Dream

This is just a glitch, I do have friends really. No, really.

This is an account of a dream I just had. It was an interesting, involved dream, and not everything made it across to my bedside notepad, and even fewer details were jogged when I read that with my morning tea, so this is like the movie trailer for the agonising three-hour epic I just watched.

I'm also doing well, thank you, and you? I'm back to nights tonight, so back to trying very hard to get lots of things pitched. Any freelancers reading this, might I ask: what the hell do you do over Christmas? It's approaching like a big white cloud on my calendar. I suppose I'll nag some websites, or... hmm.

Anyway, the mental dream.

Dream Log, Tenth of November, Two Thousand and Nine.

I am on a train. I know that this train is running between the streets of Glasgow, but the windows look out onto vast Scottish hillsides streaked with moody rain. The embankment beside the train is sunny, and students are lying in their thousands there, sunning and reading and laughing. The roaring train doesn't bother them.

We arrive at George's Square - I read the gold letters. I am not on a train, nor is there any sign of one. George's Square is about as large as a McDonalds, decked out with exuberance and greenery, black buildings with gold plate. It's more like a little plaza - it faces a waterfront where the sun is setting, although the light in the square matches high noon. In the back of the square is a blueish wrought iron staircase. The steps are too high. I climb them. I am going home.

I live in a house almost exactly like the one in the last level of Braid, except for that this house is atop the tallest, dingiest building in Glasgow and, inside, it looks exactly like my bedroom in the waking world. I don't linger.

I take the train again. The bouncer from the local night-club sits next to me - he's a sweet guy, about seven feet tall, and I've known him since school. Enormous, but gentle. He has a silly expression, like he's been giggling all morning. I get off the train at a lonely platform and make my way alone through the countryside, uphill, along cobbled roads dusty and cobwebbed, and I reach a huge derelict house. It looks like the house from the Narnia books, but sagging, rotten. I go into the main room and sit on the floor and take out my laptop and write. I'm writing a review that I recently wrote in the waking world, and it's coming out word for word.

It doesn't last long though - soon the day is over, and I'm on the train again. I'm aware that a day has passed, and I'm commuting again from my house above the tiny George's Square, this time to the university where Lisa is. I'm not sure if she's teaching or studying, but I'm writing on a notepad on a study table in a hallway. I'm opposite a professor's office, which is open.

On the desk, at which nobody is seated, lies a name-plaque: "Herne Hornes". In the room, a teacher is busying about. I know it isn't Professor Hornes - I know the teacher shares a name, but not a likeness, with one of my teachers at school in the waking world, but I can't remember which.

The teacher is peeing in a punch bowl on the drinks cabinet. He has filled it entirely with pee. Then he takes the bowl and pours it over Herne's desk, and replaces the bowl, and briskly walks out.

Some young guys are congregating in the hallway, and the teacher accosts them. "Hello, have you gents submitted your 'Least Favourite Professor' yet?" He's trying to get them to put Herne Hornes as their worst teacher. He sits next to me and the rest of them crowd around demurely, while he passes out forms, which are signed and return, and then collates them. He mistakenly bundles my Portfolio together with his paperwork. I tell him that he's got something of mine, and he apologises, and when he hands it back, it reeks of piss.

I'm in George's Square and suddenly it's the real George's Square, the big one that isn't a nice residential plaza. There's a train track running right through it, and beyond, I can see the little stair case with the tall steps that leads home. I just need to get there. I cross through the train and it starts moving while I'm in it. I start panicking about being whisked miles and miles away when all I want to do is go home, when suddenly the train is a bus, and it's stopped at the end of the dirt track to my parents' house (which is where I live in the waking world). I step off the bus, and wake up.

Written by Jaz McDougall for publication on the 11th of November 2009. I've never went for my notebook so fast as when I woke up from that dream. By the nine.

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Enter the Fanboy

This week, I bought a PS3. I managed to install it beneath my monitor - it's connected with HDMI cables, while my PC is using DVI cables. This means I can switch between inputs with a button on my monitor - Borderlands, Uncharted 2, Borderlands, Uncharted 2.

Not that I've played Uncharted 2 much. Lots of games are stacking up in my "to play" pile, and the ones I'm playing right now are pretty interesting. Borderlands is particularly intriguing. I'm not ready to voice a solid opinion yet, but it does seem like it's a very shallow game held together by one fantastic mechanic. The networking problems are atrocious, though - I haven't really had a hassle free multiplayer game that didn't end in connection problems, progress lost, etc. Wait for the patch.

I've been off work this last week, and it's been great. I've made some progress with other mags, with websites, and with how I feel about my life generally. Here's hoping I can survive on writing before too long, right? I almost met my quota last month - three perfect quota months and I'm ready to stand on my own two feet, I think. Which reminds me - do you edit a magazine? Do you need a shit game reviewed? Send it to me! I'm prompt, accurate, fair, and still quite naive and easy to exploit.

Links:

Terry Cav"vvvvv"anagh Bares his Wares!
Ludo gets Ludological at Gaming Daily!
REO Speedwagon: The Game!
M_the_C shows his impeccable taste in ambitious games!
Notch cobbled Minecraft together from Zombie/RTS bits!
Michael Abbot Defends Linear Narratives (But Only Good Ones!)!

Swings and Roundabouts (Chewing Pixels)

"For now, the eccentric video game designer seems happy to be playing in the abstract. Giant trails of string loop around the room, tacked to the ceiling. On some, tiny plasticine models of children hang from paperclips, swinging as trapeze artists on micro-ropes that, if ever scaled up for humans to enjoy, would defy both the laws of gravity and health and safety."

Simon Parkin doing his wonderful thing over at Chewing Pixels, this time showing Keita Takahashi at his most experimental in a big busted house. There's an odd moment near the end where Parkin lists off some indie games that he's been playing and, winning Takahashi's approval, finishes it with Street Fighter IV, and of course, Keita lights up at that too, for all his derision of the mainstream. It's interesting to me because there's a definite anti-mainstream sentiment among some independent game developers (and the gamers who love them). Seems about as pointless and hurtful as setting up an all-black KKK - why can't we rate games on their merit? If a mainstream game really is better than an independent one, why stand next to the pasta-and-gold-paint piece of crap and say "THIS is the future of gaming!", I ask? Especially when so many great indie games get mixed up in this debate and swallowed by their refusal to "market" themselves, like it's a dirty word. If you've got a lemonade stand, you still need to put up a sign that says "lemonade". Grrr...

IGF and Melolune (Laura Shigihara)

"After finishing the soundtrack for Plants vs. Zombies I basically allowed myself about 6 months to work full-time on it (I had been working on it part-time for probably about 2.5 years prior to that) and it’s at long last nearing completion."

Yep, lead composer for PvZ, Laura Shigihara, submitted something to the IGF. Click through to listen. This should be interesting, I'll keep an eye on it.

5th November, 2009 (DF Devlog)

"Gulsheb escaped from the depths during the third year of recorded history and wandered the mountains for six years. Eventually she tired of this life and convinced the humans living in the hills below that she was in fact a manifestation of Tob, their goddess of deformity. She was a towering, bloated one-eyed thrush with a fat, bulging trunk in place of a beak, so it must not have been that difficult. The villages united under her rule, and she directed a sixty year expansion. Then the war with the elves began."

Toady One is still quietly making the perfect game, his "personal mission", and it looks like he's added in fell beasts that take command of villages, towns, regions, and empires. The plan for this game is quite grandiose, with each world generating an intricate history from scratch that any dwarf can comment on. It can only get better.

Today, I'll be trying to figure out what's so compelling about Haze, and trying to get back onto night shift for starting work on Wednesday night. If you have a PS3 and you're on the Playstation Network, add me as a friend. My ID is "jazmeister", and I'm accepting everyone.

Written by Jaz McDougall rather early on the 8th, for publication on the 9th of November 2009.

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Scoring

A friend of mine recently put out a general inquiry on twitter - what is Game X like? Is it good? Now, I happen to have reviewed said game, so you could say that I know exactly how good it is. However, I've also been paid for my opinions and observations of it, so dishing them out willy nilly is a quick method for devaluing my product. I trust this guy, though, so I sent him a terse, private message: "I gave it XX% in a review recently." My friend felt that it was more than enough to go on for making his purchasing decision. All done, everybody's happy. That's what scores are for - to sum up the review in a little, easy to distribute number. But just because I gave Blood Bowl 80% in PCG (see above) doesn't mean that you're going to enjoy it. You need to read the damn review. So what are scores, really, and why do we need them?

I've posted a bit about this before. The Reticule has a three-grade scoring system - it's either not good, good, or really good. They also have a "really really good" badge they distribute. RPS and The Escapist don't score games. Gaming Daily uses a percentage, but it looks like they're changing to a four-grade shebang. IGN does an out-of-ten-with-a-decimal thing, so that's really a percentage too.

When I have to use scores, I prefer a percentage. You can really think about it, especially when the mag defines what each score bracket means. PC Gamer has this to say of games scoring 46-60%: "A very ordinary game, quickly forgotten. Think twice even if you find it cheap." The next one up, from 61-75%, reads: "A decent effort that, but for a little more polish, coulda [sic] been a contender." So, for me, scoring a game 60% is saying that it's right on that line. If you get a 65% game in a bargain bin, buy it, it'll entertain you. 55% is a waste of money.

From the consumer's point of view, then, scores below 60% mean nothing. For a developer, getting 57% shows that they need to take it seriously next time - they need to hit it out of the park and develop their features. If Braid had stuck to the Mario-with-time-bending of the first world; if it hadn't attracted David Hellman's art or bothered to license the music from Magnatune; if it didn't have any pretentious shit on signs or hidden endings - Braid might have scored a 60%. Could have been a contender. If I'd written that review for alternate-universe-shit-Braid, alternate-universe-lazy-Jonathon-Blow would have read it and known what he had to do. If I'd scored it 20%, he'd have thought I was being unfair or needlessly cruel, and may have given up games entirely. As a critic, my job is not only to inform the consumer, but to have a dialogue with the artist - this is what I think, this is what is great, this is what sucked and here's why. You need to know your stuff for this - not just

The third person we review games for is the publisher. People get hired and fired on the basis of scores. Should we give a game a high score to give the devs a break? No. It's easy to blame the reviewer, but really, the publisher is the one making an obnoxious, inhuman decision. Say you want red sauce, but a publisher tells you that, if you use white sauce, everyone at DICE gets to keep their jobs? Should you use white sauce? No! Fucker! I want delicious tangy red sauce, with antioxidants and stained tablecloths! Don't base your decisions on arbitrary things - do your job and fire people because they got drunk and peed in the water cooler.

So reviews are complex, and scores are simple things. The Angels and Demons idea, where you score the bad elements separately from the good and let the reader compare, has promise, but it's just lots of work to quickly and easily represent something that is involved and complex by nature. We sweat over our reviews - we're speaking to you, the Gamer, and you, the Developer. We take them seriously. Just fucking read them.

Written by Jaz McDougall for publication on the 6th of November 2009. I really want some white sauce now.

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Nine Reasons that Day Shift is brilliant

As you may know, I work night shift in a petrol station part time to supplement my earnings as a freelance writer. I work three days in a row, then I get three days off. At the completion of my last shift of three, I'll get home from work, sit at the kitchen table, and make a tough decision: do I want to switch to day shift for my days off? Here's what that implies:

Day 1: When your body is expecting to sleep at about 8am, stay up for the entire day and sleep at night time.
Day 2: Frolic and caper with frabjous glee. See the list below the cut for why this day is awesome.
Day 3: Start out as per day 2, but stay up all night and go to bed on the morning of Day 4.

How many times do I sleep during this four day period? Three times. While I'm up for the whole of the first day, I'm so unbelievably tired that my ideas are shit, my sentences are poorly constructed, and I'm likely to find all sorts of mundane things far too funny. In short, it's a torturous day of mounting delirium, where you're increasingly likely to phone Tim Edwards to bawl that you love him, and not very likely to do much valuable work at all. (Except sci-fi fantasy, of course. You just need to clean it up once you've had a sleep.)

For this week, I'm on holiday. It means I'll be focussing on my writing entirely, but it also means I can just switch straight to day shift. Here's ten reasons why that's awesome.

The Morning Routine
Getting up, showering, eating breakfast, talking shite - this is something I don't get to do with the family at large. While there are drawbacks to living with your Wife and your Parents, you really reap the benefits if you're up early enough to make everyone tea and toast. Doing all these robe-and-slippers activities in the morning means that you're much less likely to stumble down the stairs in your underpants while the Occupational Therapist is meeting with Dad, or get the mail before you've fixed your bed head.

Office Hours
There are times when I've went to bed at, for example, noon. I've got no emails. Today is a slow day, I think. I won't have any work. Then I go to bed, and wake up at six - a half hour after Future employees leave the building - to find a few emails asking if I'd like to do stuff. Now, instead of working on it all night, I've got to wait until the morning to say "k." before they can send me the link to the download, post the review code, activate the seven crystals, what have you. This way, I can catch emails and reply to them throughout the day, and if it's a little thing, even submit something before they leave the office.
This also means I can visit the bank or the post office without having to overhaul my schedule and nudge my sleeping hours.

Other People
Not many people wander into my bedroom at three in the morning. Those that do are usually just in the business of meowing at you for food. It's lonely working nights, but it's even lonelier working nights at home. Nobody on twitter, steam, or in the blogosphere (except the occasional American) - just me, filling up my own google reader and twitter feed. And inbox, occasionally. Day shift allows you to phone people and have them respond, to send an email and get one right back. I'd never have guessed how much I needed social interaction until I worked nights, which I've been doing for almost two years.

Lunch time
Taking a short break for something delicious and easy is, again, something I don't get to do that often. Your body shuts down at night whether you want it to or not, so your appetite takes a hit. Sure, why not stick this in the oven for an hour. I mean, it's not like I have to go anywhere. Rushing downstairs to make a sandwich, wondering when that download is gonna finish so you can get to work, and enjoying a fleeting game of TF2 adds to the excitement of being a games writer. There's no impetus for rapid movement when your world is lit up by monitor alone.

Light and Noise
Which brings me to this fucker. You know how you like to listen to music? I can't do that here. Sure, I can use headphones, but I can't reeeeeeaally crank them because it makes a tinny rattling noise that wakes up my Wife, who usually has work or gaming first thing. And I can't turn on the lights. I don't know about you, but I write well when I have lots of loud music blowing my head off. And natural light? Can't beat it.

Google reader
When you go to bed at 12pm and wake up at 6pm, you're waking up to 349 unread items. When you sleep at 12am and wake up at 6am, you're waking up to about 50 unread items, and you can handle the rest as they arrive. Same goes for twitter.

Head Space
On night shift, your head is always in the wrong place. In the morning, I'm tired enough to be a little silly. In the evening, I'm asleep. At night time, by brain is wondering why I'm still up. Not conducive to my best writing ever.

The Evening Routine
Winding down the work for the day, sticking things in the oven, grating a little cheese, setting up for the long evening of TF2 or a great big singleplayer game - you don't get to do that when you're unconscious.

TV
"Don't Tell The Bride", 1:45 am.
"Bizarre Animal ER", 3:15am.
"The Worlds Strictest Parents", 4:15am.
Yeah, no thanks.

Bed
When you sleep for six hours somewhere between 8am and 11pm, and your wife sleeps outside of those times, you're never going to actually be in the bed at the same time as she is. Not an uplifting prospect for a romantic man like myself. I moved my whole life to a strange country for her, and then she did it for me. It matters to me that we get to lie in bed at night, and we don't. This week, we do. Back rubs and crying ahoy!

Written by Jaz McDougall for publication on the 3rd November 2009. I am so making toast and tea for everyone today. I'm up super early after last night's out-cold-by-8pm fiasco. What can I say, I'm a Rocknrolla.

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IT'S EMO TIME

Not really emo time exactly, although a trusted source whispered into my ear that the seminal Sunny Day Real Estate are back together again and touring right now. This is big news for a guy who stood by and did nothing while Emo music was raped and pillaged. I pretty much gave up on making music, and stuck with the writing - a decision that's paying off. My buddy Ralph, for whom surrender is never an option (even in the face of certain intoxication), has been hitting drums with expert precision for The Whisky Works. They're actually doing a big UK tour next year, and... wait, this isn't what I wanted to talk about.

I wanted to mention that I bought jazmcdougall.com, and I'm being super lazy about doing anything with it. The plan is to have this blog there, and maybe some cheeky email on the side, get some hosting up there... it'll be awesome. Super busy though. That's not what I wanted to talk about either.

I really wanted to talk about kids. Now, Super Meat Boy is going to be great, yada yada, and the fact that Ed McMillen did this video doesn't make him any better or worse than the majority of adults:



If you go to the Youtube comments, someone calls this girl "smart". I mean, of course she's smart, but you don't go around calling people smart, do you? Watch the video and watch how Ed shows the girl his game. I mean, this is something all developers do, but because it's a little kid, there seem to be these unwritten rules.

For example, "You can talk to me like I'm an idiot." Kids are basically aliens. Their brains, while not entirely formed, are definitely working - my thoughts as a child were just as complex and in-depth as they are now. What's changed is my ability to communicate those thoughts, and to analyse them based on context. I now know that you shouldn't pee on people's cars, even if Dad doesn't mind when you pee on his work van. I now know that you shouldn't show people your penis - they don't want to see it. I now know that you don't drink water from puddles. Adults get so wrapped up in their experience and knowledge of context that they can think kids are stupid.

Kids are so not stupid.

My parents got us Mario Paint when we were young, and they sat with the manual and tentatively clicked around with the little toy mouse, and they tried to open up the game a little more for us. My brother and I sat back, itching to get to it. Mum and Dad went off to do things like chopping wood and making dinner and paying bills, etc, while we set to the important shit. In an hour, we'd figured out the music, the flyswatter game, the hilarious screen-wipe animations - we were having a blast. We just figured it out.

You know when you have a nephew over and they're pouring soap into the toilet and you snatch the box away from them and ask, "Why did you do that?!" You know when they say, "I don't know..." and you say, "How can you not know?!" and despair for the youth of today?

That's a vocabulary problem. That's the kid being entirely new to our culture. That's them wanting to say "I didn't think it was a problem, I just didn't know it was a bad idea and I tried it, I'm really sorry and I'll never do it again now that I know its not cool." Not a lot of words, not very difficult words, but there it is. Kids aren't articulate. You need to give them a minute sometimes, and you need to let them do their own thing, and be clear and fair and calm with them. "Abe, if you put soap in the toilet it fucks up the sewer system." Then you need to make it absolutely clear that they aren't a bad person. "Ice cream?"

Links time!

The RPS Verdict: Borderlands

"Kieron: We really sound like we hate this game considering we all love it.
Alec: I think it’s more a matter of circling, unsure how to define why we like it.
Jim: It’s genuinely entertaining, isn’t it?"

I love these, even though it's a terrible review device. Borderlands sounds awesome.

New DF Tools (After Action Reporter)

"[...] a fortress viewer that lets you explore your fortress like it’s an isometric pixelart game. If only we could play Dwarf Fortress in this kind of view!"

I can't half wait for the day when Dwarf Fortress looks as lovely as it secretly is. Until then, of course, I'll keep poking away at my fort. You do play Dwarf Fortress, right?

New York (James)

"This is where you start in Deus Ex."

Deus Ex is actually one of the few games that give you an opportunity to do this kind of thing. The only other I can think off at the moment is Fallout 3: you could visit the things and stuff and be like "DOOD I'M IN THAT FAMOUS PLACE FROM FALLOUT 3" and get dirty looks. Anyway, Tom went to New York and took pictures. Another in a long line of envy-inducing PCG outings, although I think this was strictly not-business.
I must stress that Liberty Island is so totally in New Jersey. Even if it's technically a little blob of NY, like a sort of civic pseudopod, it is so totally in NJ.

Reality (distractionware)

"I actually make games full time – and full time as in, well, all the time; all day, every day. I quit my job two years ago and I’ve been trying to find some way to balance making the games I wanna make and being able to afford doing it since. My savings from work are long gone, and I got a loan about a year ago which has since run out."

There's a donate button. You should so totally donate. I did, but then again, I'm awesome. You might not be awesome. Oh well. Sucks to be you, then.

Oh, and I found a secret preview for something totally unrelated to Terry's upcoming VVVVVV. Don't ask me what it is! It's a secret! Don't click here either!

People Buy Games, Don't Play Them!
Cobbett Is Pretty Damn Funny!
Telling Famous Black People Apart Is Hard!
I Hate Beards: IGN Does Not!

Written by Jaz McDougall for immediate publication on the 22nd of October. This stupid review code is STILL downloading. Wait, you didn't think I was really gonna let you play the secret preview did you? That shit is aaaaaaaall mine.

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Up: I was sure we already had that dimension

Yesterday, I went on a date with my wife. We went to Pizza Hut, saw Up in 3d, and walked around Borders. It was like being back in America, actually, from the free refills to the upmarket cinema to the... well, Borders, really.

Up is something I'd like to review a little later next week, but for now, let me tell you about 3d. It's a pair of thick-rimmed glasses with clear plastic lenses. You put them on your face. Suddenly, you're wondering why we haven't been doing this for the last fifty years. You know the Disney title card, right? With the castle? Everything there has depth. You're looking out over the water at a towering castle, while the words "Walt Disney" floating all up in your grill. Conveying depth is the obvious trick up it's sleeves, and it does that very well, whether wowing you with vistas longing for times when "Epic" meant "Really fucking huge", or impressing upon you just how tiny an object in the foreground is. Carl, our protagonist, hopping cracks in the kerb, for one. The floating house as it approaches the most terrifying bank of storm clouds I have ever seen, for another.

Anyway. Totally worth it for the - you know, I'm not sure if it even costs more. I'm sure it does. Just as well too, because I swiped the glasses. Right! Let's get into the links after the jump.

There was a young lady who swallowed a fly (Simon Parkin)

"In a sense, a child, by definition, shrinks Scribblenauts’ scope. The game’s potential solutions are necessarily limited by vocabulary, so players with a smaller vocabulary have fewer options open to them. But, free of the dry, efficient logic of adulthood, a child’s imagination also opens the game up in ways beyond most adults’ reach."

Simon has a rough idea why Scribblenauts arrived with a big deflating whoosh instead of the anticipated bang.

Spelunky Journal: Part II (Indigo Static)

"There are cavemans that will run at you whenever they see you. They tend to run off cliffs and sometimes jump in the spot for no reason whatsoever. Spiders begin always upside-down hanging from a ceiling, and they won’t drop until you are exactly below them. The bats however will drop and start to fly around when you come near them, no matter the angle."

I knew that. You knew that. The fascinating thing is, Diego Doumecq is just finding out. Start with part one here.

The Death of an Adventure Game (Man vs Horse)

"There was some difficulty establishing depth with the colours in each row of buildings becoming darker and then lighter again as the scene moves away. Paintshop’s blur tool helps a lot. There was a lot of trial and error involved in getting the colours right overall as well. Moving from the building on the left to the station, through the tunnel on the right, I tried to apply some of Valve’s colour theory, subconsciously demonstrating a sense of hostility and menace by leading the player into the coldest part of the image. Does it work?"

In all my time trying to get artists and programmers to bring my glorious visions to life, this guy was on the other end. Ludo unveils some old artwork for a dead adventure game.

Take a Break vs Rockstar Games (The Daily Scoundrel)

"It’s all about our poor little children, being corrupted by an evil force that is not legally available to them. Which means… could it mean… that Take A Break’s army of mums have actually contributed to the breaking of UK law by purchasing this sick, twisted product for their children to enjoy?"

Le gasp! Lewis "Furious Denby" Denby was inexplicably reading Take a Break magazine when he discovered, like a ridge of mould on a freshly buttered and toasted roll, a batshit argument against GTAIV. Apparently, it promotes violence against women. Funny, I thought it promoted going on a million dates with women before you can have your wicked way with them. GTA IV also punishes you for drink driving and for driving too fast. Okay, it rewards you for driving too fast, but it punishes you for crashing into things. Well, okay, it punishes Niko, but it rewards you with the flying Niko lulz. So where's this big hooker-beating-up mission the Take a Break guys were playing?

Take a Break... actually... playing... *chortle*... a game... they've condemned... *snigger*

Now some quick self explanatory linky-poos:

Curtain falls on Alice & Kev!
Risen sounds fucking awesome!
Halo was shit!
Derren Brown: Not Messiah 2.0!

Written by Jaz McDougall over the course of an entire night, for publication on the 16th October 2009. Yes, I wore my 3d glasses in the queue outside the cinema. No, no-one dared look at me. Yes, they were all in 3d.

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Writing Full Time

2009 is coming to a close, and come next Summer, I'll have been a published writer for just over a year. Lewis's excellent series on games writing opened with a sentiment mirroring my own personal imperative: I need to up my game.

I'm a big fan of planning things out. Even as early as when Craig Pearson first commissioned me for The Last Remnant, I was doing calculations to work out how many articles I should aim for in order to safely quit my job. I realised that all I needed to do was write a two page spread every week (it sounds so simple). Obviously, magazines come out monthly, so you don't need to be Tom Francis to realise that I should write for more mags - four mags at the very least, and that's making the rather large, unwieldy assumption that every mag will always give me exactly two pages worth of work every single month. Yeah, right.

Now, Craig, being the Keeper of the Ways, Great Cowl of Night Secrets, and Editor of the Reviews Section, is the kind of person that will suddenly have a game on his desk and, remembering his oath to fight crime and help the needy, send me an email asking if I want to review it. I don't need to initiate this action at all, and in fact, I doubt I could send him an email saying "I want to review this" and expect to influence his decision in the slightest. But while Craig will just send me reviews on a platter, the rest of the team are usually too busy thinking up their own amazing ideas and chasing lazy freelancers (oh and yeah, playing games in hurried snatches) to pick up the red Jaz phone. It doesn't work like that. If Tom has an idea for a great Now Playing or Reinstall, he can't tell me "Hey, go play Mirror's Edge and have a great time and then write an article about it." I have to do that on my own.

Good news: I successfully pitched an article. Coming up with an idea for an interesting article is something I'm doing all fucking day long, but fitting it into something appropriate for PCG needs sit-down time that, what with Lisa's immigration paperwork and Hilaria's computer and my job and so on, I don't have. I'm actually using it right now to update this dusty blog. More good news: to actually write this two-pager, it took me about twelve hours, and the fee was just about what I make for a week's work at the petrol station. If I was doing the bare minimum work, I could work one day a week. Of course, I'd rather be able to buy new trousers and eat like a king and buy a treadmill and a PAL Wii and netbook and a wacom tablet and a go kart and a pony and, gee, I dunno, actually get around to having a honeymoon with my wife.

I'm looking around and wondering who to pounce on next, and at work last night, I started thinking about Edge magazine. I haven't talked to Edge yet, but when I was down in Bath and I had to get to a photo shoot (gulp), the kindly Futurite who escorted me was none other than suave, dashing Rich Stanton. We talked about Dragon Age and rural bandwidth issues. This means we're obviously destined to be great friends - but can I exploit this potential friendship for maximum cash?

There's also the byline issue, but let me tell you where I stand on that. Edge doesn't say who wrote what, and Kieron Gillen is always poking fun at them for it. I gather he has professional issues with it - he's used the phrase "In the end, your byline is all you have." You know, I think this is the right stance for him to take. He makes his money now by having the reputation of a great writer, and if he'd been writing for Edge this whole time, he wouldn't have much of a reputation off the back of it. So I should probably care about that too - Jazmeister Central veterans will remember that my ultimate goal is to write a fat trilogy of fantasy novels and make a billion pounds a week with them. But here's why the byline isn't an issue:

• I already write for a mag that gives me a lovely, italicised byline, as will most of the mags on my "to woo" list.


• I love writing words for money.


• Last week at work, a customer told me to suck his dick, gave me the finger, and mooned me. The next day he came in to buy cigarettes and tried his best to convince me it was just a dream. I had to call the cops to remove him.


• Last night at work, a customer who didn't want to pay for his fuel and couldn't prove his identity started spoon-feeding his sob story to another customer, and she told her friend, and soon all three of them were calling me names in the doorway. I had to call the cops to get him to shut up, and he still didn't pay.


• This shit happens every single night. My hands shake every time. Cops and medical staff don't put up with this for a second, and while I can punish someone afterwards, I can never stop abuse from happening in the first place. People assume I'm trying to ruin their evening, when the simple fact is, I have a set of protocols to follow, and if I deviate from them, I'm unemployed.

Yeah, fuck the byline. I wish my only problem was not having a byline. Will I be fully self employed by Xmas? Probably not. While Santa's filling socks with iPods, I'll be filling Mum & Dad's drunken faces with crisps and cigs. But will I be doing that next year? Hell no.

I'll be squeezing out another 400 words on Mass Effect 2.

(Probably for a preview.)

Written by Jaz McDougall on the 14th of October 2009 for immediate publication. I accept ego massages and six-page commissions as guilt offerings. Be nice to your cashier, he has a record of your credit card number.

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