Hey there, everybody. I’ve been meaning to make this post for a little while now, but have been getting continually sidetracked every time I’ve meant to do it. I was originally going to post this as a video blog update, but that would require me having to get all prettied up and that’s far too much work. So this is what you get instead.

To get to the point, this post is meant to be a little recap of what we’ve been doing and what you can expect to see coming soon to Crush! Frag! Destroy! – a little “State of the Union”, as it were. As always, this is something we’d love to hear your feedback on. So feel free to drop us some words in the comments below.

So, as of one month ago yesterday, CFD! passed a milestone; we’ve been online for one full year. I’m still amazed daily that we’ve been going this long, as I have a bad track record when it comes to keeping projects running for long periods of time. I would say that I don’t want to jinx myself by mentioning that, but I’ve said it plenty of other times over the last 13 months and we’re still going strong, so I think it’s safe to not be superstitious about it anymore.

Here are a few more milestones:

• As of this writing, we’ve posted 47 reviews of games and will cross the threshold of 50 this week (actually, perhaps even today – see below for more on this)
• We’ve published 1,055 posts (including this one). I meant to make mention of us crossing the 1k mark when it happened, but I never got around to it. The 1,000th post was the one about Cream Wolf, FYI.
• Over 1,500 comments have been made on said posts.
• The CFD! Facebook page currently has 90 members. Come on, people! We can have this pushed into triple digits in no time if we try. If you haven’t already joined, do so! If you have video game playing friends on FB who aren’t yet members, tell them about the site!

Things you can expect to see this week/in the near future:

• The return of Crush! Vote! Destroy!: We haven’t done a new reader opinion poll since sometime in November, I believe. This will not do. Expect us to start again this week, possibly with more than one to make up for lost time. We’ll also be looking for your input as to potential new site features in an upcoming poll, so keep your eyes open.
• A lot of reviews: We’re currently sitting on nine or ten unpublished ones that have been gathering dust for a while. There’s a reason for this – in previous months, we tried to keep to a schedule of posting reviews on Tuesday and Saturday due to the site’s old design making it hard to keep certain posts spotlighted for long periods of time. We also were worried about not having enough reviews on deck to ensure we had new ones every week. However, with time, our review output has seriously increased and we’re now getting backlogged. Rather than delaying new reviews as we get them done in order to give preference to old reviews that have been waiting, we’re going to try to clean house a bit this week. So expect to see more reviews than normal this week.
• A new feature – 8-Bit News: The premise behind this is simple: none of us have the time to cover every piece of news we’d like to on any given day. Also, not every newsworthy tidbit is worth doing a full, 150-300 word write-up on, but that doesn’t mean we still don’t want to touch on them. Enter 8-Bit News. Eight short blurbs about interesting stuff going on in the video game industry in a compact, easy-to-digest format. Each one will come with a link to a full write-up on another site, should you feel more inclined to check it out in detail.
• More focus on original content: Yes, yes. If you’ve been coming to the site for a while, you’ve probably heard this promise before. This time around, we’ll be doing our best to keep it, however. News is all well and good and we don’t intend to stop doing it, but we want to give you more stuff to read that is uniquely our own. More reviews, interesting features, thought provoking/borderline flamebait editorials, and more. We also finally got our podcast, Team DeathChat, up and running after a year of talking about it and never actually doing so. If you haven’t listened yet, you should do so. That way you can watch us grow from our first, fumbling, nervous steps into the lean, sexy machine that we’re sure to become.

Seriously though, we’ve made it this far and as long as you all keep coming back (even all you lurky types who never comment or speak up) we’ll keep doing it. It’s been a far more rewarding (and demanding) experience than I ever imagined it would have been back in January of 2009 when the ideas for the site finally started coalescing together, but I’ve met some awesome people along the way and I wouldn’t trade this for the world. We look forward to breaking your controllers for a long time to come. Thanks, everyone.