Hey everyone, it’s Nick. I know that the blog has fallen into irrelevancy (as if it wasn’t irrelevant enough already) over the last few months. Let me provide a bit of back story as to what had happened. A while back the Giant Bomb community magazine, known as the Luchazine, was looking for some new writers. I applied and got excepted, I was pretty happy that my writing would get seen outside the scope of this blog. So I started writing for them, and I was really digging it. I wrote 2 pretty large articles for them in my first month there, the PS Move hardware and mini-reviews that are on here now and also the Castlevania review. I made sure everything was in by the deadlines the editor-in-chief had set and was good to go. For weeks after that, nothing happened. The articles were supposed to have been edited shortly after that and there was supposed to be a back and forth so that everything would be agreed upon. Now I don’t at all blame the editors for this, as a matter of fact I only really saw one guy ever editing the articles that were written for this thing. So finally after WEEKS of waiting, the art and editing was done for most of the articles and, even though it was set to come out a bit late, it looked like Issue 5 of the Luchazine was set to come out. The publish date came and went and there was nary a word on our internal message board. Finally, the EIC comes in and says, “Well since it is gonna be so late, I am scrapping the issue and we are just gonna start fresh next month.”
I wasn’t aware that “starting fresh” entailed him wiping all the posts on the message board pertaining to that issue. I really wanted to post up the final draft art layouts for the Move and Castlevania articles, but I can’t access them at all anymore. Thank god I kept backups of the articles themselves or else it would have been a bigger waste of time than it already was. Already a bit miffed at the events that had taken place, I pressed on to the next issue. I was tasked with a Rock Band 3 review, once again I had it done far before deadline. The same situation with the last issue happened again, my article sat there waiting to be edited for weeks. Over the last few days things were looking good, articles were being edited and the art staff were doing really good. Then today I see the news that the EIC has decided to close the Luchazine.
From what it sounds like to me, the EIC mostly sounds like he is blaming the staff, here is a quote from his announcement post. “Whether you blame yourself, other members or even the two of us doesn’t matter at the end of the day. The fact is that instead of getting better, we’ve gotten much worse. At this point, you can’t say ‘oh we’ll do better next time’ because we’ve already had months and months of next time. Heck, some people just randomly disappeared from here without a single word.” Now from what I saw, most of the writers and art dudes met their deadlines and did the articles they were assigned. Later on in the thread he goes on to say that they wont even release the last issue. It seems really shitty to me to have 2 months of peoples time and hard work get thrown away because one guy doesn’t like it.
I was able to back up a near final spread of the Rock Band 3 review I did, the art was done by Aurahack who is a poster on Giant Bomb and a really talented member of the staff. I also want to give props to John Rabbit who worked on a really fantastic spread for Castlevania and UberExplodey who did an awesome job on a Playstation Move spread. I have gotten in contact with all of these dudes to try to get some of the spreads so I can post them up here. I also wanted to give a big thanks to Vito Raliffe who (as far as I can tell) had to edit EVERYONE’S articles by himself.
It is pretty crappy to waste people’s time for two months and then give them nothing to show for it, I hope that should I ever work on anything like this again that the people in charge will work a little harder to make sure that people’s work doesn’t go to waste.
