Scop’s Blog

Heh, sorry about that. Kind of forgot to renew the domain. So that was it. Year one. Things certainly are not where I thought they would be when I started this, but they could be a lot worse.

Every day, I get up and drive to work, where I rub elbows with some of the best game designers in the world. I know things a (true?) game journalist would strangle an ox to find out, but a niggling little thing called an NDA keeps my pen away from the page. I enjoy the work, but it is not permanent. I am a contractor, and my employer/customer owes me nothing. One of these days, they will tell me not to come in tomorrow.

When I saw the new web hosting fees it would take to keep this venture of mine going, I flinched, I faltered, and this blog died. As more of my friends took notice, they asked me why my site was down, and I had to think it through again. A career in journalism covering video games is still very much my dream job, and this website is my best avenue into that job. In the end, I could not give this up completely.

It was easy to ignore the cost of maintaining this site during the first year. I bought the web hosting on a special, and only paid $30 for the entire year. Now, I pay monthly, so I should have much more incentive to get use out of it. That, or I will have to keep justifying it month after month. Either way, this site will not stand idle.

A lot has changed. As I type, I am listening to music from last.FM as it is playing through my Xbox. I am backing up my hard drive right now, so that I can upgrade to Windows 7. Games I salivated over last year are sitting on my entertainment center, thoroughly enjoyed or ignored. A puppy is curled up under my desk, stirring every time I shift in my chair. Tomorrow, I am going to go back to work. At a game studio.

This rambling post is not a second wind. I am not attacking my keyboard with renewed vigor. This is not an upbeat promise that I will get my act together and start posting content on any kind of schedule. This is my way of saying…

…stay tuned.

Knightengale (who has contributed to this site in the past) is quite skilled at, and I say this in the nicest possible way, annoying the crap out of me. One of his latest offenses was claiming to be disinterested in the sandbox genre. I was shocked.

In one sentence, he managed to dismiss many games I adored. Assassin’s Creed? Fallout 3? Gasp, Saint’s Row? Come to find out, he had an extremely narrow definition of sandbox games. He essentially restricted it to the GTA series and “clones” thereof, such as Saint’s Row. This cooled me down some, but as I prepared to revise his definition, I realized… mine was not very good, either.

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I was standing next to a Gears of War poster the other day (one of many), and it had Emergence Day written on it:  11.12.2006.  I found it hard to believe that the game was nearly three years old already.  It has even been eight months since Gears 2 came out, now.

Oddly for me, it got me thinking about how graphics have evolved in the past few years, or, rather, how they have not. (continue reading…)

“Sin to Win” is a new promotional contest being run by EA to promote Dante’s Inferno.  In this contest you enter by submitting as many pictures as you can of yourself being photographed with a booth babe at Comic-con.  The grand prize?  You get yourself a night of paparazzi, access to an exclusive event, a limo ride, a “SINful dinner”, and the supposed hook: you get to do all this with two booth babes.

Despite encouraging acts of lust, I’d like to put the morality of the issue aside.  I say this because when I first saw this contest I thought with my head, “Aww yeah!”  Then I thought with my other head, “Wait, this is a load of bullshit.” (continue reading…)

I know the last post is still fresh, but this is just too good to pass up.

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