And it’s done. It got boring at times but I had fun, and thankfully today was a lot more interesting. Incidentally you can see the story that I wrote yesterday for the GamesTM site here.

When I got in I had some work to do for the Retro section of issue 37, where I finally got to write my Great Gaming Moment (went with my original intention and wrote about Rainbow Road in Super Mario Kart) and also got to write a full-page article on a retro game that should be remade. For that I went with one of my favourites that’s never had a huge amount of recognition, Unirally (Uniracers outside the UK). I got to play both of them in order to get screenshots, so no complaints here.

While I was taking the screenshots I got to see final builds of Total Overdose and Star Wars Battlefront II. TO was a blatant ripoff of Grand Theft Auto (free roaming mission-based gameplay) and Max Payne (bullet time and lots of diving around), but didn’t do either of them particularly well, and everything from the Mexican theme to the voice acting wasn’t particularly well done either. As for Battlefront II, I never thought too much of the first game but if you enjoyed that you’ll like this one because it’s very much more of the same. It had some cool touches (you can run down the inside of the Death Star’s superlaser as it fires, and you can hear Darth Vader breathing in the cave on Dagobah) and the space battles looked cool, but it seemed to be pushing the boundaries of the licence when you, as a low level rebel troop, have to kill the Emperor on the Death Star with your blaster rifle. Did that happen in one of the films?

I got my appraisal as well, which was very positive. I was given a B overall (A’s for journalistic ability and interest in the job) and they said that the work that I did was of a “very high quality” and that they’d keep me on in a freelance capacity, so that should go down well with the tutors when I go back to uni.