Archive for the ‘The Word’ Category
You may remember back around the time of the contest for the early Halo: Reach beta codes, we asked how you felt about the idea of setting up forums and if you felt they were necessary to the formation and expansion of an online community. Many of you said you thought they were very important, if not essential. After all, not everybody likes to leave comments on posts and if we don’t happen to do a story about something particular that you want to talk about, you’re left without a place for your voice. Forums allow you to direct the flow of conversation with both your fellow readers and CFD!’s staff, which is a win/win for everybody.
However, as you may remember, CFD! is completely run out-of-pocket by yours truly. Web hosting, podcast hosting, non-donated prizes; all of this costs money, sadly, and the site does not make enough on its own to be self-sustaining. If it were, we’d be doing a lot more cool stuff, like improving the site and giving away a lot more free stuff.
This is where you guys come in.
Yep, you guessed it. It’s Fundraiser Time.
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“Howdy, pardner!
“Yer new in town, ain’t ya? Well then, let me be the first to welcome ya to the best lil’ rum-mill this side of the Pecos. In fact, mosey on over here and bend an elbow — here’s a shot of Red Eye on the house. Nope. No catch. I just like the way ya cut a swell, son.
“Go on, drink up. No rot-gut in my establishment. No sir! We do it according to Hoyle ’round here. Respect yer customers and they’ll respect ya back (and if yer lucky, they might be gentlemanly enough to take it outside when they kick up a row, too).
“I didn’t lie, did I? Powerful good stuff. Just make sure ya don’t get too roostered up — don’t want ya shootin’ the cat all over my nice clean bar, here.
“So are ya planning to hang around for a spell, stranger? A week? Well that’s just great! We’re fixin’ to start us a week-long shindig — it’ll be a real hog-killin’ time!
“But keep yer eyes peeled for Ol’ Gr3ml1n McG33. Ya seen the wanted sign on the post out front? He’s a ornery one. A real four-flusher, that McG33. He ain’t likely to show face ’round these parts, as the Sheriff wants to take him to the necktie social, but if yer heading out of town, best be on yer guard.”
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Crush! Frag! Destroy! has made some small changes to its original review system. Nothing earth-shaking and catastrophic, mind you; just some small tweaks and clarifications, primarily with the ratings scale. We assumed you’d all appreciate being informed of them. See what nice people we are?
But we digress. On to the details.
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Another Summer is upon us and along with the customary triple shot of shorts, suntan lotion and stifling heat comes yet another alliterative hat-trick in the form of the video game industry’s biggest trade show: the Electronic Entertainment Expo – E3 2010 is here.
And even though CFD! can’t be in Los Angeles this year, we’re going to do our best again to cover things from afar (while silently assembling our master plan to dominate the show floor next year). What does that mean to all of you, our loyal readers? We’re going to run down all of the details just under the jump. See you there.
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Okay so you may recall in our “CFD! State of the Union” post a couple weeks ago we had outlined several upcoming projects and plans for the week following the post… and then promptly fell off the face of the Earth for a while. This was completely and totally my fault and for this, I apologize.
Without going into details, that nasty little thing called “real life” intruded into my ability to adequately run the site up to the standard we’ve been maintaining for the majority of its existence. Thankfully (hopefully), things seem to have ironed themselves out on the real world side and things look like they’re going to be returning to normal again.
So, everything we discussed in that earlier post is still a go, only slightly delayed (3+ weeks is only slightly, right?). You also might want to start sandbagging, as that flood of reviews is about to come pouring in, as well as the rest of the backlogged Indie-Dome feature. And if everything goes according to plan (after a couple of false starts) we should finally be recording Episode 3 of Team DeathChat this weekend.
To sum up: Things are back on track, thanks for sticking around and believing in us, and keep on being awesome!
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.
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Okay, so I’m just going to be flat out and open about this. You’ve all noticed the site has been going through some weird stuff lately. Allow me to explain what’s been going on.
Crush! Frag! Destroy! was offline from the wee hours of January 20th until late on the 22nd due to being hacked by some… let’s go with “person or persons badly in need of a hobby”; that’s a far more generous appellation than what immediately comes to mind.
With this hack came 2+ days of fighting to try and figure out why I couldn’t restore the site from the backups I had on hand. After many hassles and headaches, however, we finally got this beast back online, but not without a few hitches.
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Yes, we’re still alive (though you’d be hard pressed to tell lately).
Between holiday business and a host of personal issues going on, the site hasn’t exactly been keeping to the constant, regular update schedule we’re used to and for this we apologize greatly. We were on track to have out biggest month to date and we ended up falling short by a few hundred views, landing us at our third-biggest month overall. I suppose there are worse places to be, right?
But we’re now on the first day of a new month and hopefully most of you will have recovered from your turkey comas by this point. December isn’t really a gangbuster month for any releases, but there will be news about next year’s offerings incoming, of course. So, to that end, we’re going to try and be back on the ball about getting things done.
We thank you guys out there, loyal long-timers and new readers alike, for being patient with us through these rough couple of weeks. We’re about to close out 2009 and, in doing so, will be staring our one year anniversary in the face not long after (CFD! started up on Feb 22nd, 2009) and we want to keep things going at a level of consistency and quality. Hopefully all of our ongoing problems will be ironed out by then and we can move into our second year stronger than before.
Meanwhile, here’s the last two weeks worth of CFD! for you all in convenient Rewind form. Enjoy!
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I know I’m a wee bit late in putting this post up, but it’s because, like most of you, I was busy stuffing my face yesterday for Thanksgiving. I think we can be forgiven for that.
For those of you out there who were spending the day with friends and family, I hope you had a great time. For those of you outside the US who don’t celebrate, take some time today to let your loved ones know how much you appreciate them and count the blessings that are in your life right now, even if they seem small.
Lastly, to all of you out there in the trenches right now, braving this cold, dark Black Friday (again, for those of you outside the US, Black Friday – the Friday after Thanksgiving – is the biggest shopping day of the winter holiday season, with stores opening at ridiculously early hours and offering huge discounts), please be safe. No discounted video game or system bundle is worth getting hurt or, worse, hurting someone else over. Keep your wits about you and look out for your fellow shoppers. It’s going to be a madhouse out there.
So, from all of us at Crush! Frag! Destroy!, we hope the holiday found you all well and that you snag some good bargains out there on the sales floor today. Take care!
So I’m sure most of you may have noticed that this weekend was a little slim on the update front. There were a number of reasons for this, none of which I’m going to bore you with right now. After all, you’re here to read about video games, not our behind-the-scenes problems, right? Yeah, we thought so too.
So, what we’re going to do is call this past weekend a wash. I’m not going to spend the first part of this brand new week trying to get us all caught up on what we didn’t get done over the last three or so days. I might consider posting up the new releases list, but chances are I’ll probably just update the Amazon banner and not bother with writing up the whole thing. You have no idea how tedious that gets and right now my tolerance for tedium is pretty low.
So yeah, there you go. Sorry about this past weekend. Things happen. We move on. You may see another mass of slightly delayed videos, since those are already uploaded to the YouTube page, so it would be a bit silly to just skip posting them up. We’ll probably also just fold the last week’s handful of updates into next weekend’s CFD! Rewind, since there weren’t that many. Beyond that, though, we’re going to buckle down for the new week.
Thanks for being patient with us.
Hey there, everybody. Just a quick word on the state of what’s been going on this weekend here at CFD!
First off, I’m sorry we didn’t get any reviews up this week. We actually had a review and a preview due to be posted yesterday. However, I spent so much time running around that by the time I was finally able to sit down and get the news posts that had been waiting in queue ready, it was edging toward midnight. So, I’m going to be shifting those we had planned for Saturday to this coming Tuesday. Sorry again; things have just been super hectic. That’s why the angry gr3ml1n got used for this post. Plus, he doesn’t get to see enough screen time.
Second, regarding those news posts I mentioned, you may have seen some new names in the bylines over the last couple of days. Believe it or not, we finally actually have some new writers now! They’ve been doing a great job so far and we’re glad to have them on board, so make them feel welcome and try not to spook them, okay?
Lastly, today will see the typical Sunday posts (new releases, a poll, etc.) but there will also likely be a small flood of new trailers and other videos. I’ve been uploading files sporadically for the last couple of days, but have yet to actually sit down and post any of them up. So, it looks like they’re all going to come pouring out today.
That’s really it. Just a few quick notes to let you know what’s been going on this weekend and why our usual schedule has been a bit off-kilter. With some new blood on staff we’ll try our best to plow headlong into the new week with renewed focus. Thanks for sticking with us.
Crush! Frag! Destroy! has grown a lot since we first opened up shop eight months back. What started off as a one-man operation (well, three if you count the art team) has grown with time, but as traffic at the site has steadily increased, so has the amount of work I’ve had to do behind the scenes. Working on site updates, handling most of the news posts, dealing with publishers and PR, as well as giving final editing clean-up to every story that goes live takes up an increasing amount of my time, leaving me with precious little to actually focus on writing original content.
So, we’re putting out the call again – CFD! needs writers, badly! [Insert Gauntlet Music Here]
What are we looking for specifically? Glad you asked! Take a look below.
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Most of you are likely already familiar with Crush! Frag! Destroy!’s system for reviews: the standard, lengthy, in-detail review text up top and a three-line summary with a rating at the bottom for those people who think “reading is haaard” and can’t be bothered to take two minutes out of their busy, super important routine (in between high-stakes boardroom meetings, no doubt) to actually read and digest the full review.
Well, while this format is all well and good for standard releases with enough depth to support a 1000 word review, what do you do for those times when you want to talk about something that’s not quite as meaty? Like, say, an iPhone title, DLC expansion pack or XBL Indie Game?
Enter: Fragments.
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Hey everyone.
You may be wondering why there were no updates yesterday and today. No, we didn’t just go poof and disappear. I just wound up the victim of some unfortunate circumstances is all.
You see, I wasn’t home yesterday, with CFD!’s Aubrey K. and I having driven two and a half hours across the state to watch a movie that was playing in super limited release. Rather than drive back the same night, we decided to just get a cheap room. The hotel was nice and while it did have wi-fi, the signal was very weak and it took forever for anything to load, to say nothing for trying to upload or download high-res assets for the site.
So rather than try to force out one or two updates at excruciatingly slow speeds and just spend the night frustrated, we decided to just hold off on updates. I suppose I should have just tried to write this explanation last night instead, but I was bloated on a delicious dinner of middle-eastern food and forgot. Sorry about that. It just came down to a case of fatigue and bad internet access.
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Just a quick note for everyone. If you subscribe to Crush! Frag! Destroy! via RSS, you may have noticed the site hasn’t updated in your reader for a couple of days. We thought it was a minor glitch that would work itself out, but it looks like we were wrong.
However, we figured out what was wrong and the problem now seems to be resolved and if a refresh of your reader doesn’t pop up new stories, trying re-subscribing to our feed and everything should be cool.
Sorry for any inconvenience. Send a mail our way at admin@crushfragdestroy.com if you’re still encountering any problems with our feed.
Thanks!
Rob Thomas
Rob Rich
Sage Knox
Beki Sutcliffe
Dustin Stevens
Jason Smith
Scott Thompson
Aubrey Klanecky
Zuri Grimm
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