No, I’m not normally this fickle. The reason for this abhorrent change in the blog’s appearance is a routine test.

I should return to having a semblance of taste within 48 hours, hopefully.

I have another game review published. Actually it was published the same day as the Football Manager review, but I have to spread them out somehow and it also needed some minor edits to it before it was ready for public consumption. Anyway, it’s of Hellgate London, but I was a little too proud of the intro I wrote for it to make a simple text link:

“Demons, monsters and creatures of the night have taken over near future London in this new RPG from the team behind the acclaimed Diablo series.

Alan Martin grabs a +4 bastard sword, a +2 beard and his oyster card to see whether the monsties are worth braving Oxford Street HMV on a Saturday for…“

I’m quite pleased with this one. Feedback not only welcome, but actively encouraged.

The new review is up, as indicated by my handy del.icio.us RSS feed on the left. The lazy or the incompetant can just click here for the review, though.

Accumulatively over the years, I have spent many hours, days and weeks on the Football/Championship Manager series, so it feels nice to put nearly a decade’s worth of wasted time into something (semi) constructive. Amongst the most memorable of the moments playing the game, was when I discovered that one of the older versions (I forget which one) used your manager’s name when creating new players. As I’d maturely named my manager ‘Roger McTodger’, this led a whole generation of Nigerian (I have no idea why Nigerian and not any others) footballers to share my comedy surname. I still have the screenshot of a defensive midfielder called ‘Lucky McTodger’ who’d accumulated an impressive 4 caps and 1 goal.

I guess my avatar must have been quite promiscuous to have such a large clan represented around the world. Lucky fella.

So my next music review is to be a band called Buck 65. What do I know about them? Pretty much nothing at all, despite the ‘interesting’ press release. Now I write press releases as part of my real (I treat reality in terms of ‘will I be paid’ in this context) job, and while this one certainly grabs the attention, it falls at the all important ‘informing the reader what the hell you’re talking about’ hurdle. This is how it reads… (more…)

It’s always nice to get out of work, safe in the knowlege that whatever music I choose to ingest is going to be my descision and no one else’s. Lately, my office’s soundtrack has been a selection of Swing (presumably as in ‘from a noose’) classics repeated ad nauseum, punctuated with some forgettable pop annoyances from the last few years. Today I have been left wondering why the thankfully one-hit-wonder Daniel Powter felt the need to share his bad day with millions of innocent (until proven guilty of crimes against music) radio listeners.

Thankfully, I have a suitable antidote: my review of JayMay’s debut album is up on Allgigs, and rather nice it is too. By which I mean the music, rather than the review - which is, of course, awesome.

Hi there, first post - snatched on a brief moment in my lunch hour. I’m Alan (as the URL suggests) and am currently an SEO copywriter. As if filling 45 hours a week with writing weren’t enough, I have taken to doing some freelance reviewing for two websites: Allgigs and Acegamez. I intend to aggregate it over this blog, with a little more personality than I feel able to in the reviews themselves.

Not that I feel over edited, you understand - these are my self imposed editorial restraints. Indeed, thus far, my editors have been a picture of ‘laissez faire’ restraint, barring one review where a surprising number of exclamation marks slipped their way into my prose. I didn’t mind too much, but as a good friend of mine pointed out, it did make me ‘come over all Timmy Mallet’, which, as mental images go, is nothing short of ghastly.

Timmy Mallet: Zany.

Anyway, this ‘hello world’ is rapidly in danger of overshadowing my lunch hour, and the BBC news website doesn’t read itself, so I shall draw this opening missive to a close. Thanks for reading.