City 16

That’s right, I’ve been doing this shit for a year now! Hurrah! Actually it’s been 1 year and 18 days, but I always forget birthdays. So while I warm up the Celebratron-3000 for some super-fun-party-times, here’s a rundown of the highlights of the past year… and by highlights I mean “things I can still read without wanting to punch myself in the face.” Self-congratulation, go!

• The second ever post on the site, probably what tipped me over the edge into setting up a dedicated games blog in the first place, was about Braid’s hidden message on obsession.
• Shortly after that I ran out of topics for intelligent analysis, so instead wrote some shit about the first hour of a bunch of games. Here’s Jade Empire, which I hated, and Dawn of War 2, which I quite liked.
• A picture diary of my favourite Fallout 3 sidequest.
• A couple of weeks with Battlefield: Heroes got me thinking about snipers in online games. Conclusion: They’re bastards, but probably necessary bastards.
• Generally I manage to avoid flying into a rant about something I’ve seen on the Internet. Generally, but not always.
• Probably the weirdest game I’ve chosen to do an hour with post about. Pathologic.
• Some thoughts on character creation led to some interesting discussion in the comments thread. God bless you people, you do make the time spent writing this stuff seem worthwhile.
• The Bad Company 2 beta led to some of the tensest moments I’d felt in an online shooter for a long time. Here’s me attempting to capture that feeling.
• Highlight of the last year: Reckless Disregard for Gravity’s developers showing up in this post to say thanks!
• I’m not normally bothered about things like DRM. Ubisoft’s turned out to be an exception.
• Finally, my recent attempt at spending an hour with Red Faction Guerrilla turned out to be a worst-of of things that can wrong with PC gaming. It all turned out good in the end though.

So, it just remains for me to say thanks for reading the site. Here’s to another year!