My first writing "gig". I always wanted
to write about games as a kid, and despite being absolutely fucking
terrible at this, it never stopped me from writing inane shit into
Windows notepad like I was going to be next Roger Ebert of games. What
a fucking waste of time. Anyways... There was this PC gaming magazine,
CD-Action, it came with 2 or 3 CDs of stuff. The thing that was cool at
the time about CDA is they were very keen on various "community
projects" to be included on the discs... There were various "corners"
and "sections" about MP3s, RPGs, emulation, FPP games, and some other
cretinous shit... But there was also ACTION MAG. FUCKING ACTION MAG. It
was a huge (huge!) "web magazine" with articles supplied by the
readers. Some of them are the deepest fucking dogshit ever conceived by
teenage shut-ins. Article-length comment section for real life,
basically. And inside Action Mag, there were also "corners", and those
"corners" also had "subcorners", like a matryoshka of terrible writing!!! And one of that "sub-corners" was about old PC games.
I should mention that at this point in time, there was no term like
"retrogaming", maybe on one of those fancy English discussion boards.
But in early 00s, dabbing in "abandonware" and "old games" was treated
like a sign of mental retardation and aggressive tendencies towards
spending your time in a productive way. There was no DOSBox (okay, it
was released in 2002, but I haven't heard of it until 2003, when 0.6x
versions showed up), Windows XP was the order of the day, everybody was
playing Counter-Strike and seeing pixels on the screen was considered a
crime against game design. So you should now have a full picture, what
a waste of time was engaging into writing articles about Wolfenstein 3D
for some tiny-tiny zine, that wasn't even listed on the back cover of
covermounts.
But I dunno, that's what I wanted to do. Mostly because the original
writings by the two guys who invented this "zine" were actually
funny?!? Despite having something like 100kb of allowed size (!!!) for
the html all said and done, they did some really fun shit, like
grayscale tiled backgrounds, some hidden text here and there, tons of
jokes and in-jokes... for me, it was more inviting that a bloated,
up-their-noses public of Action Mag (mostly because I was like 14 and
most of AM crew was 16-17, which is the worst age for mental and
psychological development). So I was there, writing about old-ass
games, exchanging e-mails with other writers, planning to make a forum
etc... of course, soon enough, the main writers started being hit with
seasonal mood alterations, school started wringing us out of free
time, my parents were hell-bent on beating the shit out of my high
ideas of being a full-time writer, then some people left, some other
people showed up who did not gel with the old crew, and there was a lot
of fun drama. All in a span of a year. Oh, and the one issue of the
zine that I was asked to make, despite having no experience in HTML,
become corrupted and rejected from the disc, which was the final nail
in the coffin. It was an amazing ride, and one of the first lessons I
took about being too invested in some pie-in-the-sky online projects.
Too bad I didn't make my homework, because *gestures at the rest of
this page*
Just remembered one of the stupid dramas. One of the "writers" sent a
whole bunch of "reviews", all of them having just few sentences, and
the leads refused to include them, so the writer rebelled and left lol.
We all should be shot with high caliber ammo for being stupid bitches
TINY EMULATION "ZINE"
2002?
I did some writing for the
aforementioned "emulation corner" that was on CDA covermounts. Like,
four or five "reviews". They were probably long-winded, full of obvious
observations and not worth anyone's time. I distinctly remember
reviewing "Aliens" arcade game from Konami, not noticing that the
marine that the player controls in is supposed to be Elaine Ripley from
the movies. And me not watching the movies, except the third one, one
boring evening when I was banned from using the computer, is no excuse.
Also, there is SOME excuse for me, because the player sprite looks
fucking nothing like Ripley, red hair and all.