For a few weeks, Sean and I became embroiled in a high score battle. This is harder than it sounds when your iDevice doesn’t support Game Centre, but helpfully Magnetic Billiards displays your aggregate score on the level select screen. For the benefit of those of you willing to try out the free levels, my final top score (before I moved on to the premium tables) was 219,790.

Considering what a breakthrough 100,000 felt like, I was quite proud of doubling my score! I’m pretty sure I ploughed Sean’s best efforts deep into the ground too, which was a nice bonus. Without having access to Game Centre’s global rankings, I decided to take my case straight to the top.

(I continued to play and improve my score for a few more days, obviously)

I only really wanted to gauge my success compared to the rest of the world, but then this happened!

I emailed my address and we had a little chat about scoring strategies (I had just started using my spare lives to set up massive Buzz combo bonuses on my final shots) and a few days later I came home from work to find a jiffy bag on my doormat. And that is how I came to be in possession of an ultra-rare set of real-life cluster shape flipcards!

EXCLUSIVE INFO: The cards include one cluster shape I’d never seen before, called a ‘jam doughnut’ – a ring of one colour with a single ball of another colour ‘trapped’ in the centre. It was worth one full star in each bonus category (which makes it about twice as good as any other cluster) but after painstakingly recreating one in the game I can confirm that they do not actually exist – I just got a regular old ‘ring’ bonus instead.

Ste also mentioned that the top scores including the premium tables came to around 2,000,000, which sounded completely insane. Now that I’ve managed to score 150,000 on one premium table alone, I am starting to understand how it might happen!

But wait, there’s more! Using its Bluetooth connection and GlovePIE, I can hook it up to Wii and PS3 controllers and use them to play games! This means I can make stuff in Game Maker and then play it on my TV using ‘real’ control pads! THIS IS AWESOME! I don’t dislike PC gaming, but I feel happier with a d-pad and as few buttons as possible.

My dog game is in the final stage of polishing up, but is still some way from being finished. I wanted it finished by the end of March, but now it’s looking more like mid-May. If I’m going to catch up to my ‘one game every three months’ goal, this basically means my next game will need to be completed in a single month! I feel bad about letting the project drift this much, but considering my lack of art/programming training, I’m still quite proud of how it’s turning out. Creating complicated, multi-faceted arty stuff on your own feels pretty great!

In other news, some of the stuff I’ve been writing for DarkZero has started to appear on the site, and we are doggedly maintaining an almost-weekly podcast schedule despite assorted minor chaos in our personal lives. Fake journalism is giving me a lot to think about. I came into it feeling pretty cocky about the quality of my writing, but when I step back and re-read my articles I still find lots of imperfections – usually to do with weird topical jumps, where I’ve edited a group of paragraphs half a dozen times and lost the original narrative flow. I have no formal training in this sort of thing, and I’m becoming more aware of that fact.

More importantly, I’m reassessing my views on the games journalism business. I’ve become even more critical of sites that publish press releases as news, but my cynical view of PR goons is softening. Now that I’ve started to come into direct contact with these people, I’m finding that some them are genuinely likable! I think it’s a point of ‘professional’ integrity that I don’t let my personal relationships influence my writing, but I can see how they would – I already feel a bit awkward about some of the things I’ve published, which is surprising. If I wanted a serious career doing this stuff, I would probably start glossing over negative opinions and not challenging anyone too.

Fortunately I don’t!

Again.

2009 seemed like a pretty weak year for games. I’m not sure how coloured my views are by the fact I couldn’t afford to buy many new titles, but when I look back at what I’ve been playing, the only games released last year were:

• Street Fighter IV (looks ugly; plays great; less depth than SF3 but easier to get into)
• Left 4 Dead 2 (wonderful – better than the original in every way)
• New Super Mario Bros. Wii (not very challenging; co-op is fun but hard to co-ordinate)
• Torchlight (excellent Diablo clone – totally unoriginal, but good if you enjoy grinding)
• Dragon Age: Origins (a fierce throwback to infuriating dungeon-crawl RPGs of yore)
• GTA: The Lost and Damned (good fun, except for the repetitive missions)
• Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II (a series of good ideas ruined in fascinating ways)

There have been a few other games I wanted to play but missed out on (Little King’s Story, Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box and GTA: Chinatown Wars come to mind) but one way or another I’m sure I’ll get my hands on them eventually.

In 2010, I’m looking forward to Bayonetta, Mass Effect 2, Monster Hunter Tri, Pokémon HeartGold/SoulSilver, Dead Rising 2, Final Fantasy XIII, Brink, Fable III, that Miles Edgeworth game, Splinter Cell: Conviction if it ever sees the light of day, Super Street Fighter IV although I’ll be annoyed when they inevitably try to charge £40 for it,  rumours abound of GTA V popping up in time for Christmas, and hopefully we’ll get a PAL release of Muscle March.

Also in 2010, I’m going to continue learning to use UnrealEd and Hammer and fiddling around in Game Maker. I have begun doing some research into using games as an occupational therapy activity – more on that in a future post – which may eventually evolve into some kind of PhD project. But more importantly than all that, I have vowed that this is the year in which I will finally capture my first Mew.

Finding a job in games is tough. I don’t want to rake through the details just yet, but my initial experiences of life within the games industry have been generally negative. It’s a little galling to hear games companies blame the government for a lack of fresh talent in the industry when many of the same companies are knocking you back for your lack of experience, but I’ll save that discussion for another day… it’s a complicated issue, and I’m in no mood to write a balanced analysis right now. In any case, it hasn’t been enough to put me off – I have had some good news too, but I’d prefer not to write about those chickens until at least one of them has hatched.

That aside, I’ve been playing yet more Team Fortress 2, hacking through another dozen stages of Fire Emblem, finishing Fable (again), Fable II, Black & White 2 and Mass Effect (again), failing to finish Left 4 Dead on expert, and having a terrible time trying to run Quake Wars on my knackered old PC. I’ve had a few cautious forays into GTA IV ranked play, but having to listen to XBox Live comm chatter makes for a painful experience. I can’t begin to understand why I can’t get the co-op achievement for playing with my friends.

As a result of all this, I have quite a few things I want to write about. I’m still not sure where I’ll find the time, but a lot of it will just involve adapting things I’ve already written – I found an excellent forum post I drafted out years ago, about golden rule growth models and the three dozer build. I feel like writing some reviews too, but (obviously) it all depends on what I’ve been playing. Right now I feel more inclined to write about reviewing, and games journalism in general.