Smashed on a first birthday.  Classy.

Seriously kids, elephants look nothing like this

Yes, that’s right readers, on this very day last year we made our very first post!  We’re a whole one years old!

Throughout the course of the year we’ve:

• Made 430 posts in total
• Reviewed 69 games/game add-ons
• Acquired three new writers
• Started a Twitter account
• Acquired four new consoles
• Never once reviewed a game specifically for Wii

Sorry about that last one by the way, Nintendo fans, I promise we’ll fix that in the next year!

So how else do you celebrate the birthday for a one year old? Why you go out drinking of course!  The entire AD crew are out enjoying a few brews tonight, and we promise to bring you some pictures of our drunken antics tomorrow.

For anyone currently pondering the lack of content on site, you can rest assured that we’re still alive and no-one’s passed away from a horrific alien spore.

The unfortunate fact is that with the Christmas season setting in, we’re all stretched a little tight for time and attenti0n, so apart from one major series of articles (and if we’re lucky, a few smaller ones) you won’t hear much out of Armchair Diplomat until we hit the new year.

We’ll be kicking off a big year in 2010 too.  Mark’s getting stuck into his redesign of the site, and Bone is drafting up new avatars to accompany our new writers.  And I’ve got a whole raft (possibly even a dinghy) of games I want to write about.

I’ll let Stu introduce the last series of articles for the year himself in the next few days (although the concept won’t shock anyone who follows us on Twitter), but apart from that I wish all of our readers a very happy holiday season, and look forward to seeing you all in the new year!

We’re welcoming two new writers to the site this month: Jess and Moose.  Moose is his real name, “Jess” may yet turn out to be a pseudonym.  They come from two rather diverse backgrounds gaming-wise, but mostly we’ve brought them on board to round out the site’s writing focus a little.  While out primary love is all things gaming, I’m not so o-fay with geek culture (despite all the horribly goofy t-shirts I own).

Jess has already started her posting, and I imagine Moose will do sometime soon also (once he decides what he wants to write about).  Say hello in the comments section, if you feel like it.  They’ll both be joining us at eGames Expo this month too, to help us report on all the goings on.

I’ll update the About page with bio details soon.  We may have one more new writer in the shape of my brother, if he can ever pull himself away from online poker, but most likely he’ll simply be writing guest articles, so I’ll mention him when he’s ready to go.  I’ve also been fiddling around with our sidebar navigation to incorporate the staff expansion, so you can now access individual blogs through there.

Content out the wazoo on the way, I’ve got two more days until a fortnight of time off!

Just a quick post: We’re entering the final stages of our basic site setup.  Bone is currently working on finalising the review visuals, and I the system.  It’ll be a basic ranking out of 5 system, detailing pros & cons, with a thumbs up, thumbs down or the morally ambiguous “thumbs middle”.

Also still to come will be basic user accounts.  I’m still in favour of making comments easy to toss out there, but just so there’s no impersonation going on we really need to make names link to accounts.  This will also support our ability later to have contests, given that we know accounts will have verified emails.  Mark’ll be looking in to this soon.

After all that’s done with, we’ve one more super secret section of the site that’s yet to be completed (details closer to completion), and then we’ll be done with our Armchair Diplomat v1 rollout.

From there, well, Mark wants to get his hands dirty with code and begin a site resculpt.  I kinda agree with him, as while I do love our current set up and colour scheme, the theme we’re currently using is a bit clumsy and prone to visual/alignment bugs.  That’s still a while away however, so you can get used to the look of things for the time being.  If you do find any bugs in the site, by all means drop a comment (any post is fine, I read them all) and let us know, I’ll get the coding monkey Mark to take a look!

More details as things progress, folks!

Just a quick site update for you readers:

I’m almost finished with Prototype (oh how quickly games are done away with these days!), just a few achievements to mop up and then I’ll be wrapping up with Saint’s Row 2.  After some frustrating shop searching, I located Mass Effect on eBay with ease and it’s now en route.  Also, due to the generosity (and some hellishly nerdworthy guesswork) of the folks over at Gamer Limit I’ll also have a copy of Zeno Clash to review soon, which I’m very much looking forward to.  Time to see if my computer is still in game playing condition!

Also, prepare yourself for some shock people: Mark is currently undertaking reviews of both Dawn Of War 2 and Rock Band 2, which should be up soon.  We were playing multiplayer Dawn Of War 2 the other night, and it’s definitely a departure from the original, but maybe not as much as people might assume.  I’ll write in a basic importer’s guide for Australians to include in the RB2 review too, just to point any other Aussies who want the game in the right direction.

Just a quick update for anyone who’s playing along at home, me and Mark have agreed that the current layout will have to do for now, so there are just a few more things to organise before we’re “done for now”.  Review art has to be integrated, a couple of category only pages for our blogs, some minor cosmetic stuff and we’ll see how it goes.

Neither of us are completely settled on this design, but it’ll be something to review (as in look back over, not assign a score based on gameplay factors) once we’ve been open a while and guaged how people feel about the site.

So I might just go ahead and peel off the black and yellow tape sometime soonish.  Not yet, but soon!
-Matt