Joe Martin – Product Marketing for Startups

March was a busy month for me – and a lot of the work I did still isn’t out there for people to use, play or read – but being busy is a good thing to my mind. As I constantly find myself saying, I don’t like standing still. It’s always better to be moving forward.

One of the things I did, at long last, was to overhaul this blog a bit. I’ve ditched the ‘Unlimited Hyperbole’ title (though I may end up using that elsewhere) bought the http://www.joemartinwords.com domain and upgraded the site to feature no ads. In the coming months I’ll be refreshing my HTML skills hopefully and adding a few more things to improve the experience, but for now it is what it is.

What else have I been up to, you ask?

Well, work on that game I’m consulting on continues. At the moment it’s in second prototype stage and progressing very nicely thanks to the talented team of designers and developers I’ve been working with. Most of March was spent refining plans for that, in fact, especially when it comes to the scoring system and the modes it will offer. We also did focus testing!

Elsewhere I did some work for Rock, Paper, Shotgun and, though it’s bound to annoy a few people, my debut piece was heavy on the New Games Journalism. It’s supposedly about playing Fallout 2 with a character that’s sub-par in the brains department, but in reality it talks more about punching cows to death. It’s called The Big Cow Punch.

I also did some work for another big site, Videogamer.com – who I used to contribute to back when they were Pro-G.com and I was just starting out in my career. It was actually through working with them that I got introduced to my long-time friend Andy Vandervell, who, though now Deputy Technology Editor at Which?, was once a games journalist too. The piece I wrote for Vidogamer.com played to my pessimistic, convention-bucking strengths: I’m Not Excited About Diablo 3.

The biggest piece of work I did this month unfortunately isn’t available yet, but I suggest everyone who wants to hear me talk to some of my game development heroes, including Dan Pinchbeck and Jonathan Blow, prepares themselves for Issue 2 of Continue Magazine.

I’ve kept up my work with Bit-Gamer.net too, of course – including a scathing preview of Assassin’s Creed 3 and an analysis of GAME’s (then impending) closure on top of my usual weekly articles. The upcoming issue of Custom PC Magazine (105) will meanwhile feature me fawning over Alan Wake, AVSeq and a trio of indie exclusives I lined up.

Incidentally, I’ve just started work on the next issue of Custom PC Magazine (106) today, securing another exclusive relating to a game I’m very much looking forward to – but I can’t talk about that until next month…

Joe, Out.