YAY ZOMG HTML IS BROKEN IN HERE NOW!

• 16Mar 12

  It's hard saying hello again when you never really said goodbye.

  So I'm sure you've heard the news by now. Depending on where you saw the news, it was divulged with a handful of either pancakes or plain old text, but the fundamental facts, of course, stay the same and don't need to be regurgitated here, especially considering that you don't need to click any more than two links on any part of either site to know what's up. I'm also not going to spend time talking about my opinion on the matter beyond saying it's nice knowing that the community here seems to be very welcoming to us despite the implicit cultural rift and that I look forward to seeing what the future brings. It's pretty straightforward stuff that, again, you can see it reiterated anywhere and everywhere, including Twitter, judging by how the trending topics were shifting upon the announcement.

  Instead, I just wanted to take this opportunity to make myself known again. As you can probably see, it's been a little while since I was last here. The last blog post before this one, for instance, was about my then completely new and relevant review of Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine, an MMO one could hardly call relevant within its own renowned series, let alone the genre it inhabits. The last actual review I posted here, on the other hand, was for Deadly Premonition, a game that probably needs no introduction, especially to any members of Giant Bomb who happen to be reading this as well. Both of those things were posted quite some time ago, nearly two years with regards to reviews. Contrast that with my most recent work on Giant Bomb, which in both blog and review form consists of a breakdown of Analogue: A Hate Story, a pretty low-key visual novel whose prominence I'm surprised is large enough to warrant an official page on this very site.

  I bring all of this up to say that I had quit this site. I never wrote an official good-bye post or anything because I always thought those were terrible on here and it wasn't as though it was a completely sudden, absolute decision. As you'll notice I didn't stop posting until well after Giant Bomb had been founded, so I wouldn't say I had ended my tenure here as a result of everything that went down back in 2007. I was going to follow Jeff and company no matter where they went; that's just how much they resonated with me as writers and reviewers. But I also knew that obviously it was a dumb thing to automatically condemn the rest of the staff still working here and the users who stuck on, so I still contributed some content here from time to time. This site still meant something to me; after all, not only was it the place that made first consider that video game criticism was worth my time as a writer, but I'd also accumulated a pretty small following of people who were kind enough to read my work and derive some meaning out of it. I always knew that Giant Bomb and GameSpot would probably have some unfortunate tension, but I wanted to do my best to not stoke those particular fires, even if, as you might be able to tell from several of my blog posts circa 2008, I was pretty excited to be a part of something new. And I'm still excited to be a part of that pancake-loving, Luchadeer-sporting, Endurance Running web site that is Giant Bomb.

  I guess that was ultimately the reason why I just stopped posting here in the end up until now. I didn't hate this place or anything, but I just felt like I didn't belong here anymore. Again, it was not the fault of any users, especially those I was and still am privileged to have on my friends list here. I just ultimately came to feel that my sort of content better fit with Giant Bomb's audience at that time and so, subconsciously, I suppose, I just shifted my focus exclusively to there. The work I've put out on there isn't a whole lot; I'm still in university, so time and money are both quite limited. But it shifted to there because I felt like it was ultimately the better home at the time, even if I met a good number of users on here who were just as intelligent and passionate about games as me, if not more so.

  I'm back here with this post now mostly to make myself known again. Now that Giant Bomb and GameSpot are sister sites, I feel like I should openly acknowledge what's been happening on my end and hopefully I've succeeded in that regard. I've noticed on the few occasions I've checked back in that I'm still ironically accumulating followers despite the utter silence, too, so I figured it didn't hurt to show them that they are, in fact, following somebody who's still alive and writing about video games somewhere.

  So where does this leave us now? I'm honestly not sure yet. I have my doubts that I'll regularly come back to using this site or at least this profile if only because, again, time constraints and whatnot. Having had my place at Giant Bomb and the pleasure of helping to shape its culture bit by bit since day one, I continue to feel that's really still home for me and my game discussion needs. But if you've been "following" me this whole time (I really wouldn't have been offended if you just stopped doing that), I figure you deserve at least a few details/updates about what's currently up with me. I'll just distill them in bullet point form because all of these paragraphs are making me look even more self-indulgent as a writer than usual.

  • You might know this already if you were reading my blog on here back in 2008, but I still go by the name of Pepsiman on Giant Bomb, the profile for which you can find here. And no, it's not a soft-drink reference. Or at the very least, not in the way you're thinking it is. Everything comes full-circle when it comes to how I do things on video game sites, we'll say.
  • I'm still the resident fan of Chie of Persona 4 fame. Sometimes I write ironically creepy things as a result of that and then sometimes the Giant Bomb community condones that.
  • I live in Japan now. Sometimes I even do really weird translation projects like this one. I also tend to skew pretty dumb in what I pick up, but then nobody says that to my face.

  There's probably more I could write. But that's the gist of it. If you still actually want to follow me in some capacity, that Giant Bomb profile is going to be the way to go for the forseeable future. What happens with this profile depends on how the new relationship between Giant Bomb and GameSpot pans out. But at the very least, I look forward to sharing the future with some old comrades and new ones.

  Thanks for reading and take care, duders.

  • Posted Mar 16, 2012 3:15 am GMT
  • Category: Relationships
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• 20Dec 09

  I played through this game twice for both your sake and mine.

  Much like how Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine was a precedent-setter for my own personal review in that it was something I both throughout disliked and spent too much time playing for my own good, the review I just put up for Silent Hill: Shattered Memories on here is special in its own way. You see, much like most other reviewers, standard protocol for me is to either beat a given game once or, as in Mad World's and Imagine's cases, spend enough time to get to know it well before providing my written verdict on it. But for Shattered Memories, I did neither; instead, I actually played through the game twice and upon falling in love with it during my first run, knew that was what would happen before posting a review.
  
  It's really rare for me to a second run of a game, especially so soon after its release, but the reasoning is simple: Shattered Memories is a fairly short game, but the experience is influenced by your own dialog choices and actions (the game monitors whether you enter a bathroom in the beginning, for god's sake!) and the extent of it was enough that I wanted to do a second run so I could know its features better before confidently writing my review. It's a game that's certainly worth at least two runs for a bunch of reasons outlined in my own linked opinion already, but I thought I'd contextualize it a little bit anyway.
  
  Well, to be honest, the point is to brazenly advertise my work in my own blog, but I digress. At least I accomplished something else while I was here.

  • Posted Dec 20, 2009 9:29 pm GMT
  • Category: Games
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• 17Sep 09

  Tales of the Abyss review is a go!

  Oh man, it's been nearly two months since the last post? Wow, I guess I really was gone for a while. Then I came back and university life resumed within about a day after that. Then Japanese homework came in. Then Scribblenauts came out AND OH GOD MY LIFE IS BEING EATEN UP.
  
  It's with that realization that I thought I'd take the time to quickly post another entry, if only to remind people that I am, actually, still alive and that I also wish to blatantly advertise my review of Tales of the Abyss that I just posted here on the site. I'm too mentally worn out to recap my thoughts here, but let's just say it's a pretty great game and that even if it is flawed, it may very well be worth your while to give it a whirl anyway. I hadn't played a Tales game since Symphonia, so while I still might be behind the times by going for Abyss instead of Vesparia, I'd say I still don't regret my decision to play the PlayStation 2.
  
  So yeah. Are you guys still alive, too? I'd hope so, but you can never be completely certain.

  • Posted Sep 17, 2009 5:22 pm GMT
  • Category: Games
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