GAMES COLUMN 1 - December 1997

A full-page column commissioned by The Face on the recommendation of journalistic goddess Miranda Sawyer, after I helped her out with background info for the legendary Lara Croft cover feature a couple of months earlier. She's fantastic. (Miranda Sawyer, that is, not Lara Croft.) Having described Lara as "The Bit Girl", The Face would go on to refer to me as "The Bit Boy" in the column's strapline for several months. I'm still not sure if this is really cool or terrifically embarrassing. The Face was at the time the "real world" publication with by far the most positive attitude towards gaming, treating it on a more-or-less equal footing with music, movies, fashion and clubbing. Off the top of my head, it's the only mag in the lifestyle press I can recall ever having features on gaming in the main body of the mag, rather than in just in the reviews section.

GAMES COLUMN 2 - January 1998

Goldeneye, Time Crisis, Grand Theft Auto - good times.

GAMES COLUMN 3 - February 1998

Quake 2, San Francisco Rush - not quite such good times.

POP VIDEOS FEATURE - February 1998

All that money - why don't we ever get to see the end of the story?

GAMES COLUMN 4 - March 1998

Dead Or Alive, cut from the published version of last month's column, makes an encore appearance.

GORE FEATURE - March 1998

Feature on the new wave of blood-and-guts games. Eventually reworked into a different piece, and bits of it also showed up in Column 7.

GAMES COLUMN 5 - April 1998

"Reality Bites" - continuing an old theme.

THE MAGIC NUMBER - April 1998

Why Number Twos are better than Number Ones. If you'll pardon the expression.

GAMES COLUMN 6 - May 1998

"In Praise Of Rooms"

GAMES COLUMN 7 - June 1998

"Undead Dead Good"

GAMES COLUMN 8 - July 1998

"Any Way The Wind Blows." Ironically, a new editor took over The Face at this point, and things changed somewhat.

GAMES COLUMN 9 - August 1998

"It's Different For Girls."

GAMES COLUMN 10 - September 1998

"Geek Power". This extraordinarily straightforward column ("Console games are getting geekier, like PC games") somehow managed to completely baffle the new editor, who claimed to be totally unable to comprehend the point even after two rewrites. At this point we parted company, making way for him to give the column to (the section head told me) his best mate, as he clearly wanted to all along. The new editor, I report with some satisfaction, would go on to preside over one of the biggest circulation falls in the magazine's history, and be himself replaced not too long afterwards.