For all you gamers out there a kind request. If you have a Xbox Live gamertag or a Playstation ID, please add me to your friends list. All too often I am looking for someone to play, let’s say Burnout Paradise, Gears of War, or Call of Duty 4 with and there’s nobody there. Well, there are people online, but getting chewed out by a 15 year old from South Alabama is a little annoying.

My Xbox gamertag is: D33F (yes I know…)

My PS ID is: ZeroAchievements

My Wii number?? Hell until they implement a user friendly system I won’t swap ‘friend codes’ (the name itself… commonnn).

See you online!

Long blogpost ahead. The executive summary: I did a newspaper article which got picked up in other (news) media. Which is, of course, really flattering. But I also learned a lot about the inner workings of the news media. And as I am planning on writing about game journalism in my PhD and because I have a general interest in news media, I wrote this down in order to vent some heartfelt joy, surprise, and a little bit of anger. Here’s how it went down.
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Currently I am working part time as I am struggling a bit with my health. Nothing too serious, but it can take a while – months rather than weeks -, and a lot of sleeping to recover. So sadly I am not spending enough time on my PhD, I am writing far less than I want to and I am waiving off all kinds of cool projects.

Today I did a very small review of the Xbox 360 horizontal shooter Omega Five in Dagblad De Pers (see page 15, .pdf). The game is totally hardcore and I had some fun with it.

As I promised (to myself mostly) I uploaded the Valve studio profile we (Shenja van der Graaf and I) did for GMR magazine. It’s downloadable here in .pdf. The two paged story is on how Valve works and a bit on the making (and testing of Portal). Exact reference is: ‘Ontwikkelaarsprofiel: Valve Software‘. In: GMR. 2.5, 2007, page 40-41.

I have this weird hobby of reading up on US politics. I loved Woodwards trilogy (Bush at War, Plan of Attack, State of Denial), Hersh’s Chain of Command and Galbraith’s insider look at Iraq and his three-state solution in The End of Iraq. When I arrived in NYC from Boston after a four hour train ride last December I talked to a man next to me. We had the o-so-casual conversation about me being Dutch and him having visited the Netherlands (he had been in Almelo of all places). We talked a little bit and I admitted I am actually quite intrigued by US politics. He was amazed as he found politicians stupid. The last weeks have been extra newsworthy with all the election stuff (gooo Obama!). As a result of all this I wrote a newspaper piece yesterday for De Pers on the presidential cadidates’ take on media & children and games in particular: “Games zijn geen spelletje voor politici VS”.

Check it out here (.pdf) at page 19. I had some fun with Mitt Romney’s views. This guy is truly delusional: “I’ve proposed that we enforce our obscenity laws again and that we get serious against those retailers that sell adult video games that are filled with violence and that we go after those retailers.” Right. Buying adult games in the US is not that simple. I tried to buy Manhunt 2 and had to show my ID. I still think this is a parental issue, not a legislative one.

At the bottom of the page there’s also a review of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (PS3). I really loved it. HD galore!