Slowdown: Year One

Hey there, and thanks for joining our birthday party – we are officially wrapping up the first full year of The Slowdown today. It’s all in the books, baby, and it’s been great! (It’s also the time for another Wordle, to capture the Zeitgeist… by the way, does anyone know of fun alternatives to Wordle for that?)

Admittedly, the date – 4th of February – is revisionist history: Like you might have noticed earlier, our archives actually extend back to August of 2008. It’s the domain, slowdown.vg, that was registered on this particular day.

I think the date is as good a birthday as any because it marked, for us, a distinct change, akin to Woolf’s 1910, where nothing effectively changed, but we now had a marker, a calling card, a signature – something to go by. In the beginning, after all, we had few goals beyond simply publishing to and for the whole wide web instead of just mumbling, redundantly and repetitively, to each other like we had, for years before.

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The End of a Decade

This year was a curious one, and I don’t mean to refer to the VG industry alone: 2009 was, after all, the first full year of The Slowdown for us three, and boy, it sure went past real fast. For various reasons, this year has also been a very trying one for each of us, yet we were still able to find the time and enthusiasm to write and post together. Taking up writing, I’m certain, has only worked to enhance our enthusiasm and interest in the medium. As if to commemorate the very end of the decade, though, my relatively recent motherboard had to be shipped over to Germany for replacement recently.

You’ve probably also noted how we’ve yet not engaged ourselves in the “best of” discourse, at all; we enjoy making lists just as much as the other guy, sure, but perhaps unsurprisingly also tend to get over-analytical and –intellectual with the concept.

Slowdown Boys

Therefore, as our final post of the year, the three of us have jotted down our personal lists of the decade. The simple rule was not to make it too difficult for ourselves. Therefore, I have sought to paint an impression of the zeitgeist, warts and all. Very subjective. Nabeel wanted to paint a portrait of himself as gamer, and Richard hoped to be accurate and inclusive. The games listed below have not been included based on their perceived merits or qualities; instead, we selected them with the aforementioned focuses in mind.

All three free-form lists after the jump. Here’s to a new gaming decade, everyone!

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Slowdown Slowdown

While you have probably noticed the tell-tale signs of a steady stream of “Quote of the Day” posts (as fun as they are to post…!), I would just like to take a moment to clarify the situation somewhat: Richard, Nabeel and I have all been beyond busy lately. I’m telling you, it feels so good to be able to write that down, even if it doesn’t change a thing: Busy!

(Kinda dig the earlier one – it doesn’t read “TORMENT” all over it…)

To write about games, you have to think about games. To do that, you do have to read and discuss them, too. Doing that properly means you have to play them first. The problem? The above chain of events simply never even gets rolling when you’re pressed for time! We try to take each and every post seriously and this sometimes means more work and delays.

Right now, our @slowdownvg Twitter feed is slightly more active than the front page, as is my own @martynzachary – if only barely.

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Slowdown Showdown: RSS Versus Twitter

RSS 96x96If you expected highbrow SEO analysis, you may very well be in the wrong place: I can’t say I’m nearly hip enough to discuss the pluses and minuses of each platform – instead, I’d like to take this opportunity to remind you of the facilities of this blog: Firstly, our RSS feed is updated with each post made here, large or small, so if you want to keep in touch with everything, that would be the way to go.

However, if you would only prefer to be notified when we post original content – reviews, interviews, analyses and other major articles – then you could simply track us on N4G, where we try to get our original content submitted. You can actually help us out with that, as well as Diggs, by pressing the “Digg This!” or “Tips N4G” links below the post excerpts.

Twitter 96x96With our Twitter account, then, Nabeel especially attempts to keep on track of major announcements, more general industry-related news, various sales and discounts as well as other interesting things (such as Yahtzee’s Zero Punctuation!). I do tweet too, if less so – more about adventures and the sorts – so you will be seeing a tweet from me too every now and then.

As far as our Twitter mark-up goes, we have chosen to codify each our personal posts: Following three separate twitter accounts, after all, is far too much to ask from you at this point. Therefore, when Nabeel posts, he uses the prefix [NB]. I’m tagged [MZ] and Richard is [RS], respectively. It doesn’t make a world of difference, but just so you know in case you want to talk to us separately via Twitter.

Finally, if you want to contact us separately for whatever reason, each of us has a firstnamelastname@ e-mail address; Check out the about page for the rest.

This is all just so you know!

P.S.

We got Plurk too. Just in case you dig that.

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Re: Slowdown

If you’ve happened upon some decidedly rough patches on The Slowdown over the course of last few days, our apologies; Those of you that have already been here before have probably noticed how we’ve now largely finalized our complete overhaul of the look and feel of the website. The new theme is (hopefully!) functionally closer to our original plans for the website.

Though my insistence on tailoring ourselves a custom theme instead of opting for an existing one (or trying to find a suitable designer to do our bidding, for that matter) somewhat hampered the overall pace of development and the general produce of new content, we should be getting back into full swing sooner than later!

For those of you that are more technically-minded, we did eventually come to place some great emphasis on browser interoperability: We should in fact display just about correctly whether your web weapon of choice is Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome or IE7/8. Even IE6 will work (though using that monstrosity would hardly be recommended – Nabeel was none too pleased with my willingness to bend over for users of Internet Explorer). If you so desire, you could also take a look at how the website fares with more obscure browsers at Browsershots!

I hope you enjoy the new website as much as we do! If you do bump into anything resembling an annoyance, do let ‘er rip in the comment section. Finally, I’ve also included the latest Wordle-generated word cloud for the website. Quite strange a balance with some words there, huh?

slowdown-wordle-2009-05-21

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