DavidGoodman.Net

I’ve heard a lot of grumbling from people about the new Wordpress backend interface, but personally, I think it’s a piece of genius. Heck, it’s actually got me eager to post, because it’s such a joy to use - the profusion of old tabs is gone, adding media (like the Gears pic in the last post, video or flash music players) is a cinch, and some nice AJAXy/Javascript touches make the whole interface much more slick and web-app like. It doesn’t feel like a bunch of PHP pages hacked together by enthusiastic amateurs anymore - this feels like a professional, easy to use, fun web publishing tool. I’ve been a Wordpress user since the 1.0 days, Blogger before that, and I personally think this marks a really positive change in user inteface design, for Wordpress in particular, but blogging tools in general. The new interface has set a very high bar.

Oh, and auto-saving on posts? SWEET. Never again will a random PHP hiccup eat half an hour’s worth of writing.

Some generic Space Marines, yesterday

Yes, yes, I know, old hat, but they’re new to me. The funny thing is, a lot of them, including Gears of War in particular, don’t feel new to me because they’ve been so heavily referenced by pretty much every gaming magazine and site I read. Gears had been built up in my mind to be this incredible, frenetic shooter, heavily based around a single-button cover system that made combat fast, fluid and lots of fun. All tied up in an aces Space Marines-esque battle with sinister aliens. Brilliant.

What I got instead was, well, dull. I’m one of those kids who dabbled in tabletop wargaming as a young ‘un, and hence have an entire mid-adolescent head full of pulp SF military hardware and mythos stored away at the back of my brain. Gears of War is a bad pastiche of the genre, with naff dialogue, stock characters and a largely spurious plot.

It’s pretty, at a certain level, but when most of that prettyness is immovable skybox background that you never get to actually touch or move around in, and the colour scheme is a load of tiny variations on grey, gunmetal blue and brown, prettiness doesn’t account for much. At its core, the environment is a series of corridors scattered with crates, like, oh, pretty much every shooter since Doom, except here the crates are disguised as chunks of mouldering concrete and low walls.

The much-heralded cover system is nifty, and has become something of a trend in over-the-shoulder shooters, but quite honestly it gets very dull, very quickly. I’ve heard it called ’stop and pop’ and indeed that’s what it boils down to, stop, pop, run, stop, pop. Blah. With weirdly-spaced checkpoints in the first third of the game, it quickly becomes a pretty uninteresting grind. I’ve heard that it’s a lot more fun playing co-op with a friend, but I played a few games of multiplayer and found it as dull as the single-player.

All in all, so much more could have been done with this. If the single-player game had bigger environments, more varied cover, decent AI on your teammates (who go down like bowling pins the moment the enemy so much as coughs) and better paced save points, it would be a lot less frustrating and more enjoyable. As it stands though, it’s a below-par shooter that I feel squandered a lot of very cool visuals, a potentially deep backstory and an interesting gameplay mechanic. It could have been so much better.

Compare and contrast to Call of Duty 4, which I’ve been playing non-stop for a month now. Hell, I’ve been writing this article in the gaps between multiplayer deathmatch games. Sweet. Stay tuned.

So, whoo, oops. Three months without an update. Yeah, it happens. Me, I was painting my flat, mainly. Anyway. After renewing for another couple of years, I’ve decided to make my site actually useful to me, beyond simply being a repository for stuff I wrote two years ago. Casting around for things I’m passionate enough to actually write regularly about, and perhaps maybe even want to write professionally on in a few years, I’ve come across the excellent Gamers With Jobs, which has great writing, a strong forum community and a brilliant weekly podcast. I’ve never done any serious critical/subject journalism before, short of a few CD reviews in my university newspaper, so this is a bit of a departure for me, but it’s something I’ve been nursing an ambition to do for a while, so I figured, hell, this is a good place to start.

So, starting today, DavidGoodman.Net will be featuring regular game reviews, longer feature articles and so on. Once I’ve written a decent portfolio of stuff it’ll be on to harassing Gamers With Jobs and other sites to let me write for them, and then, the WORLD. Muhahaha.

There will, of course, be writing on other topics, like things I’m doing (currently learning Norwegian and to play guitar, though not simultaneously), civil liberties, the odd techie thang and thoughts about writing (tending toward non-fiction article writing/freelancing as I explore my way around it).

So, seriously, stay tuned. Especially if you like games.