Games In Sand

Not pictured: the mote we built to stop the water from the ocean from destroying our 'shroom.

I went on a beach adventure with friends. We made things in the sand.

Goomba is angry because he hates the beach and the sunshine.

Only the silly white friends got burnt because they didn’t wear enough sunscreen/hats/stay in the shade. The recommended amount of sunscreen that one should wear is one teaspoon full per limb, with re-application throughout the day. I am serious.

Not pictured: me yelling at the ocean to stay the fuck away from my mushroom.

After we made these, we jumped onto them and went home to play board games and eat hot chips.

Hello Washington!

Our piñata travelled by plane to get all the way to Western Australia! No, wait, I mean WASHINGTON. Yes, Washington! Initially, I was going to use an image from Snakes On A Plane, but then I Google-imaged it and, on the first page, there was a picture of a woman getting her nipple bitten off by a snake. So I freaked out a bit, closed the window, and decided to go with a stock image of an adorable aeroplane.

Hey guys, Colombo (the LocoRoco piñata) has arrived in Washington! Here’s  a slightly abridged version of the email exchange I had with our winner, ShMerker:

Hi Josh,

Not sure if you read my post on this, but you’ve won the LocoRoco piñata! At first I thought the Boomer idea was crazy because SIF I CAN MAKE A BOOMER PIÑATA, but then I figured, ‘why not?’.  So I’m gonna try and make one.

If you could provide me with your mailing address, I’ll package the piñata and mail it off to you within the next fortnight-ish.

Cheers,
Tracey

Many weeks and a trip to the post office later, I get this email:

Just received it in the mail. It’s even more adorable in person. Thanks again for sending some awesomeness to an internet stranger. I’m not sure I can bear to destroy this guy, now that I see him up close. I suddenly understand why people are always blindfolded when they murder pinatas. Will I regret not discovering whatever it is you’ve filled this guy with? A simple yes/no will suffice, I don’t want any surprise spoiled.

Also, I took some photos of it in it’s new home: Here it is hanging over my desk. And here it is playing Geometry Wars with me. He isn’t very good at it.

It’s Colombo playing Geometry Wars! Wowzers in mah trousers!

Awwwwwww!

Farewell, Sweet LocoRoco!

Working with kids* has taught me how to smother things really well. *I'm joking. I don't actually work WITH children. I just write for them. Sometimes.

I went on a postal adventure! (Not to be confused with “Going Postal” — I am far too well-tempered a person to shoot my colleagues in the face.)

A while ago Jeremy Pencil and I made LocoRoco piñatas and we decided to give one away to the person who suggested the best gaming ‘thing’ that we should base our next piñata on. We both knew at the time that the piñata, once filled with delicious sweets, would not be a light object and that postage would cost a bit. “Like anyone outside of Australia would enter our silly little competition!”, Mr. Pencil said, rubbing his belly heartily as he munched into his third pork trotter and whipped an in-bred servant that he had illegally imported from Tasmania. Being the crazy wild child that I was, I agreed and went ahead with running the competition.

After much deliberation, we drew a winner. And after even more procrastination, got off our arses and organised a jaunt of sorts to the nearest post office. Here, we were met with a few problems:

1. We didn’t have a box big enough to fit the piñata, and the post office didn’t sell boxes that were big enough, either.
2. We didn’t have any padding for the piñata.
3. I had mis-read the address of our winner. You see, Mr. ShMerker didn’t include his country when he sent me his details, so I assumed he lived in Australia. Sure, the address itself was formatted funny and had all these numbers in strange places, but I figured it must have been because he lived in a commune or something. I have mailed parcels to people in communes before. Also, the address ended in “WA”, which I thought stood for “Western Australia”. Turns out I was wrong. “WA” stands for Washington. As in, that place in the USA. As in, NOT IN THIS COUNTRY AND POSTAGE COST ME $AU85 AND NOW I HAVE NO MONEY LEFT BECAUSE THAT WAS ALL I HAD OH GOD.

Whatever.

We walked around Surry Hills like a pair of hobos looking for a box. A man at the local fruit market shop thing was kind enough to give us a big broken one, which we had to repair ourselves.

Mr. Pencil sits on the floor of the post office, legs crossed, mending a box. This disrupts blood flow to his leg and later, he cannot walk.

Then we taped it up so that it would be all sturdy and stuff, bubble-wrapped our LocoRoco, and sent it off on its merry way.

We used TWO boxes and half a roll of tape. The package itself weighed as much as an emaciated child. OM NOM NOM NOM.

We were reprimanded three times by the post office man for taking photographs with our camera phones, and then they took my $85 from me.

ShMerker, your piñata should arrive in the post any day now. Please let us know once you have received it and, if possible, send us a photo. I hope you appreciate it. If you don’t, I swear I will cut you.

xx

Tracey

Pokémon, I Don’t Choose You!

What the hell is this thing even meant to be? It's bullshit, that's what it is.

I had to quit because I couldn’t keep it up.

By age 12, my frenzied passion for Pokémon was out of control – I was waking up at 6:30am every morning to record the daily episodes on TV, memorising the names and order of every Pokémon through rap songs, and spending every waking moment playing Pokémon Red and Blue. I may as well have been married to the franchise. We were joined at the hip; each of us never letting the other out of our sight lest we miss a special moment together. I lived and breathed Pokémon, only realising that I had gone too far when I started writing letters to my friends made up entirely of Pikachu-speak.

So, I decided it had to stop. Like a relationship gone sour, I needed to get out of this world – this marriage – that I had spent more than two years of my life in; this world where all I could think about was catching little monsters, where all my money went towards collectible cards, and all my energy was being spent telling everyone I knew how much better my exhausting obsession was compared to theirs.

I got as far away from the monster as I could, replacing Red and Blue with Age of Empires and throwing out my home-made Team Rocket costume, keeping only my original decks of Pokémon cards that were still in their shrink wrap (they were going to support me in retirement). That was, of course, until Pokémon Platinum came out.

After a ten year hiatus from all things Pokémon, I found myself drawn back to it, like a Venomoth to the flame.

WORK: Hyper – A Lot Of Stuff

Notice how the "E" and the "3" are highlight in red? As in, you know, "E3"? ZOMG THAT ARE SO CLEVER. No, seriously. I'm impressed. Nice work, mangers.

Oh hey, it’s that time of the month again! Time to rub the blood of virgins all over evil villains to drain them of their super strength so that we can launch our rockets at them and extract revenge for the slaughter of our families! No, wait, that was Dynamite Warrior. Sorry, I get confused between Thai films and Hyper magazine.

Right, so the new Hyper is out really soon and I did a whole bunch of work for them. I stepped into the role of news editor and wrote their news, which was fun. “But Tracey,” you say, “How can games news in a magazine possibly be relevant, especially when we have the intertrons?” Yeah, I thought about that, especially since there’s no denying that anything a magazine can do, a blog or any website can do faster. But can a website do it better? Well, yes. And they usually do. So all I’m saying is that I tried to make the news in this month’s Hyper different by, you know, doing some journalism. I conducted interviews, followed up and confirmed quotes, and got in touch with original sources to get a slightly different take on things. This yielded some really awesome results!

You see, there was a story that was published somewhere about a certain percentage of gamers being “addicted” to videogames, and all the blogs and ‘news’ sites were picking it up and republishing the same thing over and over again. When I called up the source to confirm some quotes, he said he’d never mentioned anything about gaming addiction, and went on to say that the media that did report on the study he conducted either misquoted him or never bothered to fact check. Whether or not this is true, I don’t know. But it did feel good knowing that I’d done my job properly.

“So, douche bag, what else did you do for this magazine?”

I’m glad you asked, faceless, nameless spirit of the web! I wrote some haikus expressing my thoughts on this year’s E3. Here is a sample:

So many updates

A bajillion blog posts

How much was real news?

You love that shit.

I also reviewed Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero? and Cooking Mama 2 because I am all man and enjoy playing hardcore games with guns set in post-apocalyptic environments. There’s also a neato roundtable discussion at the back of the mag where a few readers got to play Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood and talk about it, and I transcribed that bad boy. I transcribed it good. I think I would make an excellent secretary some day. That is, of course, if I ever develop the aspiration to be a secretary. Think of all the benefits! I’d get a desk, and a phone, and possibly free cups of tea!

Okay, you should go buy Hyper now.

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

I don't know who this child belongs to, but I fully endorse the expression on his face.

A few weeks ago I was linked to this blog entry on Insomnia. At first, I felt compelled to write a response to it, but so ridiculous was the article that I couldn’t come up with anything beyond “What. The. Hell?!”… because how exactly are you meant to respond to such irrational, misogynistic vitriol?

I was able to ignore it for the most part because it was all too crazy for me to take seriously, but it kept being brought up in conversations that I had with friends and other game writers. The people I spoke with all voiced their frustrations at the piece not so much because they disagreed with the ideas in Kierkegaard’s rant, but because he did it in a way that now makes it impossible for anyone to criticise a female game writer without being associated with his hideous diatribe.

There are valid criticisms to be made about everyone’s writing, and there are plenty that can be made about the writing of many of the women who work in the industry. Not everyone is going to like Leigh Alexander’s work; not everyone is going to be a fan of Tracey John, and there will be people who don’t like Nadia Oxford’s writing. There will be people who find me intolerable. I think all writers should be kept in check and be called out when they’re doing a particularly bad job, but Kierkegaard’s method isn’t the right way to do it. If anything, he has been completely counter-productive because now, anyone who has legitimate criticisms of well-known female writers like Leigh Alexander won’t be able to voice their thoughts without conjuring thoughts of Kierkegaard’s needlessly abusive and highly sexist opinion piece.

So that’s one small step forward for Insomnia in their page hits for this month, and one giant leap back for games writing. Thanks, dude. You’ve ruined it for everyone.

WORK: Good Game – 90s Special

I had another stroke and now my face is stuck like that. Also, SCRUNCHIE!

Hey gang, I did another thing! Actually, I did several things. The first was a story for the Good Game 90s special, which went to air last week. For the story, I interviewed Dr. Rowan Tulloch from the University of NSW and the delightful Seamus Byrne, and it was intended to be a bit of a trip down memory lane, looking at what made the 90s so important for the gaming world and other significant cultural events that may have shaped gaming as we know it today.

To get into the spirit of things, I was given a scrunchie…to hold. You see, I had intended on wearing it in an outrageous side ponytail, but if Tropic Thunder has taught me anything, it’s that you should never go full-retard. When I’m in my default mode, I’m already fairly demented, so wearing a scrunchie would have only pushed me over the edge.

If you would like to watch that story, go here.

I will post more about the things I have done a bit later when I am no longer at work (this is a lunch-time blog post!).

COMPETITION: We Are Gonna Make A Boomer

My friend Calli once told me that her uncle, who is a Christian hippy from up north, contracted these germs but wouldn't go to a doctor because God wouldn't let him (or something), so he ended up with boils. Then her brother touched her uncle (in a non-sexual way) and he also got boils. The moral of the story is to not go near anyone from Newcastle.

I think Jeremy Pencil and I were meant to announce the winner of our piñata competition yesterday, but we didn’t. You see, I approached him on Tuesday to ask who he thought should win, but he, being the crazy Englishman that he is, had overwhelmed himself with work and could speak of nothing but a film he had watched a long time ago about a woman who one day miraculously discovered that she wasn’t actually paralysed (despite spending 15 years thinking that she was), stood up, fell down some stairs, and died. Yeah, I don’t really get it either.

SO ANYWAY, we eventually arrived at a winner this morning after a long-winded conversation about interns who secretly sniff chairs (don’t ask). The winner of our LocoRoco piñata is…SHMERKER!

Mr. ShMerker suggested that we make a piñata based on a Boomer from Left 4 Dead, so that’s exactly what I’m going to try to do in the coming weeks. It will be a challenge, but I think my balls are massive enough to handle this job. Mr. Pencil, on the other hand, will try his hand at making a Chain Chomp, as suggested by TheClearWinner. Mr. TheClearWinner, you are our runner-up and we are going to mail you a pie in a box. Seriously.  We’ll be in touch soon about your prize, ShMerker. For the rest of you — TRY HARDER NEXT TIME.

Neeeeeew Banner!

Saying that I have a ‘new’ banner is actually slightly misleading because I never had an old banner to begin with. But that’s not important. What is important is that I now have one and it was made by the lovely Rebecca Clements — the genius behind Kinokofry.

This post also marks three months since I hit the “Make Zero Light Seeds Go Live And Spread Its Germs All Over The Interwebs” button, so that’s kind of neat. To celebrate, go win yourself a piñata, guys!

My Dog Has Excellent Taste In Games

My dog appears to be a h4rdc0r3 g4m3r. There will be no Peggle or Spelunky for her. Oh no. She chooses Mass Effect. If she could choose more than one game, she’d probably also pick Gears of War 2 and something else that people with massive testicles play.