CaptainD is a reviewer and fellow blogger like myself yet far more accomplished and established than I am. This made him the perfect choice for an idea I had, a series of interviews with the people who actually review games to get their opinion on certain topics instead of them always interviewing everyone else. CaptainD has several blogs, which you can check out,not only about video games, the Wii and PC, but he also reviews Books, Movies, takes photos, writes fan fiction and plays with Graphics. He also recently started writing for another blog called Gaming Daily covering Independent Gaming.
How long have you been a reviewer?
That's actually quite a difficult question to answer. I guess my first ever reviews - of computer games, naturally - were for a few diskzines back in the heyday of the Atari ST, which would be maybe 18 years ago. I've been reviewing games, books, movies and various other things on Epinions for the past 7 years, and various other places on the net. I've been running my PC gaming blog for a bit over a year now, which includes reviews of commercial, indie, shareware and freeware games.
I'd probably have to go back to the early days of 8-bit gaming - I had a ZX81 then Commodore 16, then ZX Spectrum before moving onto the 16-bits with an Atari STFM. During all that itme, right from my young childhood, I read and re-read computer magazines, and the desire to work somewhere within the gaming sector has always appealed to me. I'm not sure that I'd class myself as working in it now - my day job is in a hospital and my income from blogging / reviewing is helpful but nowhere near enough to live on - but getting to the stage where my blog is successful enough for commercial companies to send me games for review is quite cool. Plus it saves a lot of money as I'd often be about to buy those games otherwise!
What are your plans for the future?
If possible, I'd really like to turn blogging into a sustainable income and work on it full-time. There's just always so much more out there than I have time to properly look into, and I'd love to be able to genuinely help some of the small indie developers to get more exposure as they're doing fantastic work. I've always wanted to create my own games but somehow, whether with STOS back on the Atari ST, AGS on the PC or whatever, I've never managed to put something together that's been good and really complete, so I'd really like to do that at some stage. Whether I'd have the patience to learn a proper programming language is another matter... With my goldfish-like attention span another thing I've never managed to do is write a complete novel... something I hope to do eventually!
What is your favourite console/platform of all time? Why?Hmm.. that's a really tough one. I have fond memories of all the computers I've owned, and it's very difficult to compare them - the C16 and Speccy were lovely machines at the time, I had a lot of fun with the Sega Megadrive (didn't own one, but played it quite a bit), my current PC is pretty awesome nad the WII is a good little machine when developers actually make proper use of it rather than just throw a gimmick at a game and hope for the best. There are some great consoles and computers that I've never had much chance to look at, particyularly the Atari Falcon, Lynx and Jaguar. Still, I owned them during my formative years, did actually manage to put some half-decent games together on it, had several models and ended up with a rather unique upgraded machine that features three separate versions of TOS (the Atari operating system), I guess I'd have to say the Atari ST. I'm not saying it was the best system of all time, but I have a lot of fond memories of the old ST and the endless battles about whether the ST or Amiga were better were always great fun!
What is your favourite game/games? Why?How long have you got? From my C16 days, Kickstart and Bandits at Zero stand out. On the Speccy Head Over Heels, Matchday 2, Taipan, Feud; too many on the ST; Formula One Grand Prix and Stunt Car Racer, Player Manager and Kick Off 2; The Secret of Monkey Island, Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders, Pirates!, Midwinter, Populous, Iron Lord, Defender of the Crown, Elite 2: Frontier, Disc, Speedball 2... many also on the PC; TRON 2.0, KOTOR, Broken Sword, LEGO Indiana Jones and LEGO Star Wars 2... it's an impossible question really because every time I think about it, more games come to mind. I guess the games that stick in my mind are those that either introduced something genuinely new to the gaming scene or simply did something so well that even now I can't think of another game that's done it better.
Part 2 of the interview with CaptainD will be posted in a few days but until then make sure you check out his sites.
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