Nerd Bacon News: October 2015 (2)

So far October might not be the booming month that we'd hoped for, but if nothing else, nearly all of the reviews submitted have been within our Halloween theme! A relatively small number of members have kept us afloat this month, so hey! Where are the rest of you guys!? We know that reviewing is not always easy or at the top of your list of priorities, so please contact us if there's anything we can do to make the process of reviewing just a little bit easier on you.

As we move into the home stretch of October, it can only mean one thing: the holidays are closing in! Whether it's a break from school, visiting family, or settling down to some good meals (and the leftovers), there's one thing we can all dig about the holidays, and that's all the cool new stuff coming out. Ok, so maybe we won't be spending Christmas morning with a Morpheus strapped to our heads just yet, but there is plenty to be excited about. We also get to do fun stuff like look at year-end trends - what games sold the best? Who's leading in the console race? What have we got to look forward to in 2016? These are the kind of issues we want all of you to start thinking about and potentially writing about as November looms on the horizon.

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Last Chance for the Pumpkin Badge

We've got about a week left in October, so for those of you who haven't earned the Pumpkin from SMB 2, here's your last chance! In case we haven't repeated it often enough, all it takes to earn one is to submit a horror/supernatural themed game review during the month of October. Oh, and if you've been keeping track of who's earned what during the month, you may have noticed that we've been handing out a secret badge. It wouldn't be any fun if we just told you how to earn it, would it? What I can tell you is that it will also disappear with October; also, here's a hint: go back to 1.11-S and think TEAL.

Note: It was brought to my attention recently that the "secrets" contained in previous issues were broken/led nowhere. This was totally an oversight of mine! If you're having difficulty with the the clues and secrets from the previous 2 issues, please visit the web versions of these editions instead. Such problems should be resolved in the current issue. Happy hunting!

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November Brings a Challenge

Along with cold weather, Black Friday, and the promise of dry or experimental turkey (depending on your family), November will also signal the beginning of a new challenge for Baconeers. For the adventurous, we've already dropped a few hints in Issues #11-S and #12, and if you've got them figured out, you should have a pretty solid idea of what's coming. This challenge will be similar to August's 2-Year Anniversary celebration, in that each and every member will have a limited period of time to meet the requirements given. The reward? Our second limited edition badge that will never be available again! So keep your eyes open. There might just be another clue lurking around here somewhere...keep looking...

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Gettin' Free Stuff! Part 3

If you've kept up with the last couple issues of Greased like a good Baconeer should, you'll see that both Nerdberry and I have touched on using the Nerd Bacon name to get free games. Well guess what? We actually have a pretty exciting development to that end! About a year ago, we had a member who was very successful at obtaining free games via Steam. There was a nigh-legendary template that accompanied this member's victories, which was long thought lost...until now!

That's right, it looks like Nerdberry found the ol' template, and now we're making it available to anyone interested in hunting down free stuff, preferably those of you who've achieved Author status and are in possession of a domain email address. Now we can't guarantee the success of this small document, but there was a period where this particular member was scoring free Steam codes left and right, and he generally attributed his good fortune to this template he devised. To the best of my recollection, he was an avid PC gamer and had almost zero interest in the console side of things, so we don't really know how well it holds up when appealing to larger, more lucrative developers. It's worth a shot though, and I would suspect that at least some of the digital-only titles released on services like PSN, Xbox Live, and the Virtual Console are probably comparable in quality to some of the material found on Steam.

We're going to make this (alleged) work of magic available on the site for any of our members to use! Again, we recommend that members be well-established, hold the rank of author, and possess a domain email address before focusing their time and energy on gaining promo materials. If you're not there yet, use your time to churn out 20 reviews! This option will still be around once you've finished. So yes, the document will be available on-site, but we are keeping the page password protected, mostly to keep it from being discovered by outsiders. If this ol' member really did know how to magically tap into the generosity of developers, we want to do what we can to keep it safe. But we will be glad to share the "secret" with those of you who willing to do the work and stick to whatever stipulations the developer might have for you - just ask!

As a quick word of caution (or maybe advice) please be sure that you can hold up your end of the bargain before accepting anything from a developer or publisher. Remember, although you may be getting a game for free, you're not getting it for nothing. The parties involved likely will expect something from you, be it a review by a certain date, a review not before a certain date, etc. Be sure you can honor the arrangement before you say "yes." Reneging on an agreement like this makes the entire site and "Nerd Bacon" as a brand look extremely bad. Once you've held up your end of the deal, you're free to do what you wish with the materials: keep them, pass them along to another member (if you've got a physical copy), or maybe even score some cash for it and donate it to the cause - the choice is yours.

With all that said, go out there and score us (or you, rather) some free stuff!

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Holiday Sales, 2016 Projections, & 2015 Analysis

Year's end will be here before you know it, and second to E3, this is the best time of year to start digging into speculation, predictions, and analysis. During this period we'd love to host in-depth news-ish pieces from our members outlining any trends they expect to see in the coming year, or any trends they might've noticed throughout 2015. It's best to kick off these pieces with cold hard facts: sales figures, surveys and polls, official press releases, etc. From these facts it's up to you to interpolate what you think might happen in the future or give us an idea of what these facts really say about the industry and gamer behavior in general. I know this may all sound kind of vague, but it's really up to you to figure out what angle you want to attack it from. For example, a glance at the sale of consoles tells you who's winning the console race. Compare this with a list of best-selling games for the year, and voila! There are a lot of dots one can connect between the two using one's expertise. It doesn't have to turn out to be correct, it just has to make sense as an arguement.

Other topics you may want to think about are: retrogaming trends, digital-only games, the effect/influence of mobile gaming, upcoming technology, which games are most popular with certain demographics, and more! If you have an intelligent thought about something that's happening in the industry, start looking up a few facts to support (or even refute) your claim and lay it all for us in a well-thought out article. We love to see highly original, analytical pieces like these pop up on the site, and to be honest, we don't get to see them too often! Those of you who regularly bring us the news will probably have the easiest time with these sorts of articles, but the opportunity is open to anybody who can string together a competent arguement or reasonable analysis.

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Review Spotlight

• System Shock 2 - PC - Action Zero
• by The Cubist
  One of The Bacon's few "10 out of 10's," Mr. Zero really sells up the fear and terror in this one. Loads of vivid horror-like adjectives pepper this piece - revolting, malevolent, hideous, bloodstained, foreboding, inhuman - evoking a truly nightmarish playing experience. Here is a flawless example of how creative writing can be effectively used in a review, not to mention an excellent contribution to our October theme of all things creepy, cooky, ooky, and spooky.

• Uncle Fester's Quest - NES - bbpower
• by The Cubist
  Having spent several hours (days?) with this title as a child, I found that bbpower perfectly captured the level of frustration inherent to making any actual progress. Putting the reader into "the driver's seat" is a great way to draw the audience in, as well as give them an idea of whether or not this is a game that they'll find appealing.

• Until Dawn - PS4 - Rhutsczar
• by The Cubist
  It's like an interactive horror movie! Rhutsczar does a great job of drawing parallels between the game and slasher conventions, reinforcing our general focus on Halloween. We tend to think more of horror movies than "horror games" when it comes to this time of year anyway, and it's cool to see one medium based on another.

• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter - PC - Sarus Vakarian
• by The Cubist
  I enjoyed reading this piece from Sarus because a lot of people (generally speaking) have trouble recognizing - and by extension expressing - ambivalent feelings towards a game (or film, or TV show, etc.). Sarus balances both the positive and negative without letting one overtake the other, separating the aspects and leaving the audience to decide whether or not they'd be interested.

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Nerd Bacon is Cleaning Up

Those of you who've taken the time to dig into some of our oldest reviews have seen that there was a time when we weren't so diligent with things like excerpts and SEO, and quite a few of you have offered to help us spruce things up. The truth of it is we weren't being lazy back then, just dumb! Both Nerdberry and I came into WordPress blindly and all of these rules that we throw at you when you first join are the result of a growing and cumulative understanding of what WordPress does and what we need it to do. For example, we didn't always have the SEO plugin installed. And excerpts weren't available until we flipped a rather complicated "ON" switch. And it really caused us some headaches when it came to figuring out what the hell we were supposed to choose for a Featured Image. (Thankfully it was Variand who ended up nailing down this issue once and for all.) So yeah, there's a lot of stuff that ain't so pretty in those early articles, and that's where you come in.

Over the course of the next couple of months, we want to put together a small cadre of members to assist us with this task of "cleaning up." The actual cleanup won't begin until sometime in January; we want everyone to be able to focus on new stuff, the challenge, and be able to enjoy the holiday season without feeling too obligated to NB! However, we will be using the interim to organize these efforts. Speed is not paramount, though we do expect volunteers to move through their "assignments" at a reasonable pace. Seniority is not strictly a requirement, but we do expect those who volunteer to have an excellent grasp on both our rules and regulations and how WordPress itself functions. For instance, you need to not only know that a Featured Image should be at roughly a 2:1 ratio, but also how to remove and insert a new image and/or crop an appropriate section of the existing image. You'll need to know not only that 550 px is the maximum allowed width for an image in-article, but also how to resize an existing image that's too large.

I can't give you an exact list of what you do and don't need to know, but if you move through your own articles relatively unimpeded, you probably know enough to be helpful. SEOs and Excerpts will be the 2 things that are most commonly straight up missing from these early pieces. That means it'll be your job to fill in all the SEO details, including the Meta Description, and give us at least an acceptable, bare bones Excerpt. Other things worth keeping an eye out for are strange formatting (including non-standard alignment, incorrect headers, multiple empty paragraph breaks), correctly checked categories, crosslinking, images that run over the main content box, and incorrectly shaped Featured Images.

Another common problem with early articles are the non-standard Nerd Ratings, which include anything outside of a 1 - 10 scale. We will discuss this issue beforehand and provide members with some sort of instruction on how to deal with these.

I know that some of you have offered to go through and fix one thing or another at various times, but instead of having multiple members tread through the same articles looking at only one aspect or another, we think that the effort could be better utilized by taking a single look at each and every article and fixing all the problems in one fell swoop. Yes, we have over 1,600 published articles, but there will be a point where most of these problems become virtually non-existent, probably well before the halfway point. We will assign each involved member a month's worth of articles at a time in order to keep things organized.

No lie, this is a pretty thankless job, but it will ultimately help the site! So if you're proficient with WordPress and are familiar with the "NB way" of doing things, we need your help! Depending on how many of you volunteer, not everyone may get the gig, but your willingness to serve will be appreciated. Once the job is finished we'll probably keep a couple of you listed as semi-permenant "maintanence techs," another fun title to add to your resumes. There's no immediate rush on getting involved, but start thinking about it. We'd like to solidify a team by the beginning of December and use that time to get everyone up to speed so that we're ready to roll once those post-holiday winter doldrums settle in. We'll toss another couple of reminders out there in the future just to make sure you don't forget!

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Get Greasy!

Help us fill Greased with the things that you want to know about the site! What do you want us to talk about regularly? What kind of updates are you hoping for? What sort of information would inspire you to be even more productive? Let us know how we can make Greased yours and we will do our best. Don't hesitate to share any tips or tricks you may wish to share as well. We'd love to have more of you guys' and girls' input. We'd also love to field any questions that you guys and girls may have: questions about grammar, spelling, or punctuation? Maybe an ambiguous piece of policy you want clarification on? Or maybe there's a technical aspect that you've seen in another article or on another site that you're interested in using? Chances are that if you have a question so does someone else, so please, speak up and ask us! If you submit something that we use in a future issue of Greased, you'll earn yourself a Lightning Bolt Badge!

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Desperately Seeking New Recruits

I hate to repeat myself from newsletter to newsletter, but we could really use some immediate assistance on this front, especially from those of you with wider connections. Yes, blanketing Craigslist is always an option, and that's how we've found most of you, but the truth remains that we have to sift through an awful lot of deadbeats before we ever find hardworking, hidden gems like you guys and girls. Moreover, Craigslist's job and gig listings tend to be frequented by people who are in transitory periods of their lives. While they often join The Bacon with the best of intentions, it usually isn't long before they find whatever they were looking for in the first place, which tends to throw their lives in just enough upheaval where they're forced to trim the fat, a la Nerd Bacon. It isn't that people won't work for free, it's that most people are ill-adjusted to balance working for free while on the hunt for something that pays.

So here we are again, reaching out to any of you who may have connections. Some of you have jobs where it may be possible to reach out to your colleagues. Others of you might have extensive networks of friends on social media sites, or maybe you're heavily involved in online organizations, fan circles, or discussion groups. I'm also pretty sure that at least a couple of you are in college - hey, I was in college once, and we had huge gaming scenes within the dorms, not to mention a wealth of intelligent individuals eager to establish themselves online. So how many of you out there regularly hoof it on a college campus? Aren't there some billboards out there missing a nice big GREEN AD for Nerd Bacon!? My campus was also filled with clubs - official and unofficial - for everything imaginable, from the Young Socialists to burgeoning 80's revival musicians. Surely there's a pocket or 4 of gamers out there worth appealing to? And the best news is that we appeal to all sects: PC gamers, retro enthusiasts, and lovers of all things complicated and new-fangled alike. If you're spending your weekdays bouncing around from one ancient building to another on a college campus out there (or hell, even if you're just in close proximity to a college or university), let us know what we can do to help you spread the word that NB needs writers. It only takes a few seconds to tack up a flyer or hand out the web address to fellow gamers.

As always, we're open to any and all suggestions and efforts to increase membership. If there is one thing that we need right now, it's a slew of fresh faces to join us for the 2015 holiday season.

Remember, all you've got to do is pass on the application URL to anyone interested - http://nerdbacon.com/apply/ - and we'll take care of the rest!

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Site Developments

In an act where I surprised even myself (not a common occurrence), I was actually able to crunch all the necessary numbers and mail out all applicable member evaluations in less than a week! I hope the results were informative and insightful for all of you; if you have any questions, do ask! I was pleasantly surprised by the improvement of some members over last year's evaluation (I'm looking at you, Rhutsczar!), blown away by the continued greatness of others (here's to you, The Watchman!), and continually reassured by the steady, sustained progress of others (like ChronoSloth's amazingly immutable commitment). I've also got to give it up for the stellar performance of those who received their first evaluations this time around, most notably Action Zero, Doc Croc, and ZB. We've also got fresh faces like Avara and bbpower to watch out for, so let's all do our best to support each other, the team, and the cause that is NB! Ideally I'd like to revisit these numbers again in 6 months or so, but hey, if it does take another 10 months, I hope to be as pleasantly surprised as I was this time. Hopefully Nerdberry will be getting around to you guys and gals soon with his thoughts on your performace (if he hasn't already).

Briefly I want to touch on an aspect of the site that used to be marginally "successful;" the use of the Members Area. It serves much less of a purpose now than it used to. Most of its functions have been supplanted by the Status Widget and the blogs (for more colloquial updates) and Greased (for the site's official business), but at one point it served as a reasonably active area for member-to-member socialization via comments. I know a lot of you really enjoy/enjoyed the social aspects of Twitch streams - conversely, when our forums were up and running for the very purpose of socializing, they saw very little use. So here's my question: since no one seems much interested in carrying on conversations through the Members Area, and since no one has ever expressed much interest in getting involved with a working, maintained forum system, and since far less of our resources are being spent on Twitch, how would you suggest we replicate that level of member-to-member interaction? It's obvious that many of you enjoy sharing your passions with each other, so what can we do to ensure that those that want to talk and get to know each other have the chance to do so? Is it as simple as hosting a chatroom somewhere? Would you drop in a Nerd Bacon Chatroom once a night, or once a week, or never? Our survey that ultimately determined the larger fate of NB on Twitch indicated that more than the games being played, more than the host's presence, it was the interactivity that drew them to Twitch streams. With your input and suggestions, maybe we can implement something to fill the void!

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Until Next Time...

That's it for this greasy patch of Greased! In summation, keep a few things in mind:

• Keep pumping out horror/supernatural-themed reviews for the rest of the month!
• A challenge is coming in November! Details will be disclosed on or about November 1st, but if you want to get a bit of a jump on the rest of the team, be sure to seek out clues in 1.13 (this issue), 1.12, and 1.11-S!
• We want to put together a small maintanence team to clean up past articles beginning in January.
• Help us bring in new members!

Stay tuned and thanks as always for your time and effort!

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