Transparency: my MP’s expenses

Great research!

Future Publishing’s PC Gamer, a magazine covering news, reviews and previews of PC games and products, recently lost Editor Rob Atherton. Deputy Editor Tim Edward has since been promoted to Editor and can be contacted at tim.edward@futurenet.co.uk. The title are yet to replace Tim’s former role.

Link

My new job…

… is to edit this beast of a magazine. Pretty cool, eh?

Graham sucks

Look at his face. He sucks.

My enormous head

24″. Jesus.

Me on the tellybox

By popular demand. Me on the sofa. SEXEH!

Security

To: Ross Atherton.
Subject: Things that are brilliant
1. Druids
2. Editing PC Gamer

I’ve had an amazing month.

We took a holiday to Mexico. We swam with dolphins. We swam to swim-up bars and drank cocktails. And then Anna and I (the we in the previous sentences) got engaged. 

Then we came home, and my nose was crushed against the grindstone. My boss, Ross, has been taken off the magazine, leaving me with the day to day management.

It’s basically brilliant. I get to work with a team of writers and designers whom I respect and trust. I get to influence and direct what remains my favourite magazine in forever. I get to travel, meet the cool people who work with games everyday. I get to solve problems, personal and practical. And all this running against immutable, terrifying deadlines.

And, once in a while something mad happens.

Like last week, when I was sat on the BBC breakfast sofa, talking about my favourite game, with regular tv personalities, and an elf.

Or this week, when I left a package on a train and accidentally caused a security alert. 

Now, all that stands between us and huge success is deadline week. 

But, here’s the thing. Even if the issue explodes, even if disaster strikes, even if it all goes off the rails, I know I’m going to be just fine. I’m engaged. I have Anna.

Pentadactyl recognition

So, Tom won an award tonight. I almost burst into tears when his name was read out. Well done, Tom. Write faster.

TF2: Bring on the frogs

Dear Robin Walker, hero of Team Fortress.

Congratulations on the latest update. It is good.

However. We’ve been talking in the PC Gamer office about how tedious we find spectating. Tom has his own complicated ideas about two linked arenas so that everyone is playing simultaneously, and the teams get shuffled that way. I don’t really understand what he’s saying, but it sounds good. You should probably listen to him.

But I’ve got a better idea. The frog.

In Operation Flashpoint, if you were killed in a multiplayer mission, you’d re-appear as a seagull, and could watch your friends fight, floating above them.

Obviously, you can’t do that, because that’s copying. But I think it’ll be brilliant if downed players, and spectators, had the option of reappearing as a frog, just hopping around the maps, watching from boot height. They could be squashed, or trampled on, or shot, I guess, and you’d probably want to make it a server option, like party mode.

The really good bit, though, is that you’d have to provide a place for the frogs to appear on each map, and it would have to be called the frog-spawn.

Worklinks 23rd July

“It’s a moon shot for Codemasters – a game that will look, sound and play a generation ahead of the competition. The geography, all 220-odd square kilometres of it, includes rolling hills, forests, swamps and an extinct volcano to run around in. The dynamic environmental systems include day and night cycles, weather and accurate physics. Operation Flashpoint 2 is a game long in the planning, long in the making, and long, oh‑so-long awaited.”

Operation Flashpoint 2: because no-one argues with sexy guns.

“Attack and defend in a class-based shooter set in the oft-ignored WWII.”

365 Free Games! (This was a group feature that all PC Gamer contributed to. My favourite moment of the year so far came when Graham, he of sour looks, who volunteered to write this turned to us and said, “I’ve got all the games now. All I need to do is write about them. It shouldn’t take more than a day. Two weeks later, we had to pay John to come in for a couple of days to finish the blasted thing. Also note – while Gamesradar can’t verify the quality of all the games in the feature, we can. Because we wrote it.)