January 2012 in Review

The Site

After five years, I updated the About page for the blog.

The primary improvements, a relative term on the best of days, were removing my picture and rewriting the whole thing up as something mildly resembling a FAQ, despite the fact that none of the questions listed have ever been asked with any frequency whatsoever.  Still, one less picture of me, so a win for the internet!

And the whole thing does give some sort of outline to the philosophy behind this blog.  Read it at your peril, and remember that any promise of candy is likely to be a lie.

Then, due to an RSS feed misfire, my very first post on the blog… a “Welcome” message which coincidentally also attempted to establish some sort of blogging philosophy, though it was clearly in a much more primitive state at that point… received more views this month than it had during the entire history of the blog so far.

So for all of you who missed it five years ago, welcome.

And finally, I’d just like to say that I think the special iPad format that WordPress.com has looks pretty neat.

iPad version of TAGN

Of course, since it is graphically focused, my urge to make sure every post has at least one picture has been reinforced.

One Year Ago

Eschewing the predicting convention, I issued demands for 2011.

The blog was listed at a Vietnamese gaming site in a top 10 post that looked suspiciously like one from Massively.

TERA was trying to win notice by telling people how they had boars in their game!  BOARS!  Can you imagine?

EuroGamer tried to tell us PlanetSide 2 would be out by Q2 2011.

It was time to start messing with the then new EVE Online character creator.

DC Universe Online launched.  I played in the beta just long enough to remind myself I am not a superhero kind of guy.

I used Google to tell me World of Warcraft’s five most pressing issues at the time.

Meanwhile, the Twilight Cadre was back in Azeroth in force and checking out Cataclysm.  We got our first guild achievement.  Our group of new characters, four worgen and a gnome, went through Westfall and all its phasing magic, wailed in the Wailing Caverns, before settling down to a pattern of doing three instances every Saturday night.  I wasn’t sure if we had skilled up a lot or if the game had been dumbed down that much, but clearly the 1-60 game in Cataclysm was proving to be not much of a challenge.

There was some cool stuff in Cataclysm.  I like the balloons.  Redridge, never one of my favorite places, got turned into a fun solo experience.  And there was the Murloc combat ability.  But otherwise, the game was starting to lose us.

And, finally, Pokemon was coming to town.

Five Years Ago

The MMO blogesphere starting talking about generations of MMOs, and I asked if we had even gotten past the first generation, then quoted Wikipedia’s takeon the generation debate.

The instance group finished up the Scarlet Monestary and rolled through Razorfen Downs.

Blintz, my swashbuckler in EQ2 was just digging into Zek, The Orcish Wastes, one of my favorite zones in post-cataclysm Norrath.

Scott Hartsman described some of the goals for the EverQuest II expansion that would eventually become The Rise of Kunark.

I played in some of the Vanguard open beta, once I got it downloaded, but when the game actually launched, I declined to buy the box.

And, finally, Blizzard launched the Burning Crusade without the usual first day disasters that tend to accompany an expansion, though I couldn’t figure out why I was bothering to buy a copy.

New Linking Sites

I would like to thank the following site for linking here in their blog rolls.

• Hunter Bikutanda of Nazgrel
• Jester’s Trek
• MMO Overflow

Please take a moment to visit them in return.

Most Viewed Post in January

1. Hulkageddon V: Unholy Union – Coming Soon
2. How to Catch Zorua and Zoroark
3. Play On: Guild Name Generator
4. Running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit
5. Twelve Questions for 2012
6. The MPAA Paints A Chilling Portrait of Things to Come
7. What Happens After the End of White Noise in Branch?
8. LEGO Lord of the Rings: The Video Game – It Could Happen
9. Remembering My First PvP Death in EVE…
10. Type 59 Being Pulled from the World of Tanks Store
11. Considering Star Wars Galaxies Emulation? Better Grab a Disk!
12. Scraping Off the Rust in the Iron Tomb

Spam Comment of the Month

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EVE Online

After an eventful December in which I first ventured into 0.0 space, January has been kind of quiet.  The war in Branch hit a lull and I spent most of my time worried about skills and ratting in my Tengu.  Of course, just as I have been closing in on my final Maelstrom skills, the word was passed down that those with the right skills should fly a Drake.  Well, that was where I started.

And now the war is back on.  The corp has declared war time rules again, which amount to “knock off that carebear crap when fleet ops are active!”  Maybe, just maybe, I can get on the kill boards for something other than structures, in a Drake or not.

Rift

I have been playing a whole lot of Rift.  I post regularly about the instance group, but that is generally one night a week plus maybe a little bit of prep.  I have to find some time to write about what I have been doing with the other 75% of the time I have been spending in Telara.

But, as a whole, I am pretty happy with Rift for now.

Star Trek Online

It went free to play and do I care?  I am a lifetime subscriber.  Maybe not.  I keep the game patched up, but I do not play.  I did actually log in after it went free to play, just to see where I stood.  I have 1040 Cryptic bucks, or whatever their currency is called, and so many changes since I last logged in that I probably need to start over.  We’ll see.

World of Warcraft

Hrmm… I hit level 85 and haven’t done much since.

Coming Up

I think I summed up my to do list above.  Post about new null sec adventures in EVE (if any), write up something about all the non-instance group stuff I have done in Rift, and figure out where I stand with Star Trek Online and World of Warcraft.

Other than that, maybe something about iPad games and the PS3 and… oh, I don’t know… baseball movies.  We just saw Moneyball and spring training is coming up.  Or maybe not.