Month: December 2015

2015 in Review, State of Blog, and Future Planning

Standard

[This post has been edited as I am currently following WordPress’s Blogging 101 classes.

If you stumbled across this from the blogging 101 tag, then hi! I go by the moniker meckronos everywhere online. A Muslim, Gamer, Programmer and now Writer hailing from Malaysia. Curious to know about me, here’s the About Me page.]

So I was about to make a summary of how well this little blog site performed throughout the year. Apparently, WordPress made all the statistical stuff already, so I’ll just link that in case you’re curious.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,300 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 22 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Having pass 1000 hits in a year is a huge achievement for me. But to make some money on the side (which I do plan to do in the future), I need to have this much hits in a single day. Still a long way to go.

Moving on, expect to see a few changes to make visiting this site worth your time.

  • Proper scheduled posts coming every Tuesday and Thursday. This will be hopefully be consistent, and posted by 9 PM local time (+8 GMT that is).
  • Extra, topical posts (that is what most people write), coming whenever it’s topical. This won’t be counted to the two articles per week. Consider it a bonus.
  • A bit less of offtopic posts, like how naming is important and how the a placebo works. I don’t find enough time to create those kinds of posts currently. It’ll appear less frequently, sadly enough.
  • More writing opportunities elsewhere. I have been casually been a contributor for GamerMalaya, even made some reporting duties on behalf on them. Go check them out for other news and tidbits. I mostly post similar content from what I made here, but maybe more new content in the future. Looking forward to contributing for other sites as well, like JomGaming.my.
  • Tip Jar. Honestly I have made a single dime doing all this writing. Doing it because I love it. But if you consider any of the posts helpful and worth a tip, you can now do so via PayPal, check the side bar on the left (or press the plus button if if you’re on mobile). I appreciate a drink or two. Coffee, of course.

Thanks to you lot who checked the site, either regularly for new updates, or found it by chance in the search results. Here’s to another wonderful writing year in 2016, and hopefully more cool games, and life lessons, can be experienced.

The Highs and Lows of This Year’s #TheGameAwards

Standard

Last Friday is the second outing of the Game Awards, following Spike TV’s  now-defunct Video Game Awards (and the horrible mess of the VGX). While there are other awards in the video game industry that matter (like the DICE awards), the Game Awards differs by being closer to heart to mainstream audience, presented as a show, along with musical performance and such.

There’s also the spectacle of “exclusive world premiers”, 10 to be exact as confirmed by show runner Geoff Keighley. And discounts for games that are nominated. So this also runs as a shilling (read: promotion) run for all the viewers to buy these games if they haven’t.

Whether you’re in the camp of “a celebration of games and honouring the game devs” or “a major shilling event by major game publishers”, there’s a few high point and low points that are worth discussing.

Continue reading

Here’s A Review of Fallout 4, in Audio Form!

Standard

So recently, I was invited to the Rambling Monkeys Podcast to talk about Fallout 4. It’s an hour long conversation with me and the host (who’s also a good friend of mine, full disclosure) about what we like and don’t like with Bethesda’s newest open-world exploration game. Yes, I’m not calling it much of an RPG now. To note: my earlier impressions still holds up until now.

So hit play, and do other stuff while you listening to it (it’s an hour long with no video).

Like what you’ve listened? Rambling Monkeys Podcast is podcast about a lot different things, with guests invited to share their thoughts and opinions on the topics discussed. This includes nerdy stuff like games and movies to social matters like behaving on social media, love and relationship, and many others. Of course, being Malaysians, there will be hints of local flavour here and there that not many podcasts out there have (since there isn’t many Malaysian-made podcasts out there to begin with).

To listen more to Rambling Monkeys on Soundcloud, and they have a Facebook and Twitter account too if you keen to follow them on social media.

Yes, this sounds a lot like me shilling, or making a ‘natural advert’. But hey, I tend to promote things that you may never heard of.