It’s been a month of blog posts! Maybe a little more, since I started posting daily a little before August in order to get in the routine. How’d I do? Let’s take a look…
Final Fantasy 1 and 3 playthroughs
My idea for the month was just to post daily playthroughs of Final Fantasy 1. I thought these games would be longer… and I wondered if really focusing on a single game would be a good way to narrowly target my blog in a way that would make it a destination for these kinds of things.
I was pretty excited to get FF1 running on an NES emulator, and I went a little crazy looking for other NES games to play on it. I didn’t stick with FF1 on NES long; the Pixel Remasters are a lot more user friendly. For FF3, I never even considered playing the original.
Pixel Remasters = pretty good. I even got used to the weird font.
Board Gaming
I have consistently gotten very little reader interaction on board games, or stories about my family and I playing them. I’m kind of sad about that, because I’d love to talk more about them.
I can totally understand this. Most people I know pretty much play video games as their main source of gaming entertainment. Board games have the really huge disadvantage that they require other people to (usually) physically be present, for long periods of time. Even though we love board games, it’s hard for us to get everyone together more than once every two weeks. I don’t review board games, or talk about strategies or such, because there’s so many better people out there already doing it.
MMOs on Google Trends
I got inspired by Google Trends and the whole Blizzard kerfuffle to try and figure out which MMOs were actually more popular than I thought. I had a hierarchy in my mind that had WoW on top, FFXIV coming closely second, and then everything else some huge distance beneath them. I also suspected that Crowfall and New World weren’t as popular as the people I follow on Twitter would have me believe.
This led me into a huge rabbit hole of site scraping and Python programming that was, in the end, inconclusive. But, based on Google Trends, if you want to be playing the most popular MMOs in the United States, you should be playing RuneScape (or its “Old World” version) or MapleStory.
If true, and I’m not saying it is, WoW and FFXIV are not nearly as popular among the wider MMO crowd as we believe.
DCUO
DCUO is the MMO I play most frequently, and it’s been the topic of most of my posts that discuss MMOs.
I was able to test the House of Legends episode before it was released to the public and really liked what I saw. I’m liking it less now, even discounting all the connections issues I had, but that’s a subject for another post.
Superhero MMOs in General
If I were going to focus on just one thing with my blog, it would be superhero MMOs. They are a tragically underserved sub-genre, and there’s actually a lot of excitement in the area. DCUO is, arguably, the most financially successful (given we can never know the actual numbers), but several others are still chugging along, being revived, trying to make themselves outlets for different sorts of player power fantasies.
It was sheer coincidence that a new hero MMO, Ship of Heroes, was having an open beta event during Blaugust, so I got a chance to dive deeply into what could, someday, become something really special.
Potpourri
Mixed in with all these were posts about random other topics — 3D printing, the Kickstarter post (might do more of those), my continued love/hate relationship with Microsoft Flight Simulator…
One thing I wanted to do for Blaugust, and in the end didn’t do, was to restart my “Daily Blogroll”, where I write capsule reviews of everyone else’s blog posts. Those were always fun, back in the day, because the same topics would roll through everyone’s blogs and I loved reading them and celebrating them. We’re a far less cohesive community these days, though. As many others have mentioned in their own blogs, blogging is a niche writing outlet. These days, it’s about social media and video and branding.
Final Thoughts
Blaugust is always fun. It’s a challenge to find time to write every day, and it’s fun to try to find some interesting take on a post.
Going forward, I doubt I will continue to blog every day. But I don’t think I will quit, either. This month has given me plenty of ideas on how to make my blog more relevant and find my audience. I lost so many friends and my connection to the community when I let West Karana die. I don’t want to lose you all a second time 🙂
Thanks to all the mentors, mentees, and fellow Blaugust bloggers! It’s been a lot of fun, and I’ll see you on Discord and Feedly, I hope, until we meet again next year 🙂
Everyone is like “Blaugust rocked!” and my post (going live soon) is like “I ain’t doing THAT again.”
Every party has its pooper, and usually it is me!
lol… but you will, right?
Probably. *sheepish grin*
Yessss.
*chanting in the distance* ‘One of us, One of us…’
Very glad to hear you’re keeping on blogging. Also, very much looking forward to your post on why you’re not as keen on House of Legends as you were at first. I did all the introductory quests and was going to carry on and start sorting out my gear and such but I’m so locked into Bless Unleashed right now I got too twitchy at not playing that so I had to leave House of Legends for the time being. When I get the chance, though, I’d like to start a new character and play through under the new systems to see if the flow is any different.
Well, I don’t want to write that post in the comments, BUT — the new player experience is vastly improved. The seasoned player experience has become an intolerable grind.
Was great to see you back in the thick of it so much, Tipa!
The Google Trends posts were a particular highlight of the entire month for me, equally for the process/method you went through as the results themselves!
Thanks! It was fun! I did keep trying different things but the results kept getting weirder…
It’s not that posts about board games are not interesting, I simply find it very hard to talk about them. I like playing them, but in contrast to video games I simply don’t have a lot to say. In my pen&paper/board game group we have so many that we’re wary of adding more than one per year, or we’d not be playing any of them ever again. And pre-pandemic we had a really nice yearly board game event in town, which usually gave us ample opportunity to find good new games, and the last 2 years we’ve actually not met in person as often as before…
So all you’d get from me would be “looks good/I don’t like how it looks” or “Cool.”. Also maybe I’m the weird one here, but always happy to read those posts, guess that’s the point 🙂