I've been playing a lot of Killzone 2 lately. Call it a perk of attempting to break into gaming journalism. I may not be making much money yet, but I've gotten to a place where even if I don't succeed financially and wind up working retail the rest of my life (God help me) I'm getting free games, which is more than I could have asked for even a year ago. I actually just wrote up a review of the game and though I giggle like a schoolgirl every time one of the sites I work for asks me to handle a huge game like this, I can't help but feel something missing in the whole experience.

It's dawned on me that I haven't read a gaming magazine in nearly two months. This strikes me because right up until the death of EGM I was a stalwart reader of the magazine. I renewed my subscription regularly each year. I also kept a Game Informer subscription via my Edge card and was a regular visitor to the gaming section of Barnes and Nobles magazine rack. It may sound silly, but I've been a magazine fan since the early days of Nintendo Power and even though the internet has been drastically altering the face of gaming journalism for years, somehow my ultimate goal was still to see my own work in print, on paper.

That dream has since met reality and though I can easily see the advantages of digitalization, especially in providing more venues for new to the business fellows like myself to gain experience, it somehow feels less substantial now than it did when I was faced with the daunting task of working my way into the pages of EGM. Nowadays all it takes is a link and N4G for someone to be read, or even do well an article by article basis. The road to success is paved now not with Top 10 lists and broken grammar. The road lines seem painted less with well written features and more and more with articles describing the definitive reasons for why we need a remake of FFVII, or why the PS3 sucks more balls than the 360.

I feel like we're becoming a tabloid in some ways, and while I can admit that perhaps I'm being a bit overly nostalgic like Americans love to be about the 1950s for instance, all I know is this time tomorrow, I'll have a review of Killzone 2 up. I got the game for free and all that was asked of me was that I play the thing. On one level that;s pretty god damned cool. On another, my review is not on paper, and the way things are going it probably never will be.