MFGG Monthly News - November 2008

The final month of the year is upon us. The second final month of the year is just about finished. It's time for another one of these topics which have become steadily more lame each time they're posted. Oh well!

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IN THE MONTH THAT WAS NOVEMBER 2008

- The MFGG Awards happened... and is still happening now. At some point in the very near future the results will be announced. If you end up disappointed by the lack of you getting an award I suppose it means you'll have to work extra hard next year! Or get people to vote for you. Whatever floats your boat.

- Barack Obama became the new US president. Woo I suppose. See, he campaigned for months on end to get his votes!

- I'm looking to make our IRC a little more interesting by having scheduled events every now and then, like what NCFC did, but probably not as often as NCFC. At the moment, all 168 hours of the week are dedicated to simply chatting. That's fine, but... about 100 of those hours are spent with very little activity at all. Many of which filled with people staring at each other, saying absolutely nothing. Dunno if the old chat suffered from the same thing but that doesn't mean the new one can't improve. My IRC satisfaction meter will reach the top when that doesn't happen as often. OH BUT WAIT, I can do REAL stats now:

times are UTC

Our least active hour was 10:00 UTC with a grand total of 2 lines of text in a month. #retro's least active hour had 4000+ lines of text in a month. That's like, 100000% better. Now sure we've got a CCC, but you guys wanted an IRC so go use it! Really though, I'm just putting it here so I can see if activity's increasing or decreasing. Because it matters apparently. Even though December's generally an inactive month because of things like Christmas and New Year. On a more positive note, we're crushing M:FM and SFGHQ in the IRC war that I started and only I'm a part of.

BET YOU CAN'T WAIT UNTIL NEXT MONTH WHEN I DO ACTIVITY COMPARISONSS
(unless it's a terrible month for activity)

- Terrorist attacks in India... Not good.

- At the maximum value of acceleration in an SHM oscillator, displacement = amplitude.

- ...that's pretty much it. I told you November was a really dull month. December SHOULD contain MFGGcret Santa 2: Judgement Day, and possibly Cacodemons. I must admit I haven't been too motivated to do anything with you guys during November because I've been doing A-Level stuffs. And that's time consuming. It was also why last month's topic was sub-par. This one's probably par. Or birdie. Or a three-wood.

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ANYWAY
GAME OF THE MONTH™: NOVEMBER 2008

I'm picking again because I forgot to ask others

November's Game of the Month™ is:
Super Hammer Bros., by Admiral Delmore
as recommended by Black Squirrel

Not much I can say about this one that I haven't said before, but meh.

Super Hammer Bros. is a minigame that's super and involves Hammer Bros., or rather, a Hammer Brother (singular) because there's only one. The goal is pretty simple - get your Hammer Brother to beat the crap out of everything that moves by *gasp* throwing hammers at them at various degrees and speeds, while at the same time, avoiding death.

It's an original concept, and although this all works perfectly fine, the real deal with Super Hammer Bros. is the amount of polish that Delmore's put in. From the high-quality music to the online high score table, and all the graphical effects and transitions and whatever that accompany it. It's a very good example for aspiring fangamers on how to be a bit more original than the 30FPS Mario 3 engine clones that pop up all the time.

And obviously it's worth the download. Because I said so.
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Review Drive...

Review Drive #13 gave some quite interesting results. This time last month I was wondering whether to keep the review drives as part of this monthly update topic because the games mentioned had a habit of not getting enough decent reviews. So months were essentially wasted.

Now, I sent you kids out to tackle all the fangames that hadn't recieved a review. There were 39. Your score:

17/39
≈ 43.6%

That's not too bad! Sure it's left 22 games without a score (which has since increased to 26 as things were accepted over November), but it's better than I expected. Apologies that I can't effectively list everyone who took part this time. You know who you are, and I congratulate you.

However December's going to be without a review drive this month. This is for a variety of reasons:

a) If we did the same again this month as we did through November the results would most likely be poorer, since review drive activity has decreased since they were first started by ShadowMan since people get bored or forget.

b) It's December, and there's not going to be a lot of people about wanting to review Mario fangames when there's snow outside and turkey in the oven.

c) I can't guarantee that I'll be wanting to write a lot on new year's eve/day.

As such, Review Drive #14 will happen NEXT YEAR. Gives you reviewers a bit of a break. Though obviously if that 26 can get smaller in between times then that'll be grand.

It also means I can save space for tagging on all sorts of weird and wonderful 2008 stats to next month's update. Huzzah.
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And thus ends the dullest month of the year.
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Other things to think about:

- SQUIRRELZ CHRISTMAS PRESENTZ

Indeed, nice review drive

Oh you and your presentz *manly giggle*

I'll try to contribute reviews to at least some of the unreviewed games.

Oh, my first review was horrible, I tell you. O-O

Nice overview, BS.

Only one chart, and an old one at that? For shame, BS.

Like I mentioned in that other topic about IRC events, I might use an idea I got a while back (and made a topic about in the GC) to create an IRC event.

Meh. Mine was too, so no need to worry. You also picked a rather bad game to review first, IMO, so don't be too down on yourself.

Just don't be like me and write an essay's worth, because I honestly kill myself doing that.

In any case, the Monthly News seems to be getting duller. If I have anytime (only past the 17th at most), I'll try and review and few of the games. I'm just pissed I can't finish some of the games, so I can't review them (=-=)

Why should you finish a game? When you have played the first level or something like that, you'll probably know what the graphics and musics are like.

Games usually gets better after the first few levels, because most people think tutorials are boring.

the real one updates in real time

Well, I meant the real levels, not the simple ones like "go straight ahead. oh and bounce on that goomba, it can't kill you".

If I don't finish a game and then review it later, than I'll feel empty because I may have missed something like some special glitch I'd like to point out, or a particularly ugly graphic that shouldn't be used.
and then it will totally screw up the anime schedule (^v^)

This post has been edited by Soiyeruda on Dec 1 2008, 05:22 PM

I'll linger around the irc more often this month, now that I've got a client in relative order.
We'll see if we can't bump up some numbers for between 4 and 10 PST!

Well, you're right. But if the graphics in the first levels are good, I believe they won't get worse later.

But you're totally on the spot with the bugs :>