03.02.09
news in brief
Well, not so much “news” as a collection of links illustrating what I’ve been up to recently.
I never mentioned that Episode 3 of Stage Clear went live last week, marking three whole weeks of actually obeying the schedule we set ourselves. I’m off out to record another this evening, which will bring us to a month. I’m as surprised as you no doubt are (and slightly frightened, if I’m being truthful).
We’ve had great feedback to Stage Clear so far, which is wonderful. To be perfectly truthful, we set out to make a handful of recordings with the assumption that only a couple of our friends would listen, and that they’d get bored after the first few. However, our download figures are significantly better than that, and we’ve had fantastic feedback, which has taken us somewhat by surprise. At this point, we’re thinking about bizarre things like “growing the audience”, but honestly, the only way we’re keen on approaching that is through word of mouth – so if you like the podcast, please do tell all your friends / fake Facebook friends / forum pals / mortal enemies. (Of course, if you don’t like the podcast, you should keep your filthy mouth shut*.)
On a more actually-serious writing front, I’ve been doing bits and pieces for The Times again recently – their games coverage is genuinely going from strength to strength at the moment (no, seriously), with me on the sidelines chipping in context and analysis columns to go alongside some really good feature spreads. Most recently I talked a bit about “How Nintendo took on the world. And won.”, and to go along with the launch of Halo Wars last week, I penned a column “In defence of game sequels”.
Oh, I also got a barrel of good feedback for last week’s Eurogamer / GamesIndustry.biz column, Creative Downturn, so I’m rather chuffed with that too.
I think that’s about the lot. Other than that, I fear that my life has largely been absorbed in a whirlwind of learning kanji and new grammar structures, as my attempts to absorb Japanese at a ridiculous pace continue. You’ve all been spared any further political rants as a result – it’s not that I haven’t been shouting at the television, it’s just that I don’t have time to write it all down right now…
* Or tell us why you don’t like it. We’ll either improve based on your suggestion, or mock you publicly in the next episode, depending on how much we like you.
