As I mentioned last night, my PS3 hasn't seen a huge amount of use as a serious gaming machine. The reasons for this are straightforward enough — there haven't really been any exclusives of interest, unless you're the sort of person who enjoys the hideous controls and mind-numbing storylines of Metal Gear Solid (I'm not). Uncharted was a fun-but-only-once kind of experience, Motorstorm needed splitscreen to keep it going, and Haze was just plain shit. And multiplatform games are basically 360 games as far as I'm concerned, due to the generally lower prices and my controller preference. There's really nothing on the horizon either — until Little Big Planet rolls round, of course.
I do however have a big soft spot for some of the cheap, simple PSN games. PixelJunk Monsters (and its fiendish expansion pack, Encore) has made a particularly large dent in both mine and Kathryn's time. At heart, this game needed to be played by two players, sitting next to each other, preferably with a freshly-brewed cup of tea waiting to be drunk during the post-game postmortem. As such, we were both quite anxious to see whether Q Games' new PixelJunk release, Eden, would provide the same kind of experience — albeit in a totally different setting.
Writing a 'welcome' post is the same as writing the introduction to anything else — fucking difficult. Starting an essay in school or college is exactly the same. Write a sentence, realise it's terrible, hold down backspace until you're back to square one. Repeat.
There are, of course, several major differences between a welcome post on a new site, and a college essay. For one thing, when I wrote my dissertation, I knew that at least one person was going to read it. More importantly, I didn't even think about the introduction until I was at least halfway through the body of the text. An essay is presented fully formed, refined out of sight over a period of time. To some extent, the same is true of this site — this is the third redesign of semiBad, but the first to be released for public display. I even managed to avoid starting at the beginning when it came to the content.
The whole thing, of course, is a matter of first impressions. When you meet someone for the first time, you get one shot — a moment, then it's over. Over time, you may change that impression, for better or worse. But in a blog entry, the possibilities are endless! You could spend your entire afternoon testing first impressions! You could spend the rest of the day, or weeks — or however long it takes to realise that you're sick of the layout, functionality, and sound of your new site, bin it, and move on to version four.
Matt Brown recently wrote about the difficulties of finding a voice online, more elegantly than I could. The alternative is to just publish, say hello, and accept that you might have some work to do changing people's impressions later.
