WE ARE ALIVE

If there was a list of the top ten things I wouldn't want to happen to Gametrash, number two (right under “turned into Gamefaqs”) would be for Gametrash to suffer some major technical malfunction that was none of our's fault yet something we had to spend a lot of money and time to fix. Well, guess what: that happeend.

About March 6th or so, Gametrash.com's database made some stutters, and one of our subsidiary's MySQL database (which is what we use to store info like these articles) just magically disappeared. Completely. As in, it just freaking vanished. And the hosting company (1and1) just basically laughed at us and did nothing. Obviously, we were in need of a change.

So, within the next month we ended up flipping GT around like a unwanted child from server to server, looking desperately for ANYONE who would take the domain. 1and1 failed us horribly, HostGator outright stole cash from us with a (borderline illegal) hosting plan, and other servers wouldn't take us.

So, now we are on Dreamhost, and significantly scaled back. Why? Because in this change, Gametrash is going to change internally- basically, we're going to re-focus how we run. This isn't because we HAVE to, but it's because the staff of Gametrash pretty much agrees that we need to focus on what we do well and ditch what we suck at (like getting dates). Time for a proverbial housecleaning.

The Plan

Gametrash is best when we all basically do what the hell we want. People enjoy reading our reviews on odd Japanese titles more than they do the cutting edge technology, and we understand that. The reason is simple- those dicks at IGN and Gamestop can't figure out Japanese games like we can, and because they have meaningless things like wives and car loans, they have to keep a decent amount of dignity. Screw that. We're going to go for the hidden treasures of gaming and review them.

First off, the Forums and the Downloads have been removed. The forums were a cesspit of funny and stupid, but it's obvious they don't need to be there. Things like commenting and your opinion are nice, but we've found that monitoring them (basically making sure no-one hacks) takes up all the time we used to spend actually doing reviews. That sucks, and no-one likes sitting there making sure “iloveford20” doesn't post naked pictures of himself all over the website. He can just take that to a site that's stupid enough to allow that kind of thing, most notably Gamefaqs.

As well, the downloads are being removed because it takes up too much space and we can't host anything really worth downloading. No doubt you're disappointed that you can't directly download the first season of Desperate Hosuewives off our systems or something, but much like the forums, it's too much work. It sucks our bandwidth like we suck down coffee, and we really have nothing worth downloading that isn't involving nudity, which we really can't host. So that's gone.

What WILL come is a whole new system upgrade to help us add Japanese games to the system. In the future, you will be able to look through our database and see games that may or may not make it to US/European shores- from dating simulations to eroge. This is the kind of stuff that you won't find on any other website- and because we rock, we're going to be the ones to start it.

What we need

Now, more than ever, we need authors. Good authors. Damn good authors. We need people who can go out and find interesting/unknown games and make them known to the public via Gametrash. We're not interested in the “usual” authors, spewing nicely organized reviews of the latest RPG titles their parents buy them- we're looking for the hardcore and the unusual, the people who have a “connection” in Japan that buys them games where you make love to a Oldsmobile. That stuff is the true stuff of champions.

If you're interested, contact me- my e-mail is Kirk AT Gametrash DOT com. E-mail me samples of whatever you've done- we're always looking for new blood.

Until then, hold on tight and enjoy the ride. Things are going to get awesome.