August 2016 Retro Game Purchases

Last month I kind of tried to spend less money on retro games but it didnt exactly go to plan sure I might have spent a little less than the month before but in general it seemed to be around the same ball park figure that I usually spend, this month I didnt really set out with any goal in mind other than to just see what was out there and what I could get my hands on for a fair price.

My first few purchases of the month were on monday the 1st of August. It started when I walked in to a charity shop and found Dancing Stage Party Edition complete for the PS1 for £1. I wouldnt have got it as I know I already own it but it was in such great condition and the price was obviously low so I thought what the heck. I carried on with my some what pointless spend by paying £2 for 3 complete PSP games Lara Croft Tomb Raider Anniversary, Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories, and Ratchet & Clank Size Matters, again I am sure I own these buut the price was great and with the PSP stuff I am kind of grabbing what I can now while its just old enough for people not to want it anymore and before it becomes popular to collect.

I also recieved something through the mail which I had paid for a few days before (I always count mail stuff like this on the day I recieve it rather than when I buy it, I guess so I dont brag about something for it to then not turn up or for the wrong item to arrive or something) I got a loose Japanese N64 cartridge of Flying Dragon for £3 with free postage. I was intrested in this cause a local indy shop has the European version and wants £36 for it so I just wonderd if it was actually any good or if its one of those games thats lame but rare so commands a high price. I still havent played it, maybe it is because I havent currently got a N64 set up, it would be easy to set one up but I know I am going to a good friends house to play games in a week, so I figure if I find my convertor that makes imports work on a UK N64 I can take it with me and we can both try it for the first time togther.

On Wednesday August the 3rd, I went in to a small inderpendent video game store and got Pokemon link complete for DS for £3 and R-TYPE Final complete for PS2 for £6. The prices seemed fair and with the way the popularity of Pokemon seems to be on the rise I figured it was worth getting any game with the name attached to it for such a small sum.

On the 5th  a boxed complete Japanese version of Eswat for the Megadrive I had orderd arrived it cost me £5 including postage.I already have an english copy but I grew up with the Japanese version and I saw it for cheap so I decicded that I wanted it. Latter on during the day I poped in to an indy store and spent £5 on a small bunch of unboxed N64 carts, Virtual pool 64, F1 world grand pri (twice) and F1 world grand pri 2. They might not be the best carts but the price was certainly right.

I then went around a week before making another purchase, on Saterday the 13th I walked in to an inderpendant games shop and found myself a complete copy of Hybrid Heaven for the N64 for £10 ,well I say complete as in there is the cart the box and manual all in awesome condition including leaflets and bits and pieces, but its missing the center of the box though the white bit that holds the cart in place, considering its wonderful condition I will have to try and track down some form of replacment.

On the 14th I popped in to my local CEX, I had heard that they would possibly be selling some retro items again and was quiet happy to find Toy Story for the SNES cart only for £5 so instantly got it. There was quiet a few N64 carts as well but most of them seemed to be being sold for around the expected going rate and in a lot of cases I already own them.

On the 15th I went in to a local pawn store and got Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets complete for gamecube for £1.50 and The simpons road rage complete for gamecube for £6. I was certain I dont own road rage but was unsure with harry potter but figured for the price it wasnt too big of an issue.

On tuesday the 16th I visited an indy store and after a little haggling I paid £6 for 3 boxed complete PSP games Final Fantasy VII Crisis core, Meievil resurrection and Space Invaders Evolution. I was frankly surprised to get this price as plenty of places would want that or more for the final fantasy title alone.

On the 19th I walked in to a charity shop, it was absolutly filled with games but on closer inspection very few of them were worth purchasing as they were so damaged, however I manged to pick out some of the only ones in a good condition and in the end I paid £3 for 3 PS1 games boxed complete Smackdown 2, Castrol honda superbike racing, and Motocross mania

On the 21st I returned to CEX to find that they had a few new titles  I managed to grab MonsterTruck Madness 64 cart only for the  N64 for £4 and Herbrekes popoon cart only for the Snes for £8, which I wwas very happy with, I had heard a lot of good things about the game but every time I had seen a loose cart of it in the past it had been much closer to the £20 mark.

On the 22nd I Spent £14 on a bundle including

hack: Infection (Part 1), box game disc and anime disc but missing manual (for ps2)
Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story complete for the Nintendo DS
Dragon Quest IX complete for the DS
Legend of Zelda Spirit tracks complete for the DS
Wario Master of Disguise complete for the DS
Final Fantasy XII Revenant wings complete for the DS
Pokemon Ranger complete for the DS

I think it is rather safe to say this was my purchase of the month my last purchase of the month was made on the 25th however  when I spent £3 on a complete copy of 688 Attack Sub for the megadrive in a shop I had taken my daughter in to grab pokemon cards.

So this month I spent £85.50 if my calculations are correct, actually once again putting me in my usual ball park. I think this month in particular though I got quiet good value for my money, if I had to make a prediction I would proberbly guess next month will not be such a good one for retro stuff.

RIP Gene Wilder, a loss to the world.

The actor Gene Wilder, remembered by many for his portryale of the title character in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, has died at the age of 83, this unfortunatly is not a hoax it has been confirmed by his family.

The actor also starred in classic films such as The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. He wasnt in a great number of films because despite his amazing talent he was very picky about his roles and felt no need to be in a film to simply be in a film.

It is hard to talk about Mr Wilder without mentioning his collaborations with writer and director Mel Brooks as well as the stand-up comedian Richard Pryor. Wilder and Pryor could play of each other in a way you seldom get to see in many films, they managed to share the limelight and both just seemed to help to make the other even funnier, they had a perfect syncronised comedy timing that others can only hope but to come anywere near. After Pryors passing Wilder talked about him with such love and passion that I couldnt help but cry.

To me Gene Wilder wasnt just an actor who played Willy Wonka he was, is and always will be Willy Wonka, I cant read the book now without seeing his face, I cant watch anyone else try to be the character without my mind simply going ''thats not Wonka thats an imposter''. The main is a part of my childhood, a part of who I am, he made me believe that ''if you want to view paradise simply look around and see it'' So while his passing brings tears to my eyes I also choose to take this on board and to look around at all of the things that make me happy and make my life a better place, Gene Wilder will live on in my mind, in my imagination, I have shared his film with my daughter, she loves it and I hope one day she will share it with her own, who will share it with theres and that in this way Mr Wilder will live forever bringing joy to children forever more.

Lord of the rings and its impact on my life

This post is going to kind of be about the Lord of the Rings but its also going to be about insparation and about learning to see the beauty in things, ok maybe that sounds a little hippified but stick with me please.

I used to read Lord of the Rings once a year every year, which is apparently something I have in common with one of my heroes of the silver screen the late great Christopher Lee. I adore Tolkien's world so much that I have a message in Elvish on my wrist as a tattoo.

I take you back to a time when I was much younger, I was in junior school and I had just started the third year of it. So far school for me had been a not to pleasent experiance. In fact in my second year of Junior school I had sufferd with a teacher who seemed to suck all light and joy out of the air with her very precense. Its not just me exagertating either for an example of what a mega bitch she was I will just let you know that I fell out of a concrete barn on to a concrete tennis court and when I told her it hurt and I couldnt stand please could she phone my mum she not only refused but she made me do hockey on it. I ended up in hospital latter that night having not only broken my leg in 3 places but having torn all of my ligaments. You would think she would be nice after this knowing all the pain and suffering she put me through but nope not in the slightest. So walking in to my first lesson in year 3 my expectations well they were as low as they could possibly be. I walked in to the room to be met by an old white haired guy, now it might sound a bit discriminatory but my instant thought was oh he is old its going to be one of those shut up do as your told we are all going to be quiet teachers I couldnt have been more wrong if I had tried.

This man, this teacher would prove to be one of those very few very special people you meet in life who changes the entire way your mind works, who alters your very outlook and understanding of the world around you, put simply if it wasnt for him I wouldnt be the man I am today. Learning before this had been very much about being dragged through every single tick box on the curriculum, it felt as if all the teachers cared about was getting boxes ticked and covering there arses, which might make them a good teacher in the view of there employers but doesnt really wash it with me personally, there is more to educating young individuals than boxes. There is more to being a teacher than that though you are there to inspire the young to try and give them an appreciation for learning, to ignite a spark that makes someone want to learn, want to think and want to tackle new ideas. This teacher decided that what we needed in our lives was a spark, he pretty much threw the curiclum out and decided that he would teach us about the classical music of Gustav Holst, that he would teach us to read and write poetry but most impresivly that he would read us the Lord of the rings.

I dont know how he knew it would touch so many of us but we would hang on every word of Lord of the Rings in a way we had never cared about anything before, even the worst students who wouldnt usually sit down for anything would sit there in perfect silence listening to him read, more than that though none of us could stop thinking about it, we would talk about the characters and situations togther, we would guess what was going to happen next. The idea was he would read us the whole of Lord of the rings before the end of the year , but we didnt quiet make it. On the last day he read from the book he sent us all out to break and told us that unfortunatly we had run out of time and if anyone wanted to know how the book ended he would tell them. About 6 of us went to him during break time and he told us what happend at the end of the book and then he did something I had never seen a grown man do before he cried. He didnt cry because he was sad he cried because he felt that the book and its ending was beautiful, he was actually crying because he found it beautiful. It was the first ever time I had seen that it was ok for a grown man to cry, before that I had thought that it was only something that women and small boys did, that emotion like this was something I was supposed to grow out of.

This is what Lord of The Rings means to me , it proves that somethings can be so beautiful that experiancing them can change your life forever and that it is always Ok for a man to show that he has emotions

My time at the Fringe festival so far.

Ok so at the moment I'm on holiday, I'm at the fringe festival watching shows and sleeping out in a tent. It has been pretty good really, sure there have been a few issues such as one particularly stupid taxi driver claiming he knew how to get to the destination we needed and then taking us on what could best be described as a magical mystery tour but despite having stuck to child suitable entertainment I have enjoyed everything I have been to see.

First we went to a show called the Comedy Club 4 kids and despite it being aimed at children it was overall very entertaining. There was a compare called Silky and them 3 comedians, I'm sorry to say I cant remember a the first and second comedians names. The first was a lady in her twenties and the second was a 13 year old lad they weren't brilliant but they served as a decent warm up to the third and final comic a man called Stuart Goldsmith who was simply put fantastic. Most of his material was about getting told off for getting home from school and instantly making a mess but he just delivered his material in a way that had both the old and young in stitches, I wasn't surprised to find on leaving that he also does adult only shows.

I went and saw a 6 person panto production of Cinderella and I have to admit they made a really good job of it throwing in both songs and cags which would appeal to the parents as well as the kids. As good as this was though it couldn't even come close to the next thing I saw which was an improvised live Doctor Who episode performed by a small group of actors. It ended up being called the Trump experiment and was all about Donald Trump being a Slitherine who was miniaturising people and launching them in small capsules into famous peoples facial hair to encourage them to become agents who would spout Trumps rhetoric and try to extend his influence. The Doctor and his assistant had to save Brian Blessid by going into his beard to free him of there influence. It was very very funny and it shared something with the old school episodes of Dr Who and that was the fact that although the sets and props might have been crappy the acting was so awesome you couldn't help but feel pulled into it and adore it...

Ok I'm sure I have spelt a lot of things wrong and made mistakes but I'm in the middle of a field tapping away on a phone so I don't think I. Have done too bad.

Another look at Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday

 I have been reviewing games for a lomg time now, the first game I ever wrote a blog post about was Alien Storm for the MegaDrive/Genesis, so a year or so ago I revisited that game and had a look at it again. I also used to make YouTube Reviews at one point and one of the games I reviewed on there was Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday. It wasnt the first Megadrive game I reviewed on you tube that would be Comic Zone but it was one of my more successful reviews and its a game that I have always been very fond of. For a Start here is my original Video, if you want to see what I said back then.

It was one of only a handfull of games that I ever actually rented, In fact Megadrive wise I think I only ever rented about 4 games, all of these were before I owned an actual megadrive and were rented alongside a rental console. The main thing that drew me to it was the Buck Rogers name. I had often watched the old Buck Rogers show during the various times it was rerun on saterday afternoons, watching sci-fi like Buck Rogers, BattleStar Galactia, Star Trek, Lost in Space, Dr Who and Blakes 7 was the main way I spent time with my dad, heck watching sci-fi stuff pretty much is still our main way of hanging out with each other. Anyways I was well in the know about just how cool Buck Rogers was and how awesome his universe was and that made me go, I want a piece of that I want to shoot bad guys and go to space... I still think Buck is cool to this day even though I latter learned that he didnt swear on TV during a space dogfight like I believed he had as a kid. He asked a pilot if  there was  something wrong with your "Funk & Wagnals" which I heard as ''there is something wrong with your fucking wagnals'' no idea what a wagnal would be but I basically believed he was cussing the guy out and he was so cool he could get away with it during day time TV. (For those wondering what Funk &Wagnals means its basically an American brand of dictionairys and enclopedias, so its sort of a way of him saying hey do you know what your on about?)

I have to admit I didnt really know it was a role-playing game or exactly what I was getting myself into I think I just expected some shooting and well something simple that represented the show really. What I was met with was the ability to make my own team of individuals and to then enter a conflct in this world and eventually the ability to pilot my own ship around the universe more than this though I was met with a story which grabbed a hole of you and pulled you in to the universe itself. The funny thing was I had an Amiga in the house and as I have learned since this game was actually available on the Amiga and at the time I didnt realise this was the case and so Buck Rogers CountDown to Doomsday became one of the reasons I wanted a MegaDrive even more than before (I originally wanted a megadrive because my brothers friend brought a Japanese imported one to the house with a handful of games).

It wasnt till awhile latter that I had my own megadrive and got my own copy of this game, one of the reasons I felt I needed to make this youtube video was the fact that I could never get any of my friends to really respect this game in anyway shape or form yet I always felt that it was a real classic so I kind of saw it as my duty to be an embasador for it.

So do I think that everything I said in my review is accurate well mostly. I have since learned if you keep going into bars or generally loitering around in corners of space stations various things do happen such as you getting information or fights breaking out. Other than that I pretty much stand by everything, the graphics are very basic compared to other titles and proberbly did put people off which is a crying shame, on the plus side although with how basic they are they havent aged really from when I did this review, nice basic crisp graphics often age better than more experimental stuff, its why SNES games often kind of look better than N64 games to the modern eye for exmple. I still kind of see Mass Effect as the closist modern day equivalent but I still yearn for some kind of remake or sequel. Actually while talking about sequels there was a PC only sequel which I have heard mixed things about, its actually considerd abondend ware now so I have downloaded it and may download DOS Box and try to give it a bash at some point but its not like I have limitless bags of time for stuff like this, I wish some enterprising individuals had tried to use the engine behind Countdown to Doomsday to construct a MegaDrive Rom based on its PC sequel but that is something far beyond both my time and skill, as much as I love games I have never understood a thing when it comes to how they are made to the degree that as far as my brain understands they might as well be made by faires clapping or wizards waving there wands.

I would actually like to make another better youtube video about this game one day, the irony being that I now actually have better game recording equipment and I could proberbly get the wire to hook  my megadrive up to it (I use a scart lead and the recording equipment requires a composite lead, my original footage was taken using a very old TV card and an RFU cable) but I dont feel like I have the time for it, so I guess for the time being this post is the closest thing to me tackling this awesome game again.

Dead or Alive 5 Last Round

Ok so once again I am going to be pointing to the blog of DS90, the guy has an awesome blog and if you havent already then you really shoud give it a look. So recently he did an article on Dead Or Alive 5 Last Round, here is the link to his views on it http://ds90gamer.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/played-dead-or-alive-5-last-round.html#more. Well I commented on his post that I owned this game but that I hadnt really played it yet, well I was wanting something to play and I guess he inspired me as the next thing I found myself playing was this very title. I had a few thoughts about it and I was just going to comment on his post again but I really thought it would be better to do a piece myself, in my own fashion.

Now I remember the first Dead or Alive in fact I can remember the very first time I played it. All of us had our original playstations chipped back then some of us to play imports some for other reasons but it wasnt rare at all for a friend to turn up with a game on a disc that you had never heard of, it was sort of a badge of honour to be the one to be the one to introduce everyone to somthing that would become the new must have. So in an obvious bid to get this kind of acclaim one day a friend turned up with Dead or Alive. Now in my group of friends we had all been playing fighters forever heck we had been paying International Karate and such on the spectrum, followed by the huge love affair with Street Fighter 2 we all had, then there had been things like Turtles Tournament Fighters, one lad had got a playstation on release with Tekkan and another had got his on release with Toshindon. So as you can guess Dead or Alive went down extremly well. I remember being impressed with the graphics as well as the gameplay and I knew I wanted to get my hands on it.

I agree with DS90's comment that ''Of all the major fighting game franchises, Dead or Alive is probably the one that still hasn't cracked the mainstream'' but then again there is a flip side to this, although it might not have become a real household name its managed to stay around and to keep growing. Compare it to something else I have mentioned Toshindon. Look at the Toshindon series the first game Battle Arena Toshinden was awarded Best Fighting Game of 1995 by Electronic Gaming Monthly. It was a good start but it was followed by a very lack luster sequel, a game that while not a bad game was not a real step forward it was just more of the same and not much more at that by the time the 4th instalment was released it was kind of just met with a collective sigh. There was a Japan only spin of after this and there have been a few rumours that it would come back but basically the franchise seems to have peaked early and then died rather quickly, I would argue possibly because they tried to milk it for all it was worth far too soon (4 games in one console generation is a lot when you think about it). Compared to this Dead or Alive has managed to keep going to maintain itself.

Something thats intresting to note is that much like how Final Fantasy was potentilly going to be Squares last game due to financial issues hence having a name with Final in the title during the mid 1990s Tecmo were in a spot of financial difficulty themselves and really needed something new and hot to help pull them back into the green. Having seen the popularity of  Sega's Virtua Fighter series in Japan , the management of Tecmo asked Tomonobu Itagaki to create a game that was something on the lines of there take on Virtua Fighter.

Itagaki happend to be a fan of Virtua Fighter, but he wanted Dead or Alive to stand out as its own thing as apposed to being just a carbon copy, which lets face it was a good idea given how many games had been met with the words ''oh my god its just another Street Fighter 2 clone'' in the not to distant past. His stratergy to make Dead or Alive standout was to included a stronger emphasis on  both sexuality and violence, hence the bouncing breasts and level of skin on show. This in itself has both helped and hinderd the series though with people choosing to focus on this instead of the games somewhat unique flavour of gameplay. Personally I play it for the gameplay, in fact when it comes to costumes I am far more likly to put the character in something I find cool rather than revealing, I will pick a Ninja outfit or something like that over bra and panties or school girl outfit every time, I personally like to see fighters looking bad ass not butt ass (naked). In fact one of my favourate charcters in Dead or Alive 5 Last Round is Mila and my favourate costume to put her in is her second costume which is basically jeans and a T shirt and doesnt reveal anything as can be seen below.

So why is Mila one of my favourate characters? I like her fighting style, she is basically an MMA fighter who fights with a combination of punches, knees to the gut, big kicks and takedowns. I enjoy a lot of Dead or Alive in the same way I enjoy a good martial arts film, there is such a beauty put in to the art of fighting that you cant help but appreciate it, you have a whole load of characters using diffrent forms and stylesI get a real kick out of seeing Brad Wongs Drunken fist as it reminds me of the old Jackie Chan drunken Master films I used to watch, the characters might be cartoons but they move in such a realistic way its simply beautiful.

I know my fellow blogger DS90 had great pains when it came to getting his PS3 data to synch up to his PS4 game but I was lucky in that when I started Dead Or Alive 5 Final round I did not run into any problems with it synching up with the small amount of add on data I had on my Xbox 360, maybe the 360 and One data is less of a pain than the PS3 and PS4 data or it was because I had less of it or I was just lucky. The guy is bang on right though that now days you do tend to have to do a lot more messing around with instaling, updating etc and it can be a big pain in the ass when it comes to wanting to play something, my kind of way around this is to keep a MegaDrive/Genesis hooked up near my PS4 and Xbox One and when they decide a massive download or instal is required I fire that up change the channel and play some Sonic or Streets of rage while I let it do its thing, admitidly this is  bigger pain in the behind if the updates require you to click thing after thing and sort of do a whole sequence of updates and instalations.

 Ok well a fighting game kind of lives or dies on its rosta so lets talk about it. I already mention Mila who is one of the games new characters but who else is there and what do I think of them? Well there is Rig, Rig to me kind of feels like he is a whole bunch of Tekken characters thrown into a mixing pot and then put in this game, thats not to say I dislike him, I would atually recomend him to new players as he is quiet easy to get on with, even button bashers will see pretty decent results from him, he is one of those characters who feel like theyd be classed as normal strength normal speed if you get what I mean. I also tend to have a  soft spot for Taekwondo so this gives him some browny points. As for other new characters well there is the school girl Honoka, I didnt really take to her so proberbly wont say much about her at all she just didnt stand out for me but then I guess every time you add a whole bunch of characters this is going to be true of at least one of them and I am sure there will be people out there who find her to be there new favourate we all have different oppions after all. Then there is Marie Rose a very young seeming lady whoise main outfit can best be describes as being gothic lolita in style, she does a lot of cutesy things like skipping and walking backwards and hopping all over the place, she is a lot of fun to play as and I kind of get the feeling that she is a character designed with the taunter in mind. If you want to be something really small and pull of moves more for there looks than effect and drive people mad then I think she is deffinetly up your alley, something about her gave me a sort of Harley Quin vibe., Phase-4 who is basically a clone of Kasumi who has her own move set, now I enjoyed finishing arcade mode with her but it gets a bit over the top when you get people who look or are based on other people, I think she needed a lot more about her to come across as being a properly worthwhile addition. Then you have Nyotengu who is a female version of the previous Tengu boss character. The rosta in general is awesome including classic characters and bosses, guest characters from Virtua fighter and Ninja Gaiden the main important thing though is that everyone looks and feels like they belong in the game instead of just feeling like they have been pasted in to raise the numbers.

I had a look at the DLC situation with this game mostly because of DS90 mentioning how much stuff there was and darn was he right, you would spend a small fortune buying everything there is on offer and it also needs to rrememberd that a good 95% of it is purly cosmetic. It is also a darn mess on the Xbox Store as well, I am not likly to really ever buy any of it as I am pretty happy with the costume choices you get from simply playing the game but if Tecmo have a nice little revenew stream going here then more power to them, at least its pretty just cosmetic stuff there selling that you can still enjoy the game without having to purchase.

So to conclude what do I really think of Dead Or Alive 5 Last Round? Well the best way to judge a game is by taking a long hard look at its competitors and seeing where its place is in the pile. I own quiet a few fighters on the Xbox One Mortal Kombat X, Killer Instinct, etc and for me it actually lands pretty near to the top. It didnt take me long to have my fill of Killer Instinct, it just feels a little too hollow and a bit too unforgiving but Dead Or Alive 5 much like Mortal Kombat I had to play the story through from start to end and then I cant help but keep putting it on again for one more go going through arcade mode with just one more character. Yes other games are just around the corner such as the next Tekken but you should be able to get this game pretty darn cheap now so either if your into fighting games or if you think you might like to try a fighting game on your new next gen console then I would give this game a very hearty recomendation.

A bit about writing for the aspiring writer.

Ok so I am a writer as I have mentioned before, I have even showed some brief samples of my work from time to time but do I think I am a good writer? Well that is a little hard to answer because the critic inside of me would love nothing more than to rip myself to shreads. Something I have heard time and time again is that critics merly tear apart that which they can not do, or another way its often put is those who cant teach. With this in mind I do not aim to teach anyone, I merly aim to give them a little food for thought. You see when I decided I wanted to be a writer there was no one much to talk to or nothing I could really read that I could relate to. The stuff written by people who had made it, people who had written books which had ended up in actual print I just couldnt relate to it for some reason maybe they just seemed to big to intimidating in a way. So as a guy who self publishes my own stuff through amazon and who keeps his own blog I thought maybe if I talked about how and why I write from time to time it might help someone else who wants to give it a go, so here goes....

Now the main starting point for writing anything from my point of view is to come up with an idea, it cant just be any idea though it needs to be an idea of the right size. Ok so the first thing your going to ask is what is the right size? Well the right size depends completly on what it is you want to do. If you want to write a short story then the idea can be a very basic tiny one as you dont need anything to complex as your not going to have the time and space to devote to disecting it, if your trying to write a huge novel then your proberbly going to need a bigger idea maybe with some smaller ideas which can serve as sub-plots. Of course if your writing a script the same questions can be asked what size does the idea need to be, are you planning on making a feature length or a short? The only real diffrence with films is you have to ask can I afford that? In a book you can keep the stories backdrop constantly changing with no worries about budget, you can be on a futuristic space station and then an alien planet and as long as you can provide enough written detail to flesh them out and make them feel real then there is no reason not to let your plot take your characters to these places. On the other hand if your writing a script can you or the person your intending to sell the idea to afford the amount and kind of sets that your including, and can you or they realistically do them justice. Of course you might instead be writing for a video game and then you need to stop and think about how much choice you are going to include, if a player is free to make decisions that will alter the outcome of a situation or the player is going to be able to have control over conersational choices then you will have to write extra dialogs and alternative outcomes, so you will need to think about how you can have all these diffrent branches which give at the very least the illusion of choice but still keep your central idea the main focal point.

So what kind of writing have I done? Well I have wrote 2 horror based novels, a lot of short horrror stories, I have also written some erotica and I have wrote a large number of reviews articles and oppinion pieces. So is it easy to get an idea and write? Well yes and no to be honest. I have a lot of ideas for stories and for blog posts but not all of these ideas see the light of day. For every idea I see through to completion there are at least another one or two ideas that I put on the shelf. Do I come back to any of them? A few of them I do, but then I also have ideas that I have sat on for years. Its not just ideas either I have entire files full of semi penned short stories a thousand words here or there that just seems to be going well when it runs head first in to a brick wall.

Long time readers will proberbly notice that I had this big idea of doing 150 SNES reviews an idea which started out strong and then stalled a good few times and is currently in limbo, well there is a reason for this and its the fact that when you take on a big project like that you will find that there are parts of it that you are very passionate about and then parts which are just a bit harder to manage, sometimes you have to push past these and sometimes you just have to take a break and wait for insperation to hit you again. Sometimes you might even have to stop and wonder why you have decided to do a certain something.

I will give you an example of an idea of mine which kind of died on its ass. I was stood waiting for a tram in the rain, now they have these LCD style displays which tell you where the next few trams are headed and how long they are going to be. Now 99% of the time the display is tottally clear but on this particular day the thing was just going nuts, numberss and letters where flashing and dissapearing and reapering and allsorts, I had never seen this happen before. For some reason my brain went to ghosts and I just thought hey wouldnt it be weird if that was a ghost doing that, if it was traveling though the electricity, maybe it would be someone who had been hit by the tram or a car near to that sign and part of them had somehow ended up in there and this was them tryng to communicate. I got home I wrote this down in a wordpad of ideas. Oh I will stop you now and tell you that I think its a very good idea to get either a note pad or a computer file and just write down every little idea you have in it for either a story or a blog post or well anything, then when your stuck for something to do you can kind of come back to this and look if you have anything sat there which will inspire you.

Ok So I think I will leave it there for now.... Basically my first tip would be think about what kind of things you want to write and then just take it naturally see what ideas come to you and think about what you could get out of the idea, never throw an idea away though even if it seems a little crazy or your not quiet sure what to do with it, still start keeping a log of any ideas you have cause you never know when you might want to take another look at one of them.