I’m always flattered to realise that there are in fact people who occasionally consume the content I put out there, even more so to be able to interact with those people and be part of a community of like-minded weirdos. One such friend of the show is, of course, NekoJonez, and – to my great surprise and alarm – he’s elected to include me in his list of nominees for this community award of sorts, the ‘Unique Blogger Award’. Thanks to Jonez, who’s a cool guy and one of the people I’ve been able to do the most interesting stuff with since joining the internet gang of internet people; he’s done a lot of very good stuff including the Zelda Project, and he’s even recently turned sort of activist-y by taking a stand against stolen content.

Anyway, the award! There are some rules, and they are as follows:

1. Display the award.
2. Thank the individual(s) who have nominated you and include a link to their blog. A little promotion for their blog is also welcome.
3. Answer the questions asked by the individual who has nominated you.
4. Nominate an arbitrary number of bloggers and have them answer three questions you put forth to them.

Award displayed and Jonez thanked, let’s take a look at the questions he’s asked!

2. If you were able to erase all memories from one game to be able to fully experience it again, which game would it be and why?

Hoo boy. I think my answer to this would be the Kingdom Hearts series – which should surprise nobody, as I go on about it often enough. I first played it as a kid, and one who’d never played Final Fantasy or watched a lot of Disney movies to boot, so I was discovering a lot of these worlds and characters for the first time. It was also the first time I realised how big and epic a scale games could be on, and that’s a feeling I don’t think I’ll ever capture again.

2. If you were allowed to help in the production of a game, which role would you take on and why? The role of producer, voice actor, writer, designer…?

I don’t see anything to specify that taking on multiple roles is verboten, so that’s what I’m gonna do: I shall write, I’ll write, and I think that I will also write! (The story, the dialogue and the music!) I’ve actually been considering for a while whether I ought to take my novel Stargirl and try to make a game, including writing the soundtrack (I’ve already done a couple of tracks that I think would fit), out of it; the barrier is that I’ve no idea how to make a game. Coding, art and all that stuff are unfamiliar to me, so really what I need is to find a partner who can take my story, my characters, my music, and then fill in the blanks of… all the rest.

3. What is one of the earliest video game memories?

I distinctly remember renting the game of the first Harry Potter movie on Game Boy Advance, and it seemed incredible. I must have played other games before that, or why would I have a GBA? – but that’s really the first thing I remember. I suspect I might have borrowed a friend’s Game Boy Colour and played a couple of the Pokémon games to some extent, and I also recall my first experience with a PlayStation: I was at a neighbour’s house and he had Spider-Man (the game of the first Tobey Maguire film) on his PS1 and I couldn’t believe how good it looked and how much you could do in it. I was easily impressed, apparently. Heck, going back to question 1, maybe what I’d really like is to wipe all my memories of all games so that I could just experience gaming in general for the first time again, discovering all these amazing things that… don’t seem so amazing any more. That would be a real gift. But then again, I’d have to re-learn how to play, and that could be very tedious.

Right, well, that’s my Q&A done! Thanks to Jonez for the questions, and now I have to come up with some of my own and nominate some more excellent bloggers. The problem for me is that a lot of the people I can think of immediately are people who’ve already been nominated either by Jonez or by one of the people he’s nominated! That pesky Jonez with his far-reaching internet coverage.

Still, I do know a few happy people who deserve an award, and maybe they’ve already been nominated but I’ll put them again anyway!

• Shoot the Rookie
• A Most Agreeable Pastime
• Dragon’s Tea Party
• Lightning Ellen

And my questions for you guys are as follows:

1. Who is your LEAST favourite game character of all time? This can be someone you love to hate, or someone you just think genuinely sucks.
2. You wake up and find yourself in a game. Which genre of game world could you thrive in, and which would not be a good fit at all?
3. Pick your favourite track from a game soundtrack and write some terrible lyrics for it!