Just handed in my first review of the year this morning.

Reviews are, in games freelance terms, the least profitable way to spend your time. Working on larger features or news pieces are, on average, much better in terms of time to cash. Well... at least if you want to do it properly. If you play a game for just fifteen minutes, clearly it's *highly* profitable, if totally useless and completely reprehensible. And while it can be great, more often you're slogging your way through some uninspired genre game you'd never normally consider playing. But - for me - it's important to do, because it ties you to the heart of the subject. The second you turn away from the actual games, you rapidly turn into a Games Industry Journalist, which while is a fine thing to do, simply not what I got into this for. I tend to assume the worth is in the text itself rather than the system that's grown up around it.

Which is why I have to - say - play terrible third person action adventures.

Er... that reads like I'm whining, which I'm really not. I just wanted to write something in the blog, and this is it.

Something wonderful and horrendous turned up in my in-box this morning, which I may show you in the near future. Equally, a fairly important phone call later this afternoon which may lead to some interesting thing, but probably won't. And there's another phone call I'm expecting, which isn't important at all, but could be entertaining.

CD player starts up: "Bless my cotton socks, I'm in the news...".

Now there's a song.