Promoted from our Community Blogs
[The amazing Cblog Recaps team brings us a month’s worth of Topsauces it thinks are worth another look for us! Want to you your stuff reach the front page? Join the community and start blogging! –Striderhoang]
Just before we got the end-of-year recaps out for 2014, the thought struck me that monthly recaps might be a great addition to the usual Destructoid community blog recaps. Doing the 2014 recap was an interesting experience — I got to see how my writing changed over the year, revisited favorite posts by other users, and saw some great blogs that went unnoticed or under-appreciated.
The only problem was that meant I had to go back through over 3,000 blogs to pick out my favorites. That’s a lot of hours sitting down, drinking hot chocolate or coffee and reading.
Still, I liked the idea of giving various blogs another chance in the spotlight and so I asked my fellow recappers if they’d be up to do this monthly. They were but told me, “This is your baby, Pixie, you gotta post it.” They also said it had been tried in the past, but no one had been able to stick with it.
Challenge accepted.
So here we are with the January 2015 Topsauce recap. The format of the monthly recaps might be a work in progress for a bit, but the aim here is to give those that reached Topsauce status another moment in the spotlight, catch other great blogs that may have slipped through the cracks for honorable mentions, and highlight community blog events. Luna Sy also volunteered to revive cblog analytics for this.
There were other ideas we had, but for now, we’re keeping this at those things. In the future, its my hope this top space will talk about community blog events, such as the Band of Bloggers project that The Scholarly Gamer, Dreamweaver, and Fenriff have started. Or It’s About To Get Gay In Here’s steady Onion-like satire. There’s many possibilities, but I also hope this encourages people to get more involved in the community blogs.
So, let’s get to it! If you have any feedback, feel free to leave it in the comment section.
– Pixielated
Cblog Analytics
For this month of January, we had 338 blogs! That includes 27 recaps, 10 Friday Night Fight blogs, and 4 promoted blogs.
Comments of the Week Prototype
Who put all these dicks in Mario Kart?
Band of Bloggers: Fallout 3/New Vegas
Our most active blogger in January was The Kodu with twelve blogs, followed by Dreamweaver with ten, The Dustin Thomas and Joe Jurado each had nine and Fenriff had eight. Retrofraction, Bardley and CharlieTime each put up seven blogs. It’s About To Get Gay In Here and StriderHoang both had six blogs, rounding out our ten most active bloggers.
Excluding staff arrivals/departures and Comments of the Week blogs, our most voted blog was by It’s About To Get Gay In Here. His Gearbox blog earned a total of 36 votes.
You can find further details here
Expect a more in-depth blog analytics starting this month 😉 – Luna
Staff arrivals and departures
In January our resident CEO and cybershark, Hamza CTZ Aziz, spread his fins and returned to the open seas, seeking out new fish to consume. He was was followed our former community playdate manager Bill Platt, who is now less of a Chilly Billy and more of a Cold William.
Bbain evolved into Ben Davis and became a front page writer. A fellow previously known as Phil evolved into Mike Martin, our new community playdate manager. I cannot determine at this time if these are their final forms or Mega Evolutions but perhaps Strider can.
Now, on to the January Topsauce!
This month is a strange one: it’s like, all of a sudden, the people here are busting their asses to bring back things that we had before and stopped. For example, podcasts Fapcast and Space Granules makes a return this month after a long hiatus, Pixielated volunteered to write a monthly recap and for the briefest and spontaneous of moments, Comments of the Week made a spectacular return thanks to yours truly. Also, Alphadeus released the newest volume of “Songs of Gamers” because he loves you so much!
Although I don’t have time to go back and read through every blog, I also think there’s not really much to say: I think all the people who deserve credit, like Glowbear, Fenriff, RedHeadPeak, and my personal favorite It’s About To Get Gay In Here (is there’s a shorter nickname I can give you?) have been given Topsauces, so there’s not much to recommend myself.
To those blogs that I possibly enjoyed and felt it deserved a Topsauce, but can’t for the life of me remember what they are, I apologize, and I’ll try to actually keep a notepad or something full of links next month.
Speaking for myself, I might’ve been a little off-topic regarding my own blogs: although, I wrote a three-part fan-fiction featuring the Ice Climbers and pornography about Persona 4, in addition to the diary-styled postings of my Recaps, I also wrote about original hentai and funny enough The Amazing World of Gumball porn, and I regret nothing. I find the latter especially funny because, like a strange bolt of coincidence, Luna Sy, the one who seemed disgusted with a blog about that, just so happens to become the Reserve Recapper on the day I posted it. It wasn’t planned or anything, but I find that somewhat hilarious.
Rambling aside, although I won’t stop with the hentai blogs because it’s something I love, but I also hope to write more videogame-related blogs, especially after finishing Final Fantasy XIII because I feel like my love letter to that game is rightfully overdue: if it wasn’t so grindy near the end, I might’ve placed it on the Top 10 Favorite Games of All Time list. Scholarly, Fenriff, and I have also pitched the idea of Band of Bloggers, where one cheap, readily available videogame is chosen and we invite the community to play and blog about it.
Anyway, that’s it for this post! Next month’s the month of love, so if there’s ever a time for more sister incest hentais, it’ll be then. 😛
* – Cannibal Steven lists off his Top 11 fetishes, which, funny enough, none of which contains guro.
* – GlowBear has some suggestions about how Destructoid more appealing.
* – SeymourDuncan17 gots a fever, and the only prescription are conventions!
– Dreamweaver
One of the things I enjoyed seeing in January, even if I was beaten to the punch, was others take initiative and planning a sort of gaming “book club” in the form of Band of Bloggers. I had been kicking a similar idea around in the back of my head for a bit, among other ideas. I guess my problem is I have lots of ideas and sometimes have a hard time deciding on one.
That and I was stressed out by my roommate, who has since moved out. Now I can concentrate better on blogging and gaming — that and be a nudist again.
While I can’t say that I found anything that grabbed my attention for an honorable mention this month, I am pretty happy with how active the community blogs are. We started out strong this year and February is already looking pretty good.
I’m also happy to finally have established a blog series, “The Agenda.” I’ve attempted a series or two in the past, but never stuck with it because I blog and play by mood more than by plan. This series plays right into my whims and sense of humor. I already have new ideas for it, it’s just a matter of spacing the blogs out. I still have some other Persona and Majora’s Mask blogs to get out my system, though, so I’m going to work on those.
Here’s my January Topsauce and may phantom thieves ice skate down all your freeways!
* – I think Shovel Knight sits atop the Nuclear throne, but Zer0 thinks differently.
* – Bardley takes us down memory lane with ’80s gaming ads.
* – Nekrosys lists the Top 5 Sexiest Dtoiders!
* – Stellar tunage from Alphadeus.
* – Seymour posts something gay.
* – Gearbox, don’t do it! Bad Gearbox!
-Pixelated
January was a nice month for Destructoid. There has been a visible rise in energy within the community, and the members are rallying to bring old traditions back while creating new, fun projects. We saw even more changes to the site and the staff, with some veterans leaving, some new blood coming in, and some old dogs even coming back.
Maybe the biggest downer of this month was the lack of respect shown by the controversial Badger. While the idea of a feature where developers, journalists, and other important people of the industry could chime in on current events anonymously initially sounded cool, it has been abused by whoever has taken the role of the Badger in these last few weeks. The Badger has shown us he/she is incapable of expressing his/her opinions without shit talking and showing basic human decency.
But that aside, we had a lot of really good blogs this month. My colleagues have already highlighted some of the best, but I have other recommendations you should definitely check out, too:
* – The Nintendette has a cool theory about Majora’s Mask, one she can relate a lot with.
* – Tonich explains why he thinks games will probably never be viewed by the masses as real art.
* – Do you love Pikmin 3? Voltech sure does. And he explains why in this well-written blog.
* – b-b-b-bain and the Jets earned a much-deserved spot on the staff a few weeks ago!
* – Fenriff talks about the different kinds of replayability in games.
– Script
The community has been on a roll this month, not to mention the beginning of the year! So many brand new community projects to get everyone involved like band of bloggers or the return of comments of the week! In fact, this big breakthrough encouraged me to restart the Fapcast, which promises to be something good with several new interested guests as well as the return of a newly refreshed Phil, aka Mike Martin, aka our new community playdate manager.
Plus this year we’ve brought on board a few new recappers which I have high hopes since Mondays are still kind of sketchy in terms of proper ownership. I mean, despite all this cool new stuff and for sure slam dunks, there still isn’t any confirmed word on what Smurf is doing. He chimed in briefly, saying he was going to do Monday’s caps. That was last week.
So Strider’s picks!
* – Surviving the terror of horror games through communal gaming, with OSGVault
* – Alphadeus’ songs for gamers volume III!
* – Dreamweaver’s big, stupid, scary, Gumball hentai blog
* – Support Long John’s community interviews podcast!
* – Nintendo left Brazil and this affected GentleGamer
– StriderHoang
Here I sit at the beginning of my first official year as a member of the Cblog Recap team, and I must say that January was a great start to the year. We saw what hopefully will be the beginning of something much bigger in Band of Bloggers and Comments of the Week, but there were also a lot of blogs that were not only very informative, but an absolute pleasure to read. You guys are what make being in the Dtoid community so great, so keep up the awesome blog work.
* – Charlietime sings the praises of the 3DS, and speaks in ye olde English. Double win.
* – I agree with CarltonMcHard wholeheartedly on this one: Make more of your own products, Nintendo.
* – Strider’s GOTY list mirror a lot of my own, which means that Nintendo wins a lot of awards.
* – Videogames are for EVERYONE, suck it if you disagree.
– TheDustinThomas
I believe this has been a pretty good start of the year for Destructoid. While there have been a few setbacks, creative decisions that have been questioned by the community at large, and long-standing staff members stepping down, there were plenty of things to be positive about. It’s always nice to see more community members, especially ones you know or are familiar with, move on up around the site. Bbain writes articles on the frontpage. Phil is our new playdate manager. And I’m a recapper now! So is that other guy.
Some of you have been working hard this month, reorganizing the forums, coming up with new ideas like Band of Bloggers, bringing back old features like Comments of the Week, even coming up with this monthly recap thing! It’s like everyone’s trying to make this place more active and awesome again!
Keep it up ♪
Stuff I Topsauced on my recaps:
* – Sometimes, a game’s setting alone can make it worthwhile. Here are some really great ones.
– Luna Sy
January is a brutal month, New Year’s is fun but the following weeks are full of bitter cold and snow. Winter truly can be a hard time. Yeah, not for the Dtoid community! At least in terms of cblogs, activity has really been booming.
Some of my favorite things in January:
– Classic community podcasts coming back for regularly released episodes, like the FapCast.
– The new Band of Bloggers assignment, which is giving me an excuse to play a franchise I absolutely love: FALLOUT!
– And on a personal level I’ve had quite a bit of time to invest in the community: My podcast marches on, strong headfirst into the new year, I’ve tried my hand at a new cblog series (first and second posts), which actually got a good response in an attempt to engage the community better, and, the most drastic change, my joining the Cblog Recap team as the newest reservist!
You can find my first recap post here. It’s a nice change of pace in terms of I actually feel like I’m doing work for the community, with the desired outcome being that I can be more involved as time goes on. It’s also a ton of fun and enjoyment to read everyone’s blogs. I look forward to what this brings, and remember I’m here to deliver the goods!
Oh and here is my roundup for this monthly posting. It’s a bit meager but I only just signed up for the team. Expect a bigger February recap!
And that’s just January, the following months for the Dtoid community are looking really, really GOOD with several awesome projects and improvements down the pipeline and in the near future. I absolutely cannot wait for all of them!
-Nanashi
Alright, let’s try to get my entry to this new-but-kinda-not-because-it’s-like-the-yearly-recaps off the ground.
January was a weird month for me. What started in Washington DC ended in an obscure little town in the Netherlands. Language barriers were re-overcome, time zones were traversed, an ocean was crossed, and so many other things. Afterwards, I played my Wii U. And then I played my Wii U. And then I played my Wii U some more. And then I took a break to watch all of Kill la Kill. And then back to more Wii U.
Meanwhile on Destructoid, things went on as they usually do. Although not really, because they went on much better than normal! It warms all of my sensitive areas to see old projects be revived, new project get off the ground, and people continuing to blog the good blog. Speaking of good blogs, I’ve got a few!
Here are my Topsauces for January:
* – Nintendette takes a thorough look at that creepiest of Zeldas, Majora’s Mask.
* – For a musings topic, emuishere writes about the many gifts of Bioshock and Okami.
* – Dreamweaver’s Ice Climbers fan-fic was a joy to read.
* – Saying you’ve got a waifu is usually creepy, but not when Charlietime does it.
* – I don’t know a Mike Martin. I only want Phil.
* – RedHeadPeak likes to enjoy his games a little differently.
* – Glowbear talks stealth and may or may not be fat.
* – Fenriff talks anonymity in games journalism, but who the fuck is Fenriff?
* – Dreamweaver has been hard at work bring the Comments of the Week back, and it’s glorious.
I only just now realized how easy I go on you people. Just look at all that ‘sauce! That’s gotta end and soon. No more mister nice Shade, the kiddie gloves are off, you better start impressing me from now on!
Oh who am I kidding, I have enough sauce for everyone…
– ShadeOfLight
