Metapost: The end of an era

As you already know if you're an avid reader of my Twitter feed, today's Games for Lunch is the 500th one-hour review to be posted on this blog. It is also the last one that will be posted, for the time being.

The fact that these two events coincide is mostly a coincidence (though I did scale back to three reviews this week just so I'd end on a round number). The plain truth is that Joystick Division, which has been paying me to write Games for Lunch since April, has rearranged their budget and decided to leave this feature on the unhappy side of the new arrangement. As of now I've been unable to find another outlet that's been willing to pay to continue running the feature on their site.

Part of me wants to keep writing Games for Lunch sans pay, as I did for over a year before Crispy Gamer first picked it up. But a larger part of me realizes that, at this point in my life and my career, I can't justify spending a couple of hours (editing and formatting included) playing and writing about a new game every weekday. There's always a chance someone will want to pick it up in the future (Are you that someone? Get in touch. Reasonable rates!) but for now, the Games for Lunch experiment is over.

It's been fun and educational playing so many different games over the years -- many that I wouldn't have even considered spending an hour with if it weren't for this column. The one-hour review idea didn't exactly start a revolution in the game journalism community, but it did spawn some imitators (see sidebar) and I'd like to think it got people to look at their staid old review formats in some new ways. Maybe I'll go through the whole collection and compile some statistics and favorites as a sort of send off for the concept.

Thanks to everyone who contributed a comment, sent in a review suggestion, subscribed to the RSS feed (700 of you?! Insane!) or even just read a single review. I hope you didn't consider it a waste of time.

And that's the end of that chapter!