For now, some of the old content will remain and I'll continue to use the gallery as a dump for Twitter photos etc, the stream gadgets will continue to update themselves, but otherwise the site is closed. Hopefully by the end of the year I'll be in a position to bring it back, possibly even in an entirely new direction. I'm sorry I neglected it and I'm sorry it's ended so soon.

I leave you with this vaguely appropriate and not at all pretentious quotation.

One day, I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine.

Now that the first phase of beta testing for the long-awaited APB is almost at an end, I thought it was high time to share my experiences with it. I've had a whale of a time testing it, so much so I've been shunning other commitments – gaming and otherwise – to make way for the limited play windows.

For those of you who haven't heard of APB, it's an MMO from Realtime Worlds, the relatively new software house founded by the chap who invented Grand Theft Auto – and the lazy but somewhat accurate description I've often heard of APB is that it's GTA: The MMO. It's essentially a third-person run and gun game, where you play as either a Criminal or Enforcer (a semi-official vigilante), and fight to ensure your group's control of the city of San Paro. It's based on Unreal Engine 3, just like every other game out there, but rarely have I seen it put to such good use as in APB. The detail you can put into the game is incredible, starting with the unbelievably tweakable character creation which lets you change everything from height to hairstyle to scars to freckles, through equally impressive clothes customisation down to the exact shade of the stitching, the wide selection of upgradable weaponry and designable vehicles and custom decal design – which you can then apply to your clothes or car, have tattooed onto your character's skin and even spray onto an in-game wall. Anyone who's seen some of Realtime Worlds' press releases will be familiar with some of this, but it bears mentioning just how powerful yet simple these tools really are – and I've a feeling a few million more copies will be sold to the red-blooded male demographic for the simple fact that the game includes an adjustable slider for female characters' breast size. Not kidding.

So once you've created your character (in a matter of minutes if you're eager to start, though I can happily spend hours on just that) and chosen an allegiance, you're dumped into San Paro's Social District, a small area where you can access further customisation, purchase new weapons and items, and chat to other players – no missions available here, and indeed you can't even equip a weapon, but you can view statues of players who've reached notoriety or other achievements in recent days and explore shops and galleries at your leisure. Then it's on to one of the city's "action districts". Each has its own history and warring factions, and both share a scattering of hubs/spawn points for each side – police stations for Enforcers and gang hideouts for Criminals. These are places for players to meet, replenish ammo, check in-game messages, pledge allegiance to faction leaders and spawn vehicles in the attached car parks. The allegiance thing is an interesting one – the person you're allied to is the person who'll phone you up with jobs when you're out and about in the big bad world, and there are tiers of leaders to work your way up as your character increases level.

Missions in the game vary between preset instanced missions: essentially training missions, where you're sent on random errands; and the infinitely more interesting PvP missions where you're dispatched against other players – either to stop Enforcers looking too closely into your Criminal activities, or to stop nefarious Criminals by killing or arresting them as an Enforcer. This is where the game really comes into its own, and indeed where it gets its name – when the proverbial hits the fan, an APB is issued for players to put a stop to it. The clever matchmaking system ensures that the ensuing fight will always be a fair one, with individual players or whole teams being pitted against others of similar power. You can put out a call for additional backup if you're having too hard a time stopping your opponents, and your opponents can likewise do the same. When you're not on a mission you'll occasionally receive such calls for backup, which you can accept or ignore. It creates a very fluid game experience where you're never stuck for something to do for any length of time. One minute you can be flying solo hunting one or two other players who are breaking the status quo, and the next you can be part of a frenetic balls-to-the-wall tactical assault with a dozen other players fighting over their patch of the city. There's enough variety in these missions that I haven't even started feeling bored by the end of a five-hour play session.

Very little is out of the ordinary in terms of combat, which bears much more resemblance to GTA than an MMO – there's no interlock to speak of, though you can only fire on players when you're on a mission against them, but the gunplay is very fast and fluid and has more in common with an online deathmatch in something like Unreal Tournament than it does with other MMOs I've played – and this is most definitely a good thing. The HUD clearly shows where your friends and enemies are at any given time, you shoot the guys with red flags and protect the guys with green. The starter weapon leaves a lot to be desired, but at least this adds a bit of a challenge to the early missions and shoves you into the weapons buying & inventory system. There's a good smattering of guns, all of which feel very different and very realistic (or at least they might if I'd played with real submachine guns). You can only carry two at a time – one large, one small – which means you have to choose very carefully, but generally I've stuck to a decent pistol and either a rifle or shotgun, depending on whether I'm planning long-range or close-quarters fighting. There is a rocket launcher, which is a bit of a disappointment – it's very hard to aim and only holds two rounds, after which you need to switch to pistols or find somewhere to reload – but I guess this is somewhat close to reality. In all the time I've played APB I've only been hit by a rocket once, and never actually managed to successfully hit anyone else with one.

Something that seems to be a cause of concern for many people I've spoken to is the size of the instances – each having a maximum of a mere 100 players at any given time. In all honesty I've never found an instance to be too quiet (and during the beta they've been limited to 80) – there's always been plenty of activity visible on a short drive around, and near-constant APBs being put out for one player or another. Characters are not restricted to a single instance, hopping from one to the other is a piece of cake, and the interface allows communication with buddies on other instances as well as being able to locate and join friends or group/clan members across instances. Established groups can easily join the same instance automatically and not lose any players in the process. The system works well, so anyone worried about the small servers really don't need to.

There's been some killer moments I'll never forget, like the first time I ram-raided a shop (a branch of Currys, no less – actually called Curbys but the logo and window dressing look rather familiar) or the first time I joined forces with three other criminals, all driving round in the same car with two leaning out of the windows shooting at a gang of enforcers bravely trying to put a stop to our killing spree. I'm sad that my part in the beta is coming to an end tomorrow, but can't wait to jump back in. Open beta begins in spring 2010, and I eagerly await seeing some of you in San Paro then.

Finally, I wouldn't normally do this but I feel the need to give a shout out and danke vielmals to Hobbes, a player who's been both at the receiving end of my rifle and in the passenger seat of my car on many a long night of endless fighting, and always been a source of entertainment and stamina. Auf wiedersehen, mein freund.

Addendum: I should really mention that APB.com is a great source of information, their podcast is very informative and a good place to see some in-game video footage, and is also where you can register for the next wave of beta testing (open beta begins in March 2010). You can also keep track of developments via Facebook and Twitter.

Just to be clear, this won't be a review – partly because I don't do those here, but mostly because there are at least five thousand of those already. Google is your friend if you want a proper review. With that out of the way, here are some thoughts.

The game is incredibly short, which is bad. It's also a time vampire – the other night I fired up the game for a quick blast at around 1am, only to finish the game and discover it was somehow 6am. So perhaps the game is actually really long and I just didn't notice. Nope, I've checked Steam and I've only had the game open ten hours, and I'm pretty sure a couple of hours of that can be accounted for as time spent with the game on pause while having a smoke. It's a short game, then.

The cutscenes are really janky. The quality is terrible, the aspect ratio is wrong on my 16:9 (the same dimensions as the first two Ghostbusters films) monitor, the picture is grainy and the character rendering looks worse than in the game. A pre-rendered FMV should not be lower quality than my graphics card could render in-game, and if it is you've done it wrong. Which is a shame because the story told by the cutscenes is quite a good one and the voice acting is every bit as brilliant as you'd expect from the cast of the films.

The biggest downside for me is the lack of multiplayer on the PC version – perhaps I've been spoiled by Left 4 Dead, or perhaps it's the incapable AI, but whenever I was fighting a ghost with the rest of the gang, I kept thinking how this would be ten times better if only I could call in a couple of human-controlled friends to cover my back or help me with a containment stream. I'm quite accustomed to PC games missing out on something from their console counterparts, but this is a shocking omission I can see no good reason for.

But then there's the actual gameplay. Oh, joy of joys, the gameplay. It's excellent. The puzzle-solving is good and, amazingly, not out of place, the other ghostbusters' AI is tolerable if sometimes frustrating – but I like that if you stand still or start dicking around, they get out their PKE meters and do a sweep, or something else that fits their character – and the weapons, which basically comprise the proton pack with a few additional upgrades gradually granted throughout, are great fun and well balanced. The RPG-esque elements of finding collectable artefacts with your PKE meter & goggles and being able to upgrade your equipment with money earned catching ghosts are a nice touch too.

Catching ghosts then. The reason I wanted to buy the game in the first place. It's really hard to put into words exactly how awesome this is. I'll say it like this – pretty much every other game I own, once you strip away the plot, cutscenes, voice acting, weapons, vehicles etc, essentially boil down to go-here-and-shoot-this-until-it-dies. Never much challenge in the actual shooting department. But in this there honestly is – the feeling I get once I've worn down a ghost, managed to catch and keep it in a containment stream and guide it into the trap, is a feeling of actual achievement, one borne out by the damage I've doubtless caused my keyboard and mouse mashing them far harder than usual trying to get this bloody ghost in the trap. It's exhilarating in a way no other game experience has been for me, and that's what kept me coming back to the game for a little more.

Done? Good. This sparked a conversation on a messageboard I visit, specifically regarding the comment that kids aren't taught programming any more, they're taught Office. This is sadly very true, and something that led me to another realisation – at one point, kids *were* taught programming, but not by their school.

I can only speak from a British perspective on this, so if you're an American reader, a little history – while you had your Apples and your Microsofts and your IBMs fighting a war for the computer industry, over here we had a very different situation, almost a microcosm, with players like Sinclair and Acorn competing on scale and price. The BBC eventually funded an initiative to get a computer into every school in the country, with the idea that they would bleed into homes, and so with Acorn they created the BBC Micro. This in turn created a generation of coders and tinkerers – a boom of homegrown software, written entirely by teenagers in their bedrooms after school, that in many cases would go on to sell thousands or even millions of copies through small ads. The computer giants of the time found it almost impossible to market to these kids, who weren't interested in buying business software or games created by a man in a suit, when they could very easily code their own entertainment.

I was born in the midst of all of this, and managed to catch the tail end of this revolution in my early childhood, being given a Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ with a whopping 48K of memory and a tape player for I think my sixth birthday. I was quite definitely the exception – this was around 1990, when kids my age didn't have a computer – older siblings might have had one, but no interest in sharing it, and if my classmates had a computer of any kind it was a NES or Sega Master System. And this came to shape the generation I grew up with – instead of a generation who could program, diagnose and disassemble a system, we replaced it with a generation who knew only how to slap in a cartridge and flick the On switch.

So now we've reached the stage Tom Watson speaks of, where kids are taught Microsoft Office and nothing else. As such all but the nerdiest of today's children have no idea how to fix a computer or even how to do anything with a computer that does something even slightly unexpected – I see in people my own age the same bewilderment and utter powerlessness when confronted with a technically-worded error message that I've come to expect from my parents' generation. Those slightly older than I, on the other hand – let's say late twenties to mid-thirties – are typically very technically literate people, because they were of the BBC Micro era. An era where you didn't nag your parents for the money to buy the latest Call of Duty, you sat down with a programming manual in front of a portable TV and started bashing out BASIC. And then invariably debugging it.

This first became evident to me when I reached sixth form, and for the first time my ICT class entered the subject of programming. It hadn't been covered at all during GCSE years – all we got was word processing and spreadsheets then. I found myself as an AS-Level student miles ahead of the rest of my class in what I thought to be an easy subject – Visual Basic 5. I often found myself being chided by the teacher for not doing work, when he caught me idly faffing about with colours or window properties instead of the task at hand, not because I was being troublesome, but because I'd already done the work and was occupying myself while everyone else was still trying to grasp the code. I'm not saying this because I believe I was any more intelligent than my classmates, but I do attribute it to having caught the tail end of the BBC generation – I'd taught myself programming at a very young age, and they hadn't. The concepts being taught were far from new to me.

I wasn't the only one, of course – in the first couple of years of secondary school I met a couple of kindred spirits, other hangovers from the 1980s, who every single breaktime without fail were to be found huddled around the three BBC Model B computers in the library, sharing games on floppy disk while everyone else was reading books or outside playing games. But we were very much the minority, even though if we'd been born just a few years earlier there'd have been a queue to use those machines.

The people I grew up with certainly own more technology than those before, whether it's laptops, smartphones, iPods and so on. Having worked on a computer helpdesk for two years drove home to me that I was different in my understanding of computers. They were contacting me for advice on trivial problems I'd learned the answers to decades ago, or could very easily solve using some knowledge I'd gleaned along the way. Even in the workplace there was a marked difference between people my age and younger, who had only the most basic understanding of how to operate a computer and usually needed a flowchart to diagnose an actual fault, and those a little older: the turbonerds, the ones who used linux, the ones with homebrew games consoles. In short, the ones raised in the golden age of BASIC.

So the solution seems obvious – bring back programming in school. Not in AS-Level ICT, where only a select few will benefit from it, but much earlier – ideally at primary school level. Get them fluent in Visual Basic early on, and start teaching C++ for A-Level. It's the only thing to do if we want a world where millions of hours aren't wasted in the workplace every year by staff having to call technical support on the most trifling of issues. Issues which are instantly understood and rectified by the BBC Micro generation.

From the same list of notable mods that led me to Ashura, I also came across lunar sci-fi adventure Hollow Moon, again for UT2004. This is also technically brilliant – a notable lack of any sound effects (because you're in a spacesuit on the moon, obviously) coupled with a black and white colour scheme and a masterfully understated ambient soundtrack, provides senses of engrossing reality and foreboding I honestly haven't encountered in a video game probably since Doom.

Then there's UnWheel, which I've played a few times before, and again is for Unreal Tournament 2004 – and as the name implies, it lifts the vehicular chaos of its source and makes of it a driving game, with a rather wide and ludicrous selection of vehicles and a choice of game modes, ranging from a standard race through to car football. This is a highly playable game in itself, with many live servers running last time I looked for some truly bonkers online multiplayer. The only trouble is that UT's vehicle AI is laughable and unimproved by UnWheel, to the extent that on my first attempt racing against bots, all seven other vehicles decided to pile together in one corner and get utterly stuck, unable to complete the race. This is an issue I've encountered before, and it's cost me many an Onslaught or Vehicle CTF match when all the bots on my team have opted to piledrive each other into a wall. But at least if you stick to racing against other players, it's jolly good fun.

Leaving the Unreal Engine behind, there's plenty of superb Source mods I've been pointed at – such as Goldeneye: Source, an excellent attempt at recreating the classic Nintendo 64 game on the Half-Life 2 engine; Fistful of Frags, a lively wild west team-based game that although technically quite flaky is still highly enjoyable; and Zombie Master, a modestly successful zombie shooter.

The problem that seems to plague most of these mods is that they never seem to get finished – most are still in beta and many have had no activity for months or even years, despite apparent efforts being underway to complete the project the modders set out on. I can certainly appreciate that modding can be very time-intensive, can often entail far more work and manpower than was originally envisaged, and even that people might lose interest. But it's a very sad state of affairs when a mod like Ashura can display such promise in a technical preview only to become widely regarded as a long-running joke by members of the community it tried to serve.

A glimmer of hope in this sea of inspired but poorly-executed creations is Killing Floor, which famously started its life as yet another UT2004 modification but attracted the attention of Tripwire Interactive, makers of Red Orchestra, who allowed the developers to port the mod to their own engine and ultimately release it as a standalone game to considerable acclaim. And deservedly so, for it is a tense zombie survival horror with more replayability than one would expect from a low-cost independent title.

If only more mods had the same momentum.

I thought I'd start by explaining the idea behind this site. I've loosely maintained a blog in some form since early 2003, initially on LiveJournal, then through Windows Live Spaces and ultimately WordPress on my former website – and if having a personal blog about my life for six years taught me one thing, it's that nobody gives a shit about reading tales of my life. So instead of a personal site with a blog tacked on, this is an all-new site with the blog at its heart, and you'll find nothing here about me personally – because that's not what anybody wants.

Instead, I'm taking the advice of my old school English teacher: write what you know. I know many things, but what I know and am interested in talking about is games. More specifically, my take on games as a wordy British gay gamer (gaymer from here on in) with some odd tastes in games – for example, I like rhythm games but not Guitar Hero; I like FPS games but not Halo; I like co-op strategy but not Team Fortress, etc. Hopefully I'll be providing some food for thought and interesting commentary that's a little off the beaten track.

Now, as promised, an introduction to myself. There are many ways I could have gone about this, but if it's alright with you I thought I'd try something a little different. Instead of trying to sum myself up, I'd prefer to give you other people's descriptions. To this end, I ran a search through the last two years of conversation logs looking for all instances of the other person using the word 'you're', and compiled a list of everything everyone has told me I am. So, without further ado (and adjusted to first person), I am…

using obscene amounts of bandwidth
surprisingly pokeable for a top
not a fruit or a vegetable
sooo smart
not thinking hypothetically
one step closer to finding you
probably going to kick the crap out of you
your last option for help
interested in men and women
a good man
just trying to distract you
wondering about the crocodile from yesterday
adding cock
insane
full of surprises
a most useful technical acquaintance
one of the mushroom men from Pluto
going to have to see a therapist about that
somewhere near an end
constantly breaking bad news
just trying to stifle your creativity
having contractions
going to the moon
doing it wrong
also funneh
doing a sterling job
obsessed with dirty words
standing right beside you
not coming tonight
off to gameland
not too expensive though
the only shirtlifter in Nottingham
not a gumby
very popular with this demographic
living the authentic geek life
really into honesty and such
a very huggable person
good at finding stuff

So there we have it. Post number one done and dusted. I've got ideas for at least a dozen diatribes floating around my head as I write this, and doubtless more things will catch my attention before I've got those done. So stay tuned, subscribe to my RSS, follow me on Twitter etc. Peace out.