Not Quite the Anniversary

July 10th, 2008

super mario bros 3

It would be convenient for me to crown today as being the first anniversary of my venture into the realm of video game blogging, unfortunately that would be far too easy considering that my step into the gaming blogosphere was quite the slow, transitional one.

A Bit of a History Lesson…

You’ll notice that on the 23rd of November last year I posted up an article titled “Welcome to The Gaming Blog” which if you did notice probably begs numerous questions. You see, for the past 4 years I have been merrily blogging away in my personal blog which I fittingly dubbed PrimeScape. Around February of last year I created a new site to house Primescape with a WordPress CMS and gave it the address https://danielprimed.com.

It was a few months later that I began slowly shifting my efforts towards video game writing, sticking everything on PrimeScape until I eventually decided that I’d be best if I separate the blog into two; one personal and one gaming, so back last Novemeber I did just that. Since then my focus has been firmly set on improving my video game flavoured writing.

Quick Flick Through the Album

Naturally this past year of blogging has been a challenge. It’s been an uphill battle between my dedication as a gamer with something to say and my inability to fluently translate that something into words. Behind the soft blues and not too saturated to be grey whites the journey to find my feet and on those feet stand has been a struggle. I consider myself as someone who has never been well versed in professional or at least entertaining writing and while the content might seem fair on the outside, it’s taken a lot of screen staring, proof reading, re-writing and research to get to the somewhat lustrous level that it is now. I’m not sure if it comes across but I do try really hard to make everything with my rubber stamp on it to be as good as it can.

Thankfully though, amongst the struggle I have been fortunate enough to be surrounded by a great community of gamer’s who genuinely care about the medium, where it’s heading and also pipsqueaks like me trying to cut a slice of the blogging pie. You know, before I started blogging about games I’d never read a games blog before. I didn’t know where to start, where to even find them! All I wanted was a platform to share my thoughts on games. It’s been through these people, their blogs and support that I have been able to become better accquanted with what exactly it is I’ve been wishing to say. I feel like I’ve my words now, so thanks for that.

A Few Ideas for the Future

Where to from here? The same route as I’m currently on, I suppose. My writing still needs massive improvement so I’ll be investing most of my time on that. I need to tighten up my articles and show you guys a little bit of mercy with the bloated length of my work. I’m also trying to bolstering my writing vocabulary, improving my general punctuation and finally creating a much more distinct voice. Hopefully these will become noticeable changes over time. Thanks again.

Few Tweaks and a Re-Focused Outlook

June 25th, 2008

Another brief status report coming your way. You may have noticed a few changes that I have made to the site, here is a punchy, dotpoint outline:

feel the magic silhouette New Slew of Content Spotlight articles
Removed Sexiest People in Games
Removed Retro Review
Removed Images that Defined Video Games
Added Visual Connection
Added Journals
Removed BlogRush Widget
Added Twitter Feed

Basically I felt that the removed features didn’t match where I want to go with the site. The Retro Review was originally intended to be an overview of older titles but I think that this ultimately fails when A) I’d rather critique then write a technical account B) There are already sites like Wikipedia, MobyGames and HardcoreGaming101 which do this already and do it better.

Despite Googles favouritism towards it, I don’t wish to continue the Sexiest People in Games feature. Once again it is a bit like me pretending to be biopic/Wikipedia role doesn’t really fit me. I do like the idea of Visual Connection though as it is a way for me to congregate those largely image dominated articles together. Journals as stated last time is a platform for me to attempt (read: struggle) to write something of an academic nature.

I have also kindly taken up Twitter in the past month and now it is a part of this site. Yay! If you haven’t caught on yet (don’t worry I was pretty slow with this one too) Twitter is a new interactive site where you post what you are doing in 140 words and less and people “tweet” back and forth. This is a great way for you to stalk me, alas, stalk away!

I also removed that BlogRush rubbish which is 100% useless trash for self conscious web entrepreneurs, just to let you know. ^_^

300 words in and I have already lied about this being brief. No matter it makes an adequate enough segue. I know that the last couple of articles have been colossus in size, while I enjoy writing to such length I would like to condense and concentrate the majority of future articles so that it makes everything a bit easier to digest on your end. That doesn’t mean I will quit the lengthy article because I love them dearly, rather as the title pokes at, I just want to re-focus and concentrate my efforts. Thank you.

New Poll – Where Should I be Getting my News and Reviews From?

May 13th, 2008

elite beat agents scream As I’d mentioned previously in this post, I am unhappy with what I am getting from IGN in terms of both news and reviews. Too often I spot suspicious content, whether it be the checkbox styled reviews (Wii Fit, Boom Blox) or just news, reviews and previews that just don’t feel right (Nitrobike among others). I suspect that a few of these article are paid content and it’s starting to really frustrate me.

So with this I have been on the hunt for a new authority figure to tell me what is going on in the world of gaming. My problem is that I have been reading IGN for a few years now and I don’t really know where I should go next. I have already subscribed to the 1UP network feeds but I fear that they may not be a comprehensive as I’d like. Then again I could munch into gaming’s favourite junk food; Kotaku but yeah…I don’t really like their style of writing.

This is where I cry out to you; my readers. Please show me the light.

I have selected a few default sites and put them into a site poll. When selecting my options I realized that I am gonna have to cut it with one of the big wig sites. So please vote and help me make up my mind, the poll is on the right hand side of the navigation menu. I have also allowed an ‘other’ option and if you select this then please tell me what it is by either commenting in this post or sending me an email.

Of course, if you would like to elaborate on your selection I’d love to hear it. So let me know just below or send me an email. 🙂

Posted in Site Updates | Comments (7)
Tags: News, reviews

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