Day 2 has come to an end for me over this side of the world. Not a great deal to share today, been flat out with work but spend a few hours looking around the site bringing back memories. I did post two old reviews I wrote years ago for AussieXbox and placed them up online. One review is for Forza Motorsport, for a bit of history I was actually the first person in the world to review this game (no lie), I gave it a 10 back then which was our sites first 10. I remember having MGS contact me with thanks and a few sites writing to me wondering how I got the game so early. It arrived about 4 weeks before release but back in those days I assumed every review site got it. I also asked if I could post my review and got the green light, I did so it helped generate some traffic for the site at the time. It was up for about 2 days before anyone else managed to get one online.
The other review was an old TMNT one I found, nothing exciting about this one except I was a huge Ninja Turtle fan growing up. This cartoon was the most popular cartoon on TV here when I was going to primary school.
Oh well that was my day, I posted some content, earned a few quest points and stumbled across this little gem. Can you name all the games in this?
Another time taker, how many can you identify? 3 Comments
Me at the Playboy Mansion in 2005. Visiting for E3 while I was writing for Xbox AU, MyGEN and AussieXbox. Well I thought I'd post about my first day here on Giant Bomb, Monday the 23rd of August 2010. I thought it was a good idea to record my first thoughts of the site and what I did this day in history. To start with here's a few things I did today on GiantBomb.com
Changed my Avatar and Profile Pic to my own picture (I used my trip photo to the Playboy mansion in 2005. I got invited on my E3 trip as a game journalist.)
Changed my wall background. I used the Penrith Panthers Basketball logo. I representative Basketball coach for Penrith (Level 2).
I followed a few people, 1 of my friends from Amnesia Razorfish here in Australia who made me signup after I started seeing all his updates on Facebook.
I discovered the Quests system, wow, how awesome is this. One of my old sites introduced these as site achievements, but nothing like this.
I decided to complete a few quests, the Broken Toys, Generation Gap (shows my age) and Vanity Smurf quest by hitting submit on this post.
I sent a pm to my friend telling him how much I loved the place. Telling him how jealous I am for even trying to run a gaming website once and why would you bother when there's a place this good. ( I'm currently working on something new however and dreaming that one day I may have it ran by the same software these guys use. Hep "Wonders if they would be interested......".
This is what I did while I wasn't on GiantBomb (Blocked at work - why is that!).
Drove to a customers site and did user acceptance testing.
Put together a project plan for a new customer.
Put IT specifications together for another project I'm working on for work.
Day dreamed about my website idea and how I could make it better, wondered what if it was powered by GiantBomb (Damm you!!!). Dreaming about leaving this dead end job I'm in now.
Ate KFC for lunch as the customer didn't supply lunch on site. (Gotta love that....no options but to get fat.)
So as you can see a pretty average day for my first day on GiantBomb, limited due to my works stupid internet polices that block any possible thing that might be half exciting on the web, even more reason to keep working for a boss. I also have a work Blackberry and guess what, that has the same internet policy so forget trying that. I'm also a cheap ass and couldn't be assed buying my own personal phone so I guess I have to live with it.
A little bit about my gaming past working in the Australian Gaming Industry.
Myself, Major Nelson and my buddy Roach at E3 2005.
So who am I. Well my gamertag is Hep and I've been gaming for a long time. Back somewhere in 2000 I was involved in some forums of a few gaming websites. At the time Xbox in Australia didn't have any forums so a few guys were running a site called AussieXbox.net. Dung Fungus (CinC) was the owner and a funny guy by the name of Fanger was running the site. I started getting involved and I had some web coding experience and started to offer to help around the place. I learnt php and asp at work so it made sense, these guys started a community for Aussie Xbox gamers but had no way of enhancing the place. Fanger got me on and the rest is history. I started added functionality to the site which helped the site reach 8000+ members and a heap of daily page views. Crap so to speak hit the fan when we went to E3 in 2005 with a few staff and the site had to be changed due to some conflicts with the guys running the place. Something I look back at now that I'm older and wondered why did I even get involved in all of that. E3 was amazing and I got given the opportunity of a lifetime to meet some great people and even got the trip to the Playboy Mansion thanks to Ubisofts "The Playboy Mansion".
The Xbox 4WD I drove to outback NSW for a charity event for Youth Suicide. 3 of us were leftover to run the site by ourselves and we decided to build something new and walk away from the AussieXbox brand. It was scarred and we were having issues trying to get people to the site. We went and created MyGEN, a very big database driven site with a heap of functionality and some great user features including an award system on the same line as the quest system here. The site was growing again and we hit about 10k members in a few months. The site went well for a few years and we ended up building our gamercard designer. This brought in millions of hits a month and the site started to make some money.
So in 2008 my wife got pregnant and 3 months before my son was born I started to find it hard to get time to spend time on the site. The site started to lose it's edge and when my wife was having the baby the decision was made to close the site down. The cost to keep the site up and host the millions of gamercards etc was getting to much and the other guys were over it, it was all over. I was out on my own and have been ever since. I'm now trying to make a come back now that I have more time and with a few new ideas that I hope to get off the ground in the next 6 months, anyone interested in helping me financially or with their skills feel free to pm me. Australia's Largest Xbox Tournament. Halo 2 Charity tournament for the Tsunami Victims. In summary here are some of the things I was involved in during my time.
Australia's first and largest ever Xbox Halo tournament. (See pic to the left.)
Running Auto Salon Game1 2006 and 2007, Sydney and Melbourne. (600 gamers battled it out in our MyGEN tournaments, 80,000 visitors over two days)
Conker Tournament held at the Galleries Shopping Centre.
Road trip to Cowra to run a Cowra Xbox Charity Tournament for Youth Suicide. (Outback NSW)
So as you can see I use to love what I was doing, writing about games, reviews and large scale gaming events and tournaments. Working along the publishers in Australia and especially with Xbox Australia. The charity related stuff was also very special to me. I hope to one day make it online and turn it into my job once again. Once heavily involved, now looking for a new place to call home. For now this place will do.
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