I’ve been pretty lazy about checking my site’s statistics for a while now. As such, I’ve found the new feature that automatically shows you the most popular plug-ins for WordPress and installs them automatically if you like them to be very useful. One of these plug-ins shows me some basic statistics on how many visitors have stopped by my blog and what they’re reading right on the Dashboard. Now, I know that my blog will never grow to have much of a readership, but I do like to know at least some people are reading my stuff and I’m curious about how often people find some of my old stuff and dig them out to read.
Unfortunately, what the stats tell me is pretty depressing. Over the last two days, nearly forty percent of my traffic is to just one page: Sex Cards in The Witcher. Now I know sex sells, but this is rather more skewed than I’d expected. One thing I am glad of is that my review of Irrational Man continues to get a steady dribble of readers. It’s probably one of the best pieces I’ve ever written and I’m rather proud of it. Other than that, I seem to have hits on my reviews of the newer games. Good to know the truth I guess.
There are plenty of free web games around these days, but I dare say that none can match the cheek and humour of Forumwarz. Many of its mechanics merely replicate the familiar monster grinding for experience points and loot of traditional role-playing games, but everything else is hilariously different: instead of a generic fantasy world, you’re placed in a Bizarro version of the Internet with parody versions of familiar web services, Sentrillion for example, replaces Google, sTalk replaces instant messaging services like Skype and the game wiki is called appropriately enough the Spoilerpedia; instead of slaying monsters for xp, you’re given the job of pwning various Internet forums; and instead of slashing with swords or blasting with spells, the attacks in your repertoire have names like “ASCII Art Attack”, “Drool on Keyboard” and “Insult”.
At least these are the attacks that I learned as a troll. Other classes available are the Cam Whore and the Emo Kid. Anyone familiar with the dynamics of Internet forums should be familiar with these archetypes. To liven up your frequent attacks on forums, you also occasionally given the opportunity to perform some side missions including a gloriously retro text adventure minigame. The writing throughout the entire experience is fantastic and pokes fun at the full range of Internet culture though you might get tired of the admittedly simple combat pretty fast. If you make it a daily habit to visit one or more online forums, you owe it to yourself to at least check this awesome game out.
The unexamined life is a life not worth living