DavidGoodman.Net

First off, GTA IV is… well, it’s bloody amazing. Filmic in its visual quality, hilarious as usual and the gameplay is a completely different beast to the older games. Superb. I’m maybe five or six missions in and loving it. A more detailed impressions post to follow, once I’ve had a good explore. Oh, and once I’ve given multiplayer a try.

In other news, some spamming fucker hacked my old blog, Happy Dave, so I’ve had to nuke it, and my photoblog along with it. Four years of posts gone. Seriously kids, keep those Wordpress installs up to date, even for blogs you don’t work on actively anymore. In a way I’m sort of glad - starting this new site on the main davidgoodman.net domain was meant to be a clean break, and now it really is - all gaming (and the odd bit of politics) all the time. Plus I’ve saved the pieces of writing I’m really proud of from Happy Dave over there in the essays section. Still, very annoying. I spent a lot of time building the 200-odd posts there. I think they’ll still be available in the database, if they haven’t been overwritten with spam. One day when it’s not nearly midnight I’ll have a go at recovering them on a vanilla Wordpress install.

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.