Yes that’s a pun….

Ladies and Gentlemen, HUDisplay.ca is back and better than ever after my having completed the redesign of the frontpage tonight.

After our first failed attempt to get the gaming journalism organization off the ground back in August 09′, David and I put it on the back burner – it was always a project we intended to come back to develop; however with my homelessness and three jobs at the time, and David’s two jobs and an internship there was no way to get any serious work done on the thing.

I’m happy to report that now that our lives are starting to settle into some semblance of a routine we’ve started to investigate a lot of things in the background to pave the way for tonight’s grandiose achievement.

At the time, back in summer/fall 2009, HUDisplay v.1.0 was moderately successful at what we had set out to achieve: we sought out some stories and had started to gain the attention of people around Toronto – although a misinterpretation blunder (a frequent occurrence on the internet) led to a group of Canadian gaming bloggers lambasting us – claiming that we hadn’t done our research by failing to acknowledge their existence when we claimed we were the only gaming news organization in Canada. We definitely knew they existed, as we had done extensive research before beginning the endeavour, but the fact of the matter was and still is this: we didn’t care.

We didn’t necessarily care that they were out there doing their blogs – some of them quite well in fact – we were at the time completely disinterested in anything other than our mission, which was to create a gaming-based journalism organization; something that to this day still does not exist in Canada. The point behind this was that WE were trained journalists while the majority of them were not and we felt we could step up the game for Canada a few notches in that department.

Clearly none of these people who complained had ever been in a band before as having been in several myself that’s part of the marketing routine to which I was accustomed – where you claim your band is the greatest band ever, regardless of actual playing or songwriting musical talent, and proceed to defend that stance until the day you succumb to alcohol poisoning (cause… you know….. all the really awesome bands go out THAT way). As I was working for Canada’s largest nationally-distributed music magazine, Exclaim!, at the time I was sure to tell my coworkers about the ordeal and point them in the direction of the various blogs that were busy scrambling to degrade us further on their respective forum boards.

Needless to say they were fairly amused…..

Most of them currently in bands themselves saw nothing wrong with what we did and actually praised us for it…. some of them even came visibly close to attaining the coveted ROFL (that’s “rolling on the floor laughing” for those of you who aren’t familiar with internet acronyms).

Six months have passed since then, and having dropped a job each to free up time (and frankly alotting some of that for some well-needed sleeping) we’ve managed to make some serious headway – obtaining a high-grade video camera, finally transporting my video editing suite from back home in Timmins to the new Toronto Base of Operations, adding a few new members to the roster, gathering a copious number of industry contacts and finally rebuilding the entire site from scratch.

Thus far with HUDisplay v.2.0 (which will numerically increase incrementally with each new site addition or change much in the way program releases do [see the upcoming HUD v.2.1 code-named HUD v.2 PUMA]) I took it upon myself to redesign the site as an actual Heads Up Display as if from a first person shooter like Metroid or Halo if the player had paused the game. The original Megaman-styled head logo has now been joined by Metroid’s Samus Aran and the revamped Bomberman helmet as a trinity of logo segments for Heads Up! As each helmet would – if physically worn – most likely feature its own HUD for the wearer to perceive and interpret information about their surroundings.

Additional 8-bit styled helmet and head-gear graphics from popular video game characters will be used to help brand the site in the future (I thought it was clever since you can’t say Heads Up! without the word head, plus it makes for a fairly recognizable visual draw), though we haven’t yet worked out how many sections we’ll be featuring yet. This is partly in part to our dropping the news briefs coverage entirely due to lack of time and pretty much just because there are too many people already doing it, so we wouldn’t really be bringing anything new to the table other than our sarcastic wits….. which, let’s face it, are friggin’ awesome… but aren’t gonna take us all the way to where we want to go.

All-in-all it’s a work in progress, but it’s enough work for one night…. (or I guess in this case, six months)

ZZzzzz

<3 Stephenson