Mersey Remakes

Well folks, it seems like I’ve only been back about 5 minutes but it’s time for me to take a temporary hiatus for a while as that old terror called life is about to catch up with me big time.

Caff has kindly taken over the competition results collating and publishing duties and the rest of the RR admin team will be going about their business and kicking people into gutters on my behalf. xnPlay is, of course, in very safe hands and we should even have a new reviewer hopefully making an appearance soon. Me? I’m bowing out of all the stuff that running RR and associated sites entails for a few weeks (yeah, you don’t get rid of me that easily) to tend to some family matters that are about to come up.

I’ve been going pretty flat out for a month now alternating between parenting, missus and throwing all my spare time down on RR and tech support to help folks get their sites back up and running again and y’know, enough for a while. I’ve got some more serious home related stuff I’m going to have to contend with (playing Mr Single Parent next week for one thing whilst the missus is away being a pretty major one) and I’m not going to really have the time or headspace to contend with other peoples problems or a workload like I’ve been managing. I’m also pretty tired of waking up, doing stuff for hours on end and then thinking “yay, finally got some time to myself” only to look at the clock and realise it’s 1am or something daft like that.

I’ll still be haunting the forums and IRC, obviously. You don’t get rid of me quite that easily but if anyone has a problem… well, don’t bring it to me. Try Google, try one of the other admins, try asking a nun. As long as no-one expects me to do owt for a while*, it’s all good. As they say in retail “…a refusal often offends”

So, thanks to everyone who helped get RR back up and running in one way or another and thanks to everyone for the support during a bit of a rough arse time. Catch you all around the place and I’ll be back on here banging my drum in a couple of weeks.

*”Would you like a game of Left4Dead?” being the honouarable exception, obviously.

Ah, been a while again since I did a little link-me-do trawl of the internet, so I guess it’s time to drop a few links in the pot and get stirring:

Casual Insider: Why Popcap could do better…

Where’s facepalm.gif when you need it? Mental article but worth a punt for the funnies alone.

“Their last game (Bejewelled Twist) was a clone of the first game that made them popular, and it didn’t include any new, never before seen, gameplay mechanics even though PopCap promised that the game would be revolutionary. It was also space themed: the worst selling theme statistically. Someone at PopCap needs a serious talking to.”

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…if you were making a project all over again?

That’s the general question I’ve been asking myself this week as I’ve plunged myself into writing something else. Well, ok, it’s not the only question I’ve been asking myself but a little bit more on that later.

I’ve been looking back at SY!NSO! and working out to myself what I felt comfortable with and class as worth it and what I don’t. I’m (unusually for me) quite proud of SY!NSO! as a game, but as always there’s something there which niggles away at me. In this case, the one thing I won’t be doing on my next game is going for pixel overload. Been there and done it twice now and already by the second time round, it was the law of diminishing returns. Sure SY!NSO! may have been a little bit fancier than War Twat but I’m left asking myself what actual use were the effects in it? Not the nice glowy ones. I *like* them. The complete obfuscation of the play area ones.

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