I have been with the site for a year now, and these are some of my impressions of the past 365 days. I will start with how it all began…
Back in April 2009 I felt that I had spent way too much on apps, and there were still so many games I wanted to buy. Too many games were poor, and having the iTunes reviews as help was not enough. Reading a lot of five-star reviews for a farty game made me feel cheated. There were already some great sites covering iPhone games, and I felt that I had to contact one of them to help sifting out diamonds from all the turds. The ones I followed were Touch Arcade, Slide To Play and iPhoneGamesNetwork. So why did I choose to contact Nigel Wood at iPGN?
Five reasons:
1. Nachos review, and rhyme to the game Keep it Up.
2. The fact that Nigel comes from a proper country.
3. The fact that I hated Dave’s Puzzle Quest fanboy-ism.
4. The best iPhone podcast out there, which is still very true.
5. The reviews at iPhoneGamesNetwork had always been objective, and well-written.
I have to thank Steve Capps for giving me a promo code for Alice X even though I didn’t have any site to publish the review at. I wrote the review, and sent it to Nigel to get his opinion. Thankfully he liked it enough to publish it, and within a couple of days I had three new reviews posted. Within two weeks I had my own login to create my reviews from the ground-up.
My English was quite poor initially, and I thank Matt Dunn for helping me out a bit. I had to go back to my English books to brush up quite a bit. Some grammar errors still exists, and I will never be as proficient as a native Brit/Yank.
I have written, and published 345 reviews/articles in the last year. At around 600 words average that makes for 207 000 words. I have covered more than 400 games, and played about 600 in that year. I am quite impressed myself given that I have a full-time job as a teacher, and three kids at home taking most of my usual spare time. A lot of really early mornings, and even more coffee has been needed to get all the writing/testing done.
I have only had one really bad experience over the last year, and that is the response I got from some readers on my Dungeon Hunter review. It blew over, and today I can look back and feel stronger from that experience.
Definite highlights for the last year have been:
1. The name change to TouchGen has been perfect.
2. The friendly people at TouchGen.
3. All of the readers commenting, praising or giving constructive criticism.
4. That I was allowed to open a Gear section at TouchGen.
5. All manufacturers of cases, headsets and docks that have sent me samples.
6. All the game developers sticking to the iPhone.
7. The fact that I have started writing for iPhone Life Magazine,
8. The amount of games I have had the opportunity to play.
9. The iPad launch, and hopefully I will get one soon.
10. All the groupies…nah.
The best games I have reviewed for the iPhone during the year have been connected to space: Space Miner and Space Invaders Infinity Gene. The worst has been Eminem Relapse.
Tomorrow my second year at TouchGen starts…hope it will be just as rewarding as the first.
