So have have food now as Terry got me to accept there offer to buy me food and they got me about $140 of food so am good for the mouth. Now don't thank they did it out of the kindness of there heart no they did it to cover there asses as a payee has to make sure the bills are paid and I have food and since they gave most of my money to mother I had almost none for food. I have a girlfriend now and she's been staying over for the past week or so and it feels pretty good not been alone all the time and a few days ago Terry's girlfriend flew from Delaware(I think that's where she been) to his house and they pretty much been ****ing 24/7 so he's pretty happy. I think a week ago we made a podcast and it was pretty good but heads up Terry and his father who was on it too made some racist remarks so I have been on the fence as to uploading it I might if you guys want it as it has some pretty funny parts. Yesterday I rode my bike about 4 miles to wal-mart to buy a game as I was bored and it was like 5AM and came home with 2 mini blinds and 12 fluorescent light bulbs and my question is why?

(And the users who ignore them.)

A while back I wrote a blog entry on the correlation (or lack thereof) between review scores of games on the three consoles of this generation and the sales of their games. Although this was all well and good, there was one thing that this did not really provide to the reader: namely, relevance to the ultimate purpose of gaming, that being entertainment. Judging by the fact that user scores did not correlate very strongly with sales either, we can reasonably conclude that it is probably not the case that greater sales of a game necessarily imply a greater degree to which those who purchased it enjoyed it. In other words, the mere fact that many people bought a game - often against the advice of reviewers everywhere - doesn't necessarily mean that they had fun playing it.

Indeed, probably one of my greatest mistakes when writing that entry was the unjustifiably rosy conclusion that I inserted, in which I said that people were buying games that they want to play when they ignore reviews. I was called on that statement in the comments section, and those who did so were absolutely right: the evidence I presented did not at all support that statement at all, and I was wrong in making it. It might have been more accurate to say that people are buying games that they think they want to play. There was, after all, no strong correlation between user reviews and sales, either.

But nonetheless, the results of that study do raise a rather pertinent question: If people ignore the reviews of a game that they buy, is that likely to be a good idea? Are they likely to be vindicated, or will they instead probably curse the fact that they didn't listen to the reviewers? To what extent ought people trust a review, if they are unsure whether or not they will enjoy a game? How often do players in general and critics agree, and where do they agree? These are all questions that I intend to investigate within the bounds of this article.

To begin with, I went mining for data once again at Metacritic and at GameSpot. This time around, I concerned myself with two points of data per game: the Metacritic average and the GameSpot user average. The former I used to gauge the general feel of the critics for a game, and the latter I used to gauge the general feel of the masses for a game. To ensure that the overall score could not be influenced too much by one single person, I filtered out all of the games that did not have at least ten reviews both by critics and by users.

People will surely tell me that this is an inexact way of doing things, especially the GameSpot user average (it being a self-selected sample), and on this point they would be correct. Nonetheless, given that the question posed above concerns itself with those who bought a game, not all those who were uninterested in it from the start, I feel that this is a good enough metric to use with which to examine the question.

Once I had my data, I next separated games into a number of categories. A well-received game was one where both critics and users gave it an average score of at least 8.0 (e.g., Metal Gear Solid 4 got a 9.3 from critics and a 9.4 from users). An average game was one where both critics and users gave it an average score of at least 7.0, but less than 8.0 (e.g., Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe got a 7.5 from critics and a 7.8 from users). And a poorly received game was one where both critics and users gave it an average score of less than 7.0 (e.g., Wii Play got a 5.8 from critics and a 6.4 from users).*

Astute readers will notice, however, that all three of these designations are ones where the critics and users agreed, on average, on the overall quality of the game. I also made two additional designations: a user-favored game was one where critics' overall assessment of it was one level less than the users' (e.g., critics thought it average while users thought it well-received), and where the users' average score was at least 0.5 points higher than the critics' average score (e.g., Spectrobes got a 6.3 from critics and a 7.5 from users). A user favorite game was one where critics thought it poorly received, but users thought it well-received (e.g., Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology got a 6.6 from critics and an 8.3 from users).

One could also invent the designations of "critic-favored game" and "critic favorite game", but these proved to be utterly nonexistent: out of the hundreds of reviews I sifted through, in no case did critics ever review a game significantly higher than users did. So I will not include these designations for consideration.

Finally, I denote that the users agree with the critics when the average critic score is within 0.5 points of the average user score. The percent agreement for a given console is the percentage of time this is the case for the games on that console.

Note that all of these designations are completely arbitrary - one could alter them to get slightly different results. I assert that they are reasonable, however: the range of 7.0-7.9 is indeed a roughly average score for a video game, and GameSpot presents an increment of 0.5 points as the smallest tangible differentiator between two games. Both of these facts I have effectively used verbatim in this article.

Now that we have both the data and the terminology in place, we can analyze the makeup of the libraries of each of the three current-gen consoles and the two current-gen handhelds:

PS3

Well-received: 42%
Average: 23%
Poorly received: 15%
User-favored: 18%
User favorite: 2%
% agreement: 67%

Xbox 360

Well-received: 32%
Average: 21%
Poorly received: 22%
User-favored: 23%
User favorite: 1%
% agreement: 56%

Wii

Well-received: 23%
Average: 18%
Poorly received: 23%
User-favored: 31%
User favorite: 3%
% agreement: 41%

DS

Well-received: 28%
Average: 18%
Poorly received: 16%
User-favored: 30%
User favorite: 8%
% agreement: 40%

PSP

Well-received: 24%
Average: 9%
Poorly received: 9%
User-favored: 51%
User favorite: 7%
% agreement: 24%

(Note that these may not add to 100% due to rounding.)

At face value, the Wii's detractors would seem to be vindicated at least somewhat: in terms of percentages, the PS3 does, in fact, have almost twice as many well-received games as the Wii, and the Wii does indeed have more poorly received games than the PS3 (with the Xbox 360 in the middle in both cases). However, if you take a second look, the picture becomes less clear: the Wii, in turn, also has almost twice as many user-favored games than the PS3. In fact, both sides in System Wars appear to be right to a certain extent: while it appears to be the case that the Wii does indeed have worse games than the PS3 and Xbox 360 on average, it also appears to be the case that critics reviewing Wii games do, in fact, not seem to quite "get it" to the same degree that critics reviewing games for the other consoles do. In a blog entry a while back where I discussed reviewer bias, it was suggested in the comments section that perhaps all reviewers were biased in the same direction. I said at the time that I did not know how one would gain evidence for this assertion, but perhaps the above might actually qualify, although I say this only as a passing musing that I imagine may well not stand up to serious scrutiny.

Interestingly enough, however, the biggest rebels of the consoles' and handhelds' userbase were not the Wii gamers, but in fact the PSP gamers. Fully 58% of PSP games were rated significantly higher by the users than by critics, and on only 24% of PSP games - that's less than a quarter! - did users agree with the critics' precise assessment of the games. This came as quite the surprise to me, but there it is. I won't claim to understand why this is the case - users are free and invited to venture their own theories if they have them.

But back to the question at the beginning. Based on this data, what can we say with respect to the question of whether or not people are liable to regret it if they don't listen to the critics when buying a game? Well, we can more or less say "it depends".

On consoles, it would certainly seem to be the case that the critics are more in line with the users on the PS3 than the users on the Wii. In 80% of cases PS3 users agreed with the critics' rough evaluation of the game (well-received, average, poorly received), and users agreed with the critics' precise score 67% of the time. On the Wii, on the other hand, in only 64% of cases did Wii users agree with the critics' rough evaluation of the game, and users agreed with the critics' precise score only 41% of the time. On the PS3, in only 20% of cases did users score a game significantly higher than the critics, whereas on the Wii that figure rises to 34%. In other words, on the Wii, over 1 out of every 3 games released is received significantly better by the users than by critics, whereas on the PS3 it's only 1 out of every 5 games.

On the other hand, however, on both consoles it was far from a majority of cases where users broke from the critics in terms of liking a game significantly more.

On the handheld side, the picture is much bleaker for critics - the DS looks much like the Wii, except for having more games well-received by both parties and fewer games poorly received by both parties, and the PSP is just off in its own little world, with users in agreement with critics' rough evaluation of a game only 42% of the time, and rating games significantly higher 58% of the time - well over a majority of cases.

So what should we conclude? Well, the conclusion should come as no surprise to one who is a savvy buyer of video games: reviews are generally not useless, but at the same time they are most certainly not the be-all and end-all authority of quality. People will very likely find it useful to read the review just to learn the bare facts of what is in the game at least as much as to listen to the reviewer's subjective opinion of what is in the game. Those whose main console is the PS3 are the most likely to find that their subjective assessment of a game is in line with the critics', while those whose main console is the Wii are the least likely. Those whose main handheld is the PSP should probably just completely ignore review scores, as in this case they actually do appear to be almost useless in terms of predicting whether or not the reader will agree with the critics' assessment of the game being reviewed.

I know that this almost certainly will not stop those who consider an 8.5 on a single site to be a flop while considering a 9.0 on that site to be pure AAA gold. But there it is, and I hope at least someone can make use of it. And, of course, if you've already got a scheme that works perfectly for you, don't let me tell you otherwise.

*Note that this is not quite precisely true, but I didn't want to take up even more space to enunciate the precise definition since it is not entirely straightforward. To be completely precise, a game is considered well-received, average, or poorly received if both critics and users rate it with that score, or if the critics rate it with that score and the users' rating is less than 0.5 points away. For example, a game that the critics rate as 8.1 and the users rate as 7.9 will still be considered well-received. This is to avoid the oddity of having percentages not add up to 100% since, for a game to be user-favored, there must be at least a 0.5-point difference between the scores.

Anyone wanna recommend some good manga for me to read? I'm currently reading Code Geass. Any others that you guys wanna recommend?

As most of you guys know, I work at a used bookstore on occasion in exchange for books. I hadn't worked there in three months, being too busy with other work and traveling. I went back a couple of weeks ago, only to find the one person I can handle working with has quit.

I wasn't going to work there anymore since I don't work with people I don't know, but the owner begged me to stay. They were moving the trade center, which is separate from the main store, and she said I was the only one she could trust to get the books arranged at the new building. Her and the pile of manga I wanted convinced me to stay and work.

I worked Thursday-Saturday two weeks ago, and Monday last week. The guy bringing me the books from the old store said I was working him to death since I was getting the books on the shelves faster than he could bring them.

We got it done, and I got 45 volumes of manga, an anime box set, and another anime dvd. Here's a picture of it all (along with the Tales soundtrack I bought). I also got some more books on the Appalachian Trail.

Oh, and if anyone knows where I can buy the second volume of the Tales 10th anniversary soundtrack (at a reasonable price, not that $76.95 listing on ebay), then I'll love you forever. It was supposed to be mine for free, but who remembers to check back after 8 damn months? >_>

Thanks again for Dragon Quest V, Ron. It brightened up my otherwise bad day yesterday.

*Edit - I tagged this as an editorial because that's what it is. Unfortunately, that also put it in the community soapbox, which wasn't my intention. It doesn't belong there, and as soon as the matter was brought to my attention, I changed the topic. I apologize.

If you've been followingmy tweetsas I play throughUncharted 2, you already know that I don't particularly like the game. Not only do I not like it, but I can't fathom how it currently has a 97 score at Metacritic.com.

Not one of the 75 people who have reviewed the game has given it less than a 9.0. Nobody in the entire industry seems to think that the game is anything less than stellar. It makes me furious that not one person has registered a dissenting opinion on the game -- I'm legitimately upset by this.

I'm an idiot -- a complete moron.

Please read the rest of this article at Bitmob.com. I hope you find that it's worth your time.

http://bitmob.com/index.php/mobfeed/nobody-should-care-that-i-dislike-uncharted-2.html

It's official. I got myself a new acc (about time if I say soo myself...) Now here's the thing. I hardly ever go on this site. Ever. However in consideration that 1: This account shows my age 2 years older than my actual age, 2: I was elevenwhen I made this account, thus explaining the part-overrated and part-damn god-forsaking name, and finally, 3: I do in fact have a YouTube account that I use waytoo much time on, conveniently bringing me a user name that is simply impossiblefor me to forget,I hereby announce that the name of my new account...[Insert dramatic suspense here]... UchihaFate008. You see, back then, I could freely admit I was quite the 007-fan, contributing to the ending 3 digits. Plus it rhymed with Fate^^ As for the Uchiha part... I solely have to give to an old friend who's name I have regrettably forgotten. You know who you are, mysterious person.

I just bought a new boat and decided to take 'er for the maiden voyage this past weekend.
This is my first boat and I wasn't quite sure of the exact Standard Operating Procedures for launching it off a ramp, but I figured it couldn't be too hard.
I consulted my local boat dealer for advice, but they just said "don't let the trailer get too deep when you are trying to launch the boat".

Well, I don't know what they meant by that as I could barely get the trailer in the water at all!
The stupid truck would die and start floating before the trailer even got close to deep enough!

What am I doing wrong? Should I load the truck down with some lead or maybe rocks so it doesn't float?

Anyhow, here's a picture. See for yourself. What am I doing wrong?

Just leveled up once agian. 4 months it took me to get to the next level. That is all.

This would be my newest short story. Enjoy! And I would like your feedback (:






He was a regular customer at the supermarket. It was not because of the goods they had to offer. It was more than that. It was something else - something that could change his life forever. Even though he didn't really need to buy anything, he would always enter and find something to buy. He was compelled to enter it time after time.

He would always approach the same cashier. Even if the line extended to a massive number, he would wait, for it was the only reason he would be there; the cashier.

To him the cashier was indescribable. She was simply the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was breathtaking. She had everybody under her spell. He was the most affected. He was enchanted, captivated.

Her long blonde hair fell beautifully over her shoulders. She had a gleam in her eye that could light the night. They were light brown, and they sparkled in the light. Her nose was small, fitting perfectly in her face. Her upper lip was perfectly curved, sitting on the throne that was her lower lip. She would wear no lipstick. When she would smile she would show her charming dimples. She would wear large, thin silver hoop earrings that would dangle a few centimeters above her shoulders.

He had never actually talked to her. Not because he hadn't the nerve to do so, but because she was older than him... a lot older than him; for he was nineteen years of age, and she twenty-five. He knew only her name, the name that blessed the receipt he would receive from her. Anna...

Anna, the fairest of names, to the fairest of them all. Sometimes he would drift away, forgetting that he was in line. He would daydream, and float away to a land of dreams, a land where Anna belonged to him and him alone. And he would stare at her.

She would catch his attention, retrieve him from his land of dreams and bring him back to reality. She would do so by saying some words. "You're up, sir. Your turn. Excuse me..." Her voice was magical, more beautiful that a thousand angels playing their harps. Sometimes she would lean over from her cashier stand and touch his hand. The touch of her hand would wake him from his dreams and send him to another magical world.

It was obvious to Anna that he was deeply in love. She knew about it. She enjoyed it... she cherished it. She would see him almost everyday. The situation he would put himself just to see her made her admire him. She might have even developed some feelings towards him.

It was an awkward relationship, if there existed one. He would just smile at her, and she would smile back. No words were exchanged except the occasional greetings. He had absolutely no idea what to do, and he wasn't going to continue that way...

It happened when he was the only one in line. It was night, with two hours left for midnight. The supermarket wasn't very crowded, albeit it did have some customers. He was standing in front of her, staring as usual, waiting for nothing in particular. She was checking his groceries; gum, a Snickers bar, KitKat, Galaxy chocolate, and a variety of other confetti. A speeding car applied the brakes and slid across the gravel outside until it came to a halt. Two men wearing masks entered the supermarket.

They were both armed. They looked dangerous. They were dangerous. They had a plan devised. One man stood a good distance from Anna. The other man approached Anna and threatened her. He ordered her to open the cashbox. He had a gun to her head. The other man, who wasn't next to them, was making sure that nobody did anything heroic.

The man got what he wanted; he emptied the cash register. He ran to the door and said, "Kill her."

"What?" came the reply. The man was now standing at the door.

"I said kill her!" He said and ran.

He was looking in disbelief. The man hesitantly aimed at Anna. She started screaming. She was paralyzed, unable to move.

He jumped forward and blacked out.

He woke up and looked at his surroundings. He was lying in a hospital bed. His arm hurt. He looked at it and discovered that the bullet had hit it. It didn't hit major arteries. He looked to his right. He saw what he would always dream of. He saw her. She was smiling at him.

And he would drift off to his land of dreams, the land where Anna was his and his alone... only to return back to reality, where Anna would be his forever..

All rights reserved to me of course

Hey Everyone, this is Dilan94 (Also known as Dilan11)

I'm here quickly to post that anyone that has been on my profile recently has known that i've been MIA (Missing in Action) since late Janurary. I'm sadly here not to say that I am coming back, but that I will be continually gone from the gamespot community hopefully intill July.

This MIA is very unusual then my usual yearly absenses, where I leave from about September to December, and come back for the rest of the year. This MIA has actually been here since about last year September!

I wanted to apologies for giving any hope that I would be coming back anytime soon. I know i've logged on a few times and have said that I will be coming back; but the opposite happened.

I hope that you guys can understand why I'm MIA, life's getting tough here and school is odviously getting harder as the years and days pass on. I've also been doing other things, if you get what i'm saying . To be honest with you, I have no idea what games are the best right now, and I haven't played a console game in about a month

Because of this MIA I will also have to hand in my leader position in The Runescape & FunOrb Union. If you are part of this union, I would suggest that you tell other's in the union that I will be giving away this position. I do have a few names in mind, but if you do want this position, please COMMENT ON THIS BLOG. I refuse to read my unread messages, because I honestly do not have time.

If I do come back in July, it would be appreciative if I do get my leader position back, but if you feel that you deserve to keep that position, thats fine.

I'll talk to you guys later, hopefully sooner then later.

-Dilan

Something ive noticed is that when people "come back" they expect everyone to remember them and talk to them, when they realize that other users are gone or not interested in them is when they trully leave the site...so im coming back expecting all of you to be either dead, lost in the woods or homophobic (not gay...it was just random)

Where have i been the past 10 months? well gosh i gave you a heads up!! i was...

In the US for some time (i live in mexico yup) then i went to Guam then on to Thailand for some time, stoped in Vietnam for a couple weeks and toped it of with China...then flew home

So whats hip now? wheres the good unions? who are the cool cats?

Gamespot really changed A Lot.

Have you guys ever wondred what the future of video games is? Well this will give you an idea, awsome but kinda scary at the same time. http://www.cracked.com/article_15243_next-25-years-video-games.html

Well i was in a hurry the other day so i didn't really have time to finish what i was going to write on the last blog so i thought i'll do it here. Anyway when i was talking about the band i actually found a pic of me and the Drumline in competition.

This was taken at our school quad and i am the guy with the biggest bass drum. Just to inform you i have upgraded and am now playing the 2nd bass drum ( The second smallest one)

This was us at the vallejo Winterline show and it was our very first year for The Drumline through out our whole school's history of competiting at a Drumline competition. We ended up actually placing in third place novice division.

This was Us at the Grenada Winterline show and it was our second competition this year for Drumline. WE were hoping to take home first place in the novice division but we ended up getting suprised by the Judges saying we were so good that they bumped us up to the Advance division and we placed third. I also made a video of youtube of our porformance.Here it is.I dont know how to actually make it show up on the blog as the actual video so just copy and paste the site on your url address and watch it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2HuQtORfUc

Next year will be great for me. I will be a junior in high school and i will only need two more years till i graduate. Also i can now get an off campus school pass and actually leave at lunch to go out to eat. MY schedule next year will be PreCal, Chemistry, Drumline, English 11 honors, Yearbook, And AP U.S. History. I'm going to have a very busy school year next year, but i'll find time to mange to get back on here as much as i can.

So far my summer has been pretty chill and i am actually spending time with my Friends. Just the other day i went over to my friends house and we just stayed there from 11 am to 5 playing some intense Brawl and some old Nintendo 64games. After that he got out his electric guitar and started playing. He started teaching me how to play too. And today i am going to be hanging out with the Drumline and were going to go play some guitar hero 3 and make a video of us and put on youtube. I'm going to be the one editing it.So i'll tell you guys when i actually make it and you can watch it. I'll tell you guys how today will go when i come back.

Also for those of you who didn't know i am not dead and i do exist. Well this long has been going on for a while and i dont want to make this extremly long since my blogs are usually short so i just want to thank everyone who is still my friend and hasn't forgotten me. And i will be posting back on unions and being more active in gamespot. You can't get rid of me that easily.

Ciao!

~Sithlord300~

After a lot of people left GS, people who made this site worth to visit for me. It's now time to leave this site myself. I canceled my subscribtion a while ago but this will continue till November.

The reaon why I finally decided to leave is mainly cause the upcoming site of Jeff and Ryan, called Giant Bomb. Here I hope to find my refugee instead of being forced to visit other lame sites like this one.

Anyway, all by all had a nice time here at GS, wrote some nice blogs and got to know good people. Unfortunately this comes to an end here. Though, if u are in need to contact me u can always check my own blog, Gamebits or wait for the membership options (if they come) at Giant Bomb and contact me there.

Further on there only this let for me to say.... Sayonara, have a good life and make sure to keep playing games... it makes us who we are! That's all folks...

Gram signing out.

http://www.giantbomb.com/

Update your files accordingly.

...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

Sad day, indeed, guys

All this Jeff Gertsmann affair is really disturbing. Until Jeff is re-hired again or proof that he was not fired
because of the K&L review, I am not coming back here.

Rendarian, Visionary, Sonicare, Crovax.... it has been great to discuss and share opinions with you, guys,
these last four years. Hope I see you soon.

farewell

Milikito

well for anyone who gives a damn about my blog posts (you sad sad people) I am fairly fruturated that nintendo had the guts to do that again. I accept it and am willing to wait (what else should i do) but i am thuroughly *spelled wrong, P-O'd. But, the longer the wait, the better the game, it seems so for nintendo.

Well, 2007 has long since come, and is almost gone (Qtr 3 now), and STILL no Spore or Starcraft II

Is there anything else the dev's wanna delay??

I thought Starcraft II was supposed to come out this September, and yet there's still NO listed release date on Gamespot

Blizzard is famous for delays, but come on already And Spore, the one I've most been looking forward to for like, 5 years is delayed until Q2 2008 Sigh, I'm pretty sure they'll be worth the wait (at least spore will, Starcraft looks like a rehash), but still, waiting does not make this gamer happy

Until then, I'll be continuing to play GuildWars.. I have all 4 now, the 3 and the expansion.. Hours upon thousands of hours of entertainment there

Das