A few weeks ago, when I was bored and full of curiosity, I went and checked out my old Gameboy site. In a way I was surprised to still see it up and to find out it still gets over a thousand hits per month. Mind you that is nothing compared to the likes of Amazon or even a regularly updated, interesting, personal site. My site, however, is an amateur Gameboy review site chock full of shit grammar and covering games you can’t even buy anymore and possibly don’t remember and to top it off I don’t advertise it anymore. I would have genuinely guessed my hits would have been around 10 a month.

Because the site still gets some sort of regular traffic I’ve come to the realisation that Gameboy HQ was my internet pride and embarrassment. There are a lot of reasons for me to be proud of my work. I was one of the first real Gameboy news sites at the time. I genuinely had some influence (even if it was with a very small portion of Nintendo’s consumers) and, most importantly, the site lead me to get into freelance writing; making $20 a page for websites and books related to games. I did this at home. I was getting paid some rather decent money for something I was happy to do for free.

So what’s to be embarrassed about? Well I really have to ask how did I have any influence over anyone, get any visitors to my site and why in the hell would anyone looking at that want me to write something for them? I know I can do much better now; hell I think I could have done much better then. I just did not care. I was young and banging out reviews quick so I could get back to debating pointless shit on gaming forums and it definitely shows, in my opinion.

I think I had got a little lucky with the whole dot com thing. I rode that wave and ended my career shortly after the dot com crash. I think things could have been different if I had ran my site like I was making money from it rather than continuing to run it like an amateur. Instead I got more into PC gaming and just gave up the whole gaming journalism thing.

I think now “would I have wanted to keep that up?” and I think the answer is no. Looking back on my competition I see sites that are gone, sites that seem to be run by people bored with the scene and, worst of all, I see the likes of IGN, Gamespy, etc actually giving the Gameboy proper coverage. I think I could have dealt with competing with the “big boys” but I don’t like the whole new-age game journalism. The whole “let me talk about my boring little life in my game review” blows major ass. I do think the likes of Next Generation / Edge magazine are a dying breed. Casual gamers are becoming too much of an influence and it would do my head in at the thought that I might have to cater to that group of uneducated gamer.

So before I get too far off track, the point is, I didn’t feel like starting up my Gameboy site but I didn’t like the fact that my game review legacy was left looking like that. It definitely shows that the site was designed on a Win3.1 machine with a 640x480 resolution and what was probably 256 colours. Click here to have a look at the old design if you have never gazed up on it.

While I haven’t filled the spelling and grammar, the site now looks better. I will probably sneak about fixing up spelling and grammar ever now and then when I’m bored. I’m not that bothered and I don’t want to rush into it and get put off by the hassle of rewriting something that looks like a retard wrote it. I’m hoping if I take it easy I would get that spark again for game journalism and possibly get back into the whole scene. I don’t think I would focus solely on the Gameboy again. I don’t like Nintendo’s current trend whore attitude that seemed to come about after Mario Party. Nintendo, listen up, not every game has to be a multiplayer game aimed at children with no attention span or taste. You’ve ruined Mario Kart, Mario Golf/Tennis and it’s well embarrassing that you’ve made Wario such a mainstay in the Mario universe and, worse yet, added Waluigi…..that name fucking sucks.

I’m not sure what I’ll cover, if I get back into game journalism, but I know I’ll do it correctly from the start next time.

I would like to thank everyone that has been a regular visitor to Gameboy HQ. Especially those who sent hate mail or retarded Gameboy questions. I’d like to give an extra special thanks to Mafioso. It’s a shame we lost contact with each other, mofo.