Well, we've been promising you a flurry of action and adventure, and so the flurry begins.

For the last few weeks we've been traveling around the countryside. We've faced a grueling trek through some of the harshest and most remote areas of Australia searching for a rare species.

Australian Gamer team members are not just born. They are not raised. They are crafted, manufactured out of some kind of gaming steel made in the fires of a gaming forge to be a flaming sword. Of gaming.

I really lost track of that somewhere. The point is that we have been looking for people. People that could bring something new, something special to Australian Gamer. People who were really good writers who would work for free.

And who did we find?

Naturally we found a few people who were already contributing to the site, active on the forums, readers and fans, if that's not too far to go. We also got some great new people, who heard our call from forums around the internet, or read posts in pl...

Well, we've been promising you a flurry of action and adventure, and so the flurry begins.

For the last few weeks we've been traveling around the countryside. We've faced a grueling trek through some of the harshest and most remote areas of Australia searching for a rare species.

Australian Gamer team members are not just born. They are not raised. They are crafted, manufactured out of some kind of gaming steel made in the fires of a gaming forge to be a flaming sword. Of gaming.

I really lost track of that somewhere. The point is that we have been looking for people. People that could bring something new, something special to Australian Gamer. People who were really good writers who would work for free.

And who did we find?

Naturally we found a few people who were already contributing to the site, active on the forums, readers and fans, if that's not too far to go. We also got some great new people, who heard our call from forums around the internet, or read posts in places such as Sumea.

So who did we end up with? Who were our lucky three? Or unlucky three, when you take into account that they actually get pretty much nothing out of it and are expected to give up their free time to provide content for us for free. Yay!

Anyway, the first thing to say is that there wasn't three. A few things have come up since we decided to take on some new people.

First of all, Jess, who has been with us since our first round of applicants, has decided to move on. She just doesn't have time to put in anymore, and wants to move out of the games industry.

We'd like to thank Jess for her contribution and her presence, and wish her well. Hopefully she'll still be around and chatting in the forums, etc in the future.

So as well as the three new people we always planned to take on, we decided we also needed to fill the empty space Jess leaves. Making four.

Then we just arbitrarily decided on five. Why not? Hopefully no one listens to a word we say anyway, so 3, 4, 5, or 9, whatever.

Having that one extra person filled a few important needs. For one, it was just such a good application we didn't want to let it go. Secondly, we actually have so many review titles being sent to us now that we felt would could do a better job of our job if we had one more hand on deck, so to speak.

So in keeping with the ship theme, I'd like to welcome our new crew members. Hopefully this ship will be more the Love Boat, rather than Ghost Ship. Even though the acting in Ghost Ship was better, I think we can all agree that setting a course for adventure is far cooler than being cut in half right at the start.

Did you know the little girl in that movie was Violet Baudelaire in A Series of Unfortunate Events? Cool, huh? She hasn't done much since. Busy with stuff, I guess. School. Puberty. That sort of thing.

Where was I? Oh! On the Love Boat!

Joining us on the crew of the Love Boat will be the following fantastic people:

Anna is the youngest of our team. She has been a member of our forums for a long time now, and is known as Amanmai in there. I think she's the only person I've ever quoted in an article. She also harasses me on MSN while I'm at work, which I'm OK with. Anna is based in Melbourne. There are some pictures of her with us from the Melbourne Game1, though a recent NZ holiday meant she was unable to visit us for eGames.

Samo has been a regular visitor to AG since before we even HAD the forum, posting in our user comments and now in the forum as Flying Fr1dge. Or something. Anyway, he's now Samo because introducing him as Flying Fridge to Sony reps seemed a little odd. Samo came and visited us for Game1 and eGames, and manned the booth at eGames, which was a big help. He also came out drinking with Yug, to his detriment. Samo is based in Melbourne, which gives us AJ, Anna, and Samo all squished into Melbourne. Samo was one of our original applicants for reviewer positions, and it was a hard decision between him and AJ.

Brett is one of the few people we took on who we haven't met. He's in Perth, which was a real plus. But he was also (apart from Samo) the first person selected as a reviewer. Why? Because of his application letter, which was quite strange and funny. He's a good character, and should prove a great addition to the team. Actually, we're pretty sure he's completely insane, and we plan to just use his creative energies before they lock him up and he can't get access to a computer anymore, except for some sort of Marquis De Sade therapeutic letters. Which we will publish.

Jessi is our new Adelaide Rep, though what exactly she'll be representing time will tell. Nothing happens in Adelaide, so her opportunities to really rep are pretty limited. Still, Jessi is an experienced writer, and an awesome addition to our team, who we're very lucky to have. We actually met Jessi in Melbourne for eGames, where she had the misfortune to have to be in the audience for almost every speaker we were introducing, so we pretty much got to annoy her regularly. Jessi has been posting in the forums for some time as "Chienne", but that name is now being changed to Jessi to eliminate confusion among some of our less gifted forum readers (esp. Yug).

Romi was our last pick. Actually, we'd already read all the entries, made our decisions, argued, debated, and finalized everything. I'd done all the setup. Then Yug went "oooh, let's take this one as well!" So we argued some more, and eventually I lost interest and let Yug win. And I'm glad he did. Romi is our new Brisbane Rep, taking up where Jess left off, and has had involvement of one kind or another in several of the local and interstate games companies. She currently works at Krome where she is an ass prod. I'm told that means Assistant Producer, but seriously, does it have to stand anything? Romi also made the unwise move of starting a new WoW character on my server this weekend, so don't expect her to do any reviews for a while!


So welcome to these new people. We know you'll see plenty of them as they bring news, reviews, forum posts, and a whole bunch of other stuff to the site. I don't know what a whole bunch of other stuff means, probably nothing, but I thought I'd say that instead of having to quantify it.

If you applied for this position and were unsuccessful, please don't feel that you're not welcome, or not liked, or don't have anything to contribute to the site. The truth is we had a lot of great applicants (as you can tell from the people we have) and many other great applicants simply didn't get through due to (and this was very common) a shortage of relevant consoles. It's not that helpful to have a Sega Master System 1 AND 2. We don't really do a lot of reviews for those.


The addition of these new writers and contributors marks and important change of direction for AG. Most particularly up, and to the side.

I don't mean that as a joke. Things are looking up. With an additional 5 active and engaging reviewers, you'll be seeing a vast increase in the quality and quantity of updates, both of reviews, and of the site frontpage news. The additional manpower (and womanpower, which as we all know is greater) will allow us to not only trail behind other Australian based news companies, but surge ahead.

OK, that's not really true at all, but we should be able to trail closer behind, and that's an important step. We want to be among the first to bring you not just news and important events, but funny news, videos, rumours, and outright lies.

Secondly, when we started this website, there wasn't all that much around. Finding good reliable Australian news wasn't that easy a job. Now companies like PALGN are even more prominent, and Gamespot and IGN have an Australian presence, albeit a half-assed and kind of pointless one. The need for a serious and dedicated news team is pretty much missing. The need for coverage of local releases is minimized, if it was ever even there.

So we're shifting our focus. Rather than concentrating on giving you the most accurate review, we just want to bring you the most interesting. We want to provide a site, a review, a forum, that's fun, irreverent, and always topical. We want you to enjoy your visits, and if you learn something, or get anything constructive out of it… well, that will be an unfortunate side effect.

Please let us know and we'll remove the offending information immediately.

Seriously, though, we're looking forward to continuing to bring you, the Australian Gamer, the best news and reviews. But how we define "best" is maybe a little different. We will give you top class journalism with personality, humour, and dirty words. Can Gamespot do that? Fuck no!

See?