...goodbye.

Boy, that would have been awfully obtuse, wouldn't it?

I'm going to do my best to avoid turning this into a massive weep session. I've already started and scrapped writing this message more times than I can count, so instead of putting endless thought into this, I'm just going to say what I feel and leave it at that.

The five years I've spent at GameSpot are arguably the most important years I've spent in my life. Prior to this gig, I'd never had much of a real job. When Jeff and Greg and the rest of the crew back in 03 gave me--some skinny, 21 year old punkass who'd never done anything but freelance for a few scattered sites--a legitimate chance, I'd never envisioned that this would turn to be the job that defined me, that gave me a place and a career. I had no idea that I'd actually make some semblance of a name for myself here. That anyone would actually give a crap about what I did or what I wrote. I still find the notion kind of unbelievable, actually. Reading all the messages people have been sending me since the word got out has been utterly mind-blowing. It's one thing to enjoy what you do, but it's quite another to know that others enjoy what you do. It's gratifying, and I'm thankful for it.

I could probably spend the next several hours giving individual thanks to everyone who has helped me along the way, but most of them know who they are and have been thanked in more personal fashion, so I'll skip the acceptance speech from hell. Instead, a general thank you to the staff (both former and present) for letting me be a part of the dream that is/was GameSpot. Also, thanks to you, the reader. I'd be nothing if you folks didn't come back time and time again to read the junk I put out, and I can't tell you how thankful I am that you did.

Leaving completely sucks, and believe me when I say I'm in no way joyful about my departure. Well, OK, that's not entirely true. There is a certain sense of...freedom that I'm feeling now as I envision an endless string of pantsless weekdays. Still, if I'd had my druthers, I'd have probably rather stayed precisely where I was, doing what I was doing. But circumstances don't always work out the way you'd prefer, and things change, often not for the better. My time here was finished. I was conflicted about that notion going into the holiday break, and that notion turned into fact with startling clarity as soon as I came back from break. It was a frightening and painful experience to let it go, but I had to. If you love something, set it free, and all that junk. I don't think this one's ever coming back, though.

Of course, I'm not going to disappear into obscurity--at least, not without a fight. You'll probably start seeing my name start appearing on bylines relatively soon. I'm not doing anything full time just yet, but we'll see where the wind takes me. In the meantime, if you need to get in contact with me for any reason, my new e-mail address is alexiconofscars@hotmail.com, and if you want to read my assorted ramblings about whatever, I am keeping a personal blog at The Head Of Alfredo Garcia. Stop by sometime if you want to read about what I think of practically everything except games. I'll give you a hint: I hate all of it.

And lastly, let me just make one thing as crystal clear as possible. I hold no ill will, issue no blame, take no umbrage with any of my former co-workers on the edit team. These guys are some of the hardest working, upstanding, straight up cool mother****ers I've ever met in my life, and as long as they're around doing their thing, GS will continue to live and breathe--there will still be a soul there, underneath whatever ridiculousness might be on the surface these days. There is no GS without those guys. The GS content crew is a family, and no one can change that.

Before I duck out, a few stats to chew on from my time here:

Number of reviews written: 733

Number of video reviews produced: Somewhere around 100

Number of video features appeared in: Dozens

Controllers broken: 7

Debug consoles broken: At least two that I can remember (sorry Ricardo!)

Number of console launches experienced: 5 (not including N-Gage and Gizmondo, which absolutely, positively don't count)

Number of weekend birthdays spent at the office: 2 (thanks PlayStation 3, Wii and Rock Band launches!)

Number of E3s covered: 5

Number of hours of sleep lost while covering said E3s: 280

Number of delicious sandwiches consumed during work hours: Too many to count

Pounds gained over the last five years: 45

Favorite review ever written: It's sort of like choosing your children, but I'd have to say that Super Mario Galaxy was probably the piece of writing I was most proud of just for clarity and overall quality. For pure comedy, while Big Rigs is obviously the fan favorite, I think my Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green review was my favorite, mostly for the opening paragraph, but there are some good chuckles elsewhere, too. My only regret with that one was that it was published before I'd learned the skill of brevity.

Favorite video piece: Regarding Robocop. Tim Tracy took my hours of ridiculous footage and turned that thing into something magical.

Worst review ever written: Read any of the first five to ten reviews I did for the site. They're as boring as they are barely informative. I was still learning the craft at that point. I think I've gotten a touch better.

Review that caught me the most flack: Probably Advent Rising. I will still never understand what anyone saw in that game. It was like retarded Star Wars with a broken frame rate. Now there's a box quote for ya!

Biggest editorial regret: Never giving Burning Questions proper closure. What can I say? I snapped.

Biggest non-editorial regret: Lack of travelling, specifically to Japan. Would have loved to have gotten one TGS trip in.

Thing I'll miss least about GS: Apart from the current unpleasantness, I'll say the commute. Nothing sucks more than driving an hour through traffic to work every day, especially when you're accustomed to carpooling and then suddenly end up having to do it all by your lonesome. *cough*

Thing I'll miss most about GS: The dozens and dozens of awesome people who have come and fled over the years that helped make GS a terrific place to work during their time. You know who you are.

And with that, I bid you all a fond adieu. It's been real.

--A

...is a really terrible movie starring Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock. Seriously, it's like the most hackneyed thing you'll ever watch. Avoid seeing it, if you can.

It's also one of the more disconcerting e-mails I've ever had to write in my lifetime. The finality associated with such a short and downright glib e-mail is altogether weird. Two sentences of text, someone above me hitting the "terminate" button, and after nearly five years of commitment and passion toward the GameSpot brand, my tenure is officially put to rest. How coldly efficient.

Wait, let me back up a second. I'm getting ahead of myself.

Odds are you've probably heard by now. Yes, last week I put in my two weeks notice and I will be leaving GameSpot as of next Thursday, January 24th. No, this is not my big goodbye post. I'm still here for another week, so I'll probably spend some more time thinking that one through before posting it. This is simply my confirmation that, indeed, the rumors you've heard are true.

I haven't said anything up to this point mainly because...well, I didn't know what the hell to say. I know this might sound odd coming from me, but frankly, I've felt a little sheepish about this whole thing since word got out. As much as I enjoy having my name on bylines and being in front of the camera, I'm not really used to having a laserlike focus on me and my personal affairs. Make no mistake, I was A-OK with word being put out when it was. But considering I've never had a major gig like this prior to my time at GS, I'm kind of fumbling for the right way to handle the situation. Big, emotional outpourings confuse and alarm me, like a bear trapped in a room full of loud, flashing sirens, so forgive me if I'm not at my most communicative or tactful over the next several days.

I do want to thank everyone for all the PMs, e-mails, blog comments, Xbox Live messages, and other general statements of support I've gotten over the last week or so. It's awesome to know people care and even have any manner of opinion of me, let alone actually like what I do enough to have an emotional reaction to news such as this. Just the fact that it's news at all is totally bananas. It's really meant a lot, and believe me when I say that I'm going to miss you all. Or, well, most of you. Some of you I can and will do just fine without. System Wars, I'm looking at you.

Kidding. Well, sort of...

As far as why I'm leaving, what I can say has been pretty well covered, especially in the Joystiq story Kyle Orland put together. I know people probably want more details, but right now my comments there will simply have to do.

I'm not entirely ready to talk about where I'm going or what I'll be doing from here on out, as honestly, I don't even really know at this juncture. I'm going rogue for the time being. I'm taking the mercenary route and seeing where things go from there. I'm considering all options at the moment, and I do have some work lined up to keep my mind focused on work and away from the non-stop Internet pornographies. You may start seeing my name pop up elsewhere soon enough, so don't worry about me disappearing into the ether. I can't quit you game industry, no matter how much I might want to sometimes.

So, look for a more proper goodbye on this blog on my last day. If you happen to catch me in the OTS chat, on XBL, or wherever, say hi, say bye, say **** off, whatever you feel like. I'll be around, in some fashion or another.

Over at the personal blog.

I'll be updating semi-regularly over the course of the next week or so, so keep checking back.

EDIT: My blog was down for a few hours there, but should be back now.

In case you hadn't already heard, I've set myself up a personal blog off of GS. This, in and of itself, does not mean anything. However, I'm aware that us editor types are under something of a microscope lately, and that any actions along these lines are sure to spark a myriad of insane rumors. And far be it from me to discourage such behavior. I take utter delight in watching the machinations of internet rumor mongering, and can't wait to see what people come up with. So, yeah, have at it.

The truth is, I just wanted a blog zone for more personal fare, and frankly I didn't feel like this was the appropriate spot any longer. I am not abandoning this blog. I will simply reserve it for the work-related editorials and such.

Consequently, if you're one of the people who has been hounding me with PMs asking if I'm going to do another annual top albums list, the answer is yes, but only on the new blog. Or maybe I'll do it on both. Probably not. So, yeah, if you want to know what music I didn't hate in 2007, you should check out the new spot sometime in the next week or so, when I've finally finished sifting through the dozens and dozens of albums I picked up this year. Because that's what vacation is for, right?

Remember SimCity? Remember what a joy it was to build up a fully functioning, living, breathing city, full of life and wonderment? Then, at some point down the road, after you've built up your city to the peak of its productiveness, you'd start mashing the disaster button and a wide variety of tornadoes, earthquakes, and fake Godzillas would come tromping through, laying firey waste to every bit of what you'd worked so painstakingly to create?

Yeah. It's a little bit like that. Except someone hit the disaster button for me.

Though I probably would have had a Guitar Hero III review ready for today if it weren't for all the online testing I still had to do. Oh well.

So yeah, Guitar Hero III launched today. Weekend launches are always a little weird, and the timing rarely works out too nicely for reviews, but in this case, all that was holding me back was getting some online time against the real world on all platforms. Now that that's out of the way, we'll have our GH III review tomorrow.

However, for those waiting with baited breath for our review to decide whether to go get it or not, I'll just say that if you liked the previous entries in the series, there's very little reason not to pick this one up. It's a hell of a lot of fun and has definitively the best soundtrack of any of the GH games thus far. It's almost psychotically harder than the previous sequels on hard and expert difficulties, so if expert in GH II befuddled you, this one will probably pluck individual pieces of your brain off and dump them in an Aperture Labratories brand incinerator. Obviously the Score Hero crowd probably won't mind that, though I always wonder if building sequels specifically for the hardcore existing fanbase is always the smartest move. Especially with direct competition from Rock Band on the horizon.

Also, for those wondering which version to get, the 360 version seems to be the clearcut best just in terms of feature set. The PS3 version doesn't have any friends list options online that I can see. The Wii version is reliant on friend codes for friends matches, and also looks about on par with the PS2 version (which isn't online at all). 360's online with all the usual friends list action, looks great, plays well, has achievements, and comes with a launch day patch that I believe adds a co-op quickplay option, meaning any song you unlock anywhere in the game is immediately accessible to play in this mode. No version of the game comes with this out of the box, as far as I'm aware, and in the other versions, you have to specifically go through the co-op career mode to unlock songs for co-op there and only there, which is kind of dumb. I think maybe the PS3 version is going to get a similar content patch? I haven't heard specifically either way.

As a peace offering for not having the review until tomorrow, here's a video of me fumbling my way pathetically through Through the Fire and Flames on expert in practice mode. It's literally the only way I can play that song right now without failing the intro. I know they're hammer-ons. They're still goddamn hard.