Distilling January: A Review

I've taken inspiration from tagn.wordpress.com and I decided to take a look at what happened in my newly emerging blog over the course of the past month.

 Verydistilled has become a bit of an obsession of mine since I started in November last year, you'll notice I try to post daily on weekdays and stay in contact over Twitter most of the rest of the time.

My topics of conversation through Jan have ranged from creating evil penguin-eating monsters in LBP to attempting to murder my friends over New Year. I've read some really interesting articles over the past few weeks, from the heroism of Twitter defending its clients, tonnes of predictions for 2011 games and even some lore stuff for GW2 (yay for giant polar bear warriors!). Considered buying DC Universe Online; decided against it, bought LBP2.

The most popular posts for January 2011 were as follows:

1. Vanessa Atalanta Trilogy - Puppetmaster Interview
2. Guest Post: The Experience of Evil by time2pwnu
3. The Looking Glass Club
4. Waiting for my Blue Mace Lady
5. Marble Hornets Entry #33

Congrats to time2pwnu - in the short time its been up, his guest post has shot to near the top of my reader list. Nice one :D.

Top 10 Search Terms for January 2011

1. blue mace lady
2. marble hornets 33
3. "robert monroe" xkcd sickness
4. appleofoureye
5. everymanhybrid
6. inception ambiguity
7. marble hornets unfiction
8. segst
9. "an amphibious mammal swims in this sea"
10. "apple of our eye" slender man

Special mention to the person who found their way to my blog via the search term: little naked nude blogspot. Kudos horny midget blogspot adventurer - you are a king among men.

Video gaming wise my time has been split as follows:

50% Black Ops

25% Guild Wars

25% Little Big Planet 2

Black Ops: I'm now about halfway through my 5th prestige - not amazing by the real hardcore gamers' standards, but impressive for me, I think! I'd rate myself as semi-decent. Usually going positive when it comes to K/D ratio once the game ends (my overall K/D is currently 1.22). Each time I prestige I keep trying to use different guns, but inevitably I always end up falling back on the FAMAS - its a complete beast and I love it.

Guild Wars: I've been striving to finish the Elonian cartographer title by exploring the continent of Elona in its entirety (and so get Legendary cartographer by gaining the equivalent title for all continents), and also max my Luxon Allegiance title through grinding out some Alliance Battles and Jade Quarry after Jade Quarry battles. All the while, I've been chugging booze like there's no tomorrow - I will have GWAMM by the time GW2 is released!

Little Big Planet 2: Only recently got it, but if you've been reading my posts and following me on Twitter you'll know how much I've been enjoying this game. I think I'm on the final few levels now and its getting tough, I've heard the final boss is a complete bitch so I'm looking forward to that. I'll be making a level fairly soon, the Girl asked if I would make one on the subject of "how much I love her" - so she'll probably be eaten by Gobbler's mother. Who knows?

ARG-wise, the first part of my month was filled with 15 Days of Darkness stuff (what with the OOG discussion going on the 4th of Jan), subsequent to this we've got some interesting stuff happening in Marble Hornets and also some real developments from the smaller YouTube stories out there (such as Experience of Evil and Dark Harvest). Other games worthy of a mention:

Missing Wallace - brilliant story in this, uF poster Thunderwolf has just come in and blown the whole game apart, so its well worth getting involved if you fancy it.

The Wrach - interesting story, cryptic and twisting. Worth getting into if you've got the conviction.

Interesting blogs I've come across over the month:

Brit Chick Runs - Healthy living and running blog from a horse-mad oatmeal hoarder, lots of fun.

L'Épée Magique - RPG enthusiast and Dragon Age: Origins player. Debates tea and elvish custom.

Video Games Blogger - up to date gaming news, crashes when I load it at work - update IE systems admin! Curse you. 

Kill Ten Rats - MMORPG news, including lots of Guild Wars stuff. Love it.

So, its been an interesting month overall. Expect more stuff from Feb - notably, Guild Wars updates, Marble Hornets shenanigans, Black Ops pwnage, fluff, stuff, waffle and banter.

Little Big Planet Awesomeness

Probably my last post for a couple of days now, I'm heading up to the frozen norths for New Years Eve. My friend's parents bought a hotel up there a couple of years back, its a gigantic 20s style boutique hotel, lots and lots of creepy looking rooms, perfect for hide and seek... of course you can play hide and seek when you're 23! What do you mean I'm a grown man with facial hair? That doesn't proclude my participation in espionage based children's games! Regardless, last year myself and a bunch of friends headed up there, through wind, hail and dense snow and partied the night away.

So, tomorrow my friends are coming to pick my car-less ass up and we are going to brave the M6, all the way up to the lakes for more drunken revelry. So I shan't be back until the 1st, don't miss me too much!

In other news, my brother got me a sweet sackboy figure for Christmas:

 
And he reliably informed me that LBP2 is out early in the new year! Ooooh yeah!



This trailer gives me the tickles down in my belly, I LOVE this game, its so... childish, carefree and most of all its simple. Its just a sidescrolling platformer, but its such a damn good sidescrolling platformer that there is so much more you can do with it!

I have to admit, in my LBP level making career I only made one level of any note (and thats because the girl went on holiday for 3 weeks to Korea and, well, what else am I supposed to do except spend 6 hours a day constructing a masterpiece?) but, if you're interested in checking it out, my PS3 gamer tag is: "DistilledWill" - look me up!