tough life. No really, it can.

Alright, I have zero travelling to do to get to work as I work from an office at home, I can take a break when I want, I decide my own agenda for the day and I can work pretty much any hours I want, but it's still a tough job.

No, really, it is. Honest, it is!

The thing is, not only do I get to play superb games for free and get paid for it, but I have to play the utter pap ones too... And the cruel twist of irony here is that I actually play the poor games a lot longer than the decent ones. Sounds weird, huh? Well, the reason for this is that you can tell a good game from a poor one pretty quickly, within the first half hour of playing, for sure. Classics like Half Life 2 and Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War are easy to spot as being worth splashing the cash on... So you don't have to play them quite as much, and as they're enjoyable anyway, you don't mind spending time on them.

But then you get the runts... the games that should never have gone beyond someone opening their mouth before actually thinking and setting a whole load of tripe through the development machine to be etched onto foil and loaded on your drive. These sorry bits of code suck from the intro screen and get worse from there... and the sad fact is, that to be fair, you HAVE to play these games longer to make sure they're bad! After all, it wouldn't be fair to write up a slating review of a game that has the worlds worst opening levels and then rapidly blooms into a classic later on. All that would show is that I've skimped on doing a proper review. So, when I'd rather be power sanding the cornea from my eyeballs, I plod on through some tortuous pap to make absolutely sure that what I'm playing is truly as bad as it gets.

And then, once the torture is over, I have to write about it.

Of course, writing up a good game is a joy, there's always plenty to write about, loads to tell and lots to applaud. But your average dog's dinner of a game is again, a tricky number. No matter what you write, unless you outright LIE, the developer and the publisher won't be happy. So you have to make damn sure you can defend your opinions and fight a true corner.

But on top of the games reviews is the truly terrible amount of scratching around it takes to bring you the news and previews. Those single page jobbies represent about an hour's work for each one... so imagine how long those E3 articles took...

And then there's chasing publishers for code to review or preview, speaking to various developers about ongoing projects, getting myself into preview events and a myriad of stuff that goes on to get lined up for receiving code to look at... and that doesn't even cover the hardware side of things, so make sure you keep your eyes peeled for some very tasty stuff from Saitek, XFX and some exclusive stuff from RAPTOR GAMING which is very tasty indeed.

Anyway, where I am right now, its 4am and I have to get up in 4 hours! So, I'm going to go now and leave you lot to wonder where I am... here's a hint.. 101!

Byyeeee!

[Lee @ SCAN]

Originally Posted by Nick

So, I'm going to go now and leave you lot to wonder where I am... here's a hint.. 101!

Byyeeee!

Your either with paul Merton on Room 101, or your in Taipei or another remote far-flung region going to Computex... Am I close ?

Bah....Wish I got played to play games all day

[Rys]

The 101 nearly fell on us tonight. EARTHQUAAAAAKKKKKE!!!!!!!!!!