My writing WIRED!
So, if you get the August copy of Wired magazine and you turn to page 015 of the special Wired HOW TO section, you’ll find a small blip of writing in the middle of the page, beginning: “SHARE A PSP GAME.” Well, I’m not on any Contributor page (there doesn’t appear to be one any longer in Wired), there’s no byline for the little blip, and the approximately 400 word blurb that I had originally written for them has been thrown into the wood-chipper, so it is only a measly 38 words (and that’s including all of the little words like a, an, the, and of). Thankfully, I just checked with Brian Lam at Wired (and soon of Gizmodo) who originally contacted me about writing something for them, and I am still getting paid.
Pre-the cuts, the original story I submitted looked like this:
Want to play Lumines on your PSP with your friend, but you own the game while she doesn’t? Here’s a neat trick that will help you share one UMD among two or more friends simultaneously:
Step 1: For best results, take a good puzzle game like Lumines or a fighter like Street Fighter Alpha. Load the game.
Step 2: Start a level. One of the most energy hungry parts of the PSP is the UMD drive. Energy kicks in to spin up the drive and fire up the laser. In order to prolong the battery life on your PSP, many games limit the amount of time they must read game data off of your UMD, opting to load a good chunk of the game into RAM. That loading screen may be your own personal gaming bit of hell, but thanks to that wait, the game may not need to access the data on the UMD drive again until you switch levels.
Step 3: Once the loading screen is gone and you’ve reached a playable section, eject your disk.
Step 4: The PSP, shocked by your actions, will blink a grey screen at you reading: “Do you want to quit the game?” Choose No, hit the X button and in a good percentage of games the PSP’s tiny robot-brain will be so confused by this illogical maneuver that you can keep playing.
Step 5: Pass the game along to your friend. She can follow the same steps and pass it on to another friend. If you play a long round the music may stop on Lumines, but the game will keep playing.
Step 6: If you reach the end of a round, or if you move to another section on a game like Untold Legends, the game will freeze. Simply tell your friends you need the disk back, put it in, and wait a few for the next bit of data to load.
Step 7: Laugh at your Nintendo DS-wielding friends and their inability to do this cool hack. Accuse them of being too touchy-feely. Kick dirt on them. Call them names.
Step 8: Rinse, repeat, enjoy!
C.K. Sample III is the author of PSP Hacks and blogs on various Weblogs, Inc. properties, as well as on his personal blog, Sample the Web (http://www.sampletheweb.com).
And that, my friends, is a look into the luxurious life of writing for a magazine. ;-)
August 3rd, 2006 at 9:06 am
[...] So, remember how I mentioned that Wired took a piece I wrote for them, stripped it down to 38 words and didn’t give me any sort of byline or mention on the credits page? Well, here it is: Wired 14.08: How To: Get Your Game On Share a PSP Game [...]