The Blog for the Sports Gamer

Gameshark posted two articles of mine today: a look at a handful of kids games including Blink, Chicken Cha Cha Cha and the always fantastic PitchCar as well as my take on GalCiv II Dark Avatar. (Awesome game)

The freelance world (my freelance world anyway) was turned upside down last week with the sudden closing of Computer Games Magazine. This sucked for several reasons and staying true to Blog for the Sports Gamer form, I’ll list them in bullet format.

• CGM was a decent chunk of my freelance income. Print pays well. Or, at least it used to pay well and I was also starting to do work for its sister magazine, MASSIVE, which focused on MMOs. That’s all gone. Freelance writing is like that. It’s a tough gig.
• Steve Bauman, the EiC, is a good friend of mine. I hate seeing my friends hung out to dry like that. I won’t go into the whats and the whys as to the closing, but this was not CGM’s fault.
• It was a great magazine. I thought CGM was the best PC gaming magazine on the planet — going back to the days when it was called CGS+. It’s rare in life when you can attain one of your personal goals. It’s hard to do whether it’s dropping 20 pounds or writing the Great American novel. When I started in this industry, my goal was to write for CGS+. Not PC Gamer and not CGW. CGS+ was my focus. This is back when I was just starting out (around 1995/96), not getting paid to review games, going to E3 on my own dime and just trying to make a name for myself — along with former blog-mate Todd Brakke, starting at the low rung of doing work for small websites that took volunteers. Four years later, and several jobs later including paying stints at GamePen and WarZone and running my own site called The Gaming Nexus, I was named PC Sports Editor of CGS+. (A job that I truly loved..until there were no more PC sports games…heh)
• So, this really is an end of an era for me and one that I didn’t want to see come to an end. And it sucks.

Thankfully, the good people at GameSpy are picking up the slack and I’m going to be doing more work over there as well as at GameShark, which is keeping me above the water line. I’m working on GSpy reviews of OOTP 2007, Genesis Rising and I should get a review copy of the PC version of Battlestations: Midway shortly. For GameShark I have Silverfall, Draft Day Basketball, C&C 3, as well as several board game reviews including a really cool interview with the designer of Arkham Horror, Richard Launius.

Speaking of board games (not bored games! cute ad..real cute. heh) I finally discovered the VASSAL engine today. This website allows you to play certain games online or via email. If anyone wants to learn BattleLore, for example, let me know and we can start an email game. I don’t have time to play live online, but email games — I’m all for. Hammer of the Scots is there as well. I assume that these games are complete, but I haven’t tried this yet — just read about it. Dan S.? Any wisdom re: VASSAL?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.