Adventure Rules Update: Upcoming Content

Hey, adventurers! I wanted to take today to give you all a bit of an update concerning the upcoming direction of Adventure Rules.

First of all, I want to thank you all for being very patient with me last week. All the travel really cut into my blogging time, but no one was all grumpy about it. So thanks for that. It’s pretty much inevitable that stuff like that will happen from time to time. When it does, I’ll do my best to keep you updated and to get content onto the site as close to the correct time as possible. One post that was particularly affected by the lateness was the latest chapter of this month’s fanfic, Mario Party. If you’ve been following the story, you definitely won’t want to miss out on that chapter. Additionally, since today is just an update day, this is a great day to start and catch up if you haven’t been reading it. I’ve been working hard on capturing the essence of Zero Escape for the story, and I think it’s turning out really well. So if you’re interested, please click on the Mario Party category on the right side of the page here and give it a try!

Second of all, some of you might have seen that on Sunday, I did a review of a free-to-play indie game from Steam. This is something that I intend to start doing on a weekly basis. I’ve wanted Adventure Rules to have more reviews for quite some time, but I rarely have the money to pick up mainstream titles. And when I do, I have specific games that I really want to save for, which prevents me from just grabbing Assassin’s Creed Mega Punch 7 or whatever just so I can review the latest craze. So rather than trying to focus on doing reviews of the big-league titles, I’m going to focus on the stuff within my budget – free stuff. I know a lot of my readers may very well be in the same boat, and so I figure this way I can help the adventurers who are a little strapped for cash to still enjoy some new games.

Additionally, I am now announcing the cancellation of a segment: Totally Subjective Reviews. “Wait…you’re gonna do more reviews, but cancel your review segment? How does that work?” At the beginning of the month I mentioned that I would be working on a segment called “Allegedly Objective Reviews.” Well, I’m probably going to call it something different now, but that segment will now be the only review segment on the site. The reason? I want to focus on doing more serious content, content that could be considered reputable by other bloggers and gaming websites. I want folks to be able to come to Adventure Rules not just for content that’s good for a laugh, but for real substance too. Naturally, my goofy sense of humor and quirky charm will still be present in these reviews; I’m just going to start giving games actual numerical scores that can be compared to the ones offered by other sites.

This trend towards more serious content – mm, let’s use the word “reputable” rather than “serious” – is also why I have been doing such detailed guides for Fire Emblem Fates. Here’s the thing: when I look at my website data and see where most of my hits come from, it’s not WordPress, or from my Facebook friends, or any of the social media sites (certainly not Twitter!). It’s search engines. Random people on the internet just trying to search for help on games or for another person’s opinion on an upcoming title or whatever. My most viewed posts are not my most hilarious ones, or the ones where I rant most angrily, or the ones where I write the cleverest plot twist. They’re the quizzes, the reviews, the walkthroughs. Whether you’d consider those sorts of things my best content or not, that’s what the human beings of the world want from a gaming blog.

Am I saying that Adventure Rules is going to start changing drastically? Nah. That’s not my style. You’re not going to start seeing photorealistic portraits of game covers or shots of me with a furrowed brow as I try to overcome a difficult enemy in Dark Souls. I’m not going to limit my vernacular to a fourth grade reading level and I’m not going to start writing one paragraph pieces on news that I just wrote about two weeks ago. If anything, by adding more content with real substance, Adventure Rules should grow even more.

So get excited, because there is a lot of good stuff coming up! Tomorrow I’ll be posting the last child guide for Fire Emblem Fates, after which I may start working on a guide for the adult characters. This Friday will be part four of the five part Mario Party fanfic, and things are really going to start escalating. Then on Sunday, I’ll have a review of the next indie title I’m playing from Steam. What’s gonna happen Saturday? I dunno. But that’ll be cool too.

Thank you all for sticking around and for taking the time to read this update. I hope you’re excited to see some more reputable content on the site, and if there’s anything in particular you want to see (a certain type of guide for a game I’ve been talking about, or a certain free-to-play title you’d like to see reviewed), let me know in the comments! Have a wonderful day, adventurers!