A year of blogging in review; wondering where Falcon Reviews can go from here.
If any of you haven’t already picked up on this, I take my hobbies very seriously. Before I started this blog, I focused primarily on gaming as a hobby, and my methods haven’t been simple for some time.
I had a thought last night as I was sitting on the couch about looking at game cases, and I came to the realization that I haven’t even looked at the back of most of the games I purchased lately. I have just finally taken a look at the product information on the back of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided‘s case for instance. I remember going to the electronics section of a store like Best Buy or Target and looking at the PC game boxes. I can recall the time I went to Wal-Mart to buy my first Xbox 360 and choosing Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion as my first two games, knowing next to nothing about them.
Fast forward to today, when I spend hours researching games before they even release. I read dozens of articles covering different aspects of the game before the thought of even considering to buy the game crosses my mind. This tendency for intensive research and preparation has spilled over into my new hobbies: Dungeons and Dragons, and running Falcon Reviews.
I spend hours working on my posts, and even more time preparing for them by taking notes for reviews and article ideas. Many of the posts I have started never make it onto my blog, as I constantly prune away at the ones that I feel aren’t developing well. Falcon Reviews has become a big part of me… Something I pour my heart and soul into.
My Reviews can take days to simply collect notes for them, and I often never use half of the notes I take. It puts me at a bit of a disadvantage when competing for views, but I prefer my methods because I feel that taking copious notes helps me collect my thoughts more effectively and keep me focused. My Mass Effect 2 review had over two pages of notes, one full page for the story alone.
Interestingly, my Impressions and Opinion posts take me the longest, because I spend much more time researching the information I need to complete them. For example, my Scalebound article took me to over a dozen articles covering the game’s development.
My goal with my Impressions and Reviews is to make them as informative as possible, while still being entertaining. Sometimes I think I veer a little too far onto the serious side, getting too bogged down in the details. My Opinion articles tend to be a little more freeform, but I worry sometimes that I tread too closely to being boring by attempting to not be confrontational.
If my work on Falcon Reviews were a job, I’d be employed full time. Many of my articles go through the process of me taking tons of notes, writing the article, deleting whole sections, rearranging, searching for appropriate images, and on and on… Like I said however, many of the articles I start never get posted because I don’t feel like I could get the right thoughts out. Many more that I want to write, I never start.
Taking Stock Of Falcon Reviews
Input from readers is incredibly validating. You all, including anyone reading this as their first visit to Falcon Reviews, have contributed to convincing me to come back again and again to write new posts. I’ve loved every successful piece I’ve written, not out of smug satisfaction that I got likes or views, but because I have the feeling that someone else valued my work and drew entertainment from it.
Despite my lack of experience with running a blog or website, I’ve been met with a measure of success. Back in August of last year for instance, Falcon Reviews broke 1000 views, and it was a momentous point for me. It isn’t much in the grand scheme of things with bigger websites getting thousands of hits per hour, but it’s exciting to me. A special call out to my Elite: Dangerous review for being the post with the highest views on the blog ever.
That said, there are a number of things I’d like to change. It’s my intention to make some changes to this blog in the coming year. The most drastic of these changes will be securing a normal domain to turn this into a full website, which is something I’d love to be able to do as soon as possible. Telling people about this blog by giving them the WordPress domain name is a mouthful and doesn’t make it easy to gain traction I think.
It’s my desire to make this blog look more professional as well. I need to go back through my older posts to fix headers, include more links to other articles, and perhaps figure out how to make it easier for non-Wordpress visitors able to subscribe.
Feedback From You
So I have a favor to ask of you all, both my long-time readers and those that have just now discovered Falcon Reviews. Please take some time to comment here or email me at falconreviewsblog@gmail.com (whichever you prefer), and leave me some feedback regarding this site. Your feedback is going to help me greatly, whether it’s about the layout, blog post formats, text size or type, flow, favorite/least favorite topics, tone, etc.
Please review Falcon Reviews, but most importantly, thank you for reading!
Falcon Game Reviews 
I find your game related pieces enjoyable! Well done on making it to a year and keep doing what you’re doing!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Much appreciated! No complaints or critique though? You won’t hurt my feelings, I promise.
LikeLiked by 1 person
There’s nothing to really complain about. If I disagree with something you post then that’s a difference of opinion and shouldn’t be changed.
I like your review structure and think you should stick to it.
I liked the survivor stories series. It might be nice to see more of those, perhaps based in a different game (I know that could be challenging but they were a good read).
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you. I thought about doing the same thing for Elite: Dangerous, but I haven’t had a chance to consider it for much else. Open world RPGs would be suitable though, as long as the character could be unique.
Regardless, I need to sit down and play some more of The Long Dark. I’ve been away from it so I could focus on Mass Effect.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Elite is the one I thought of when writing that funnily enough. Not as easy to write about though I think. Long Dark lends itself to it very well considering the environment. Perhaps some way of doing it using ZombiU?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’d want to go with something a little different to be honest. The gameplay in Zombi U looks pretty similar to The Long Dark in the sense that it’s heavily focused on retrying with new characters as the previous ones die. My wife did a bit of that type of writing for TES IV: Oblivion, so I might try my hand at Skyrim or Fallout for the next series.
Still gotta see where the story with Olivia goes though!
LikeLiked by 1 person
A Bethesda world could be good for it, yes. Using some sort of survival mod with perma-death would be great!
LikeLiked by 1 person
But I don’t own Zombi U! Looks cool though. I wonder if I could swing it with XCOM or even No Man’s Sky…
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’ve been considering doing an XCOM one with followers on here.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’d read that!
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’d be a short series as everyone dies in the first month!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Wish I could help and give some good reviews or something to help -but I have NOTHING. Unless you wanted to have a “Characters” page where you post characters you have created, or a list of games you have played (and you can link to the reviews you have had) or something, I got nothing.
I highly enjoy reading what you write (though I am pretty sure you already knew that. Ha.). I think it is fantastic you are going to make it into an actual site type of deal. I cannot remember what your page looked like, but it is kind of hard sometimes to get Blogs looking like … AWESOME when working with the WordPress. I would recommend a redesign. (I should look at your actual review site blog though before stating this huh?)
For some reason this reminded me I really do need to try SKyrim one of these days. It is one of those games that everyone is like “OMGERD YOU’D LOVE IT” and I just… haven’t. Ha. …
I need to update my own dang list.
ANYWAY – CONGRATS! I look forward to reading more! These are a blast and well written. Never knew you wrote notes and stuff. That is pretty darn epic. I should do so, but then I forget. I need to record my authentic reactions – my husband says those are entertaining.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I love the idea of making a list of games I’ve played… Holy crap though. I might have to stick to games on current systems.
Skyrim is pretty good, though like Fallout 3 and 4, I feel it’s a tad bit overrated. Not everyone’s cup-o-tea. Having tidbits in your posts that are from your husband telling folks about your reactions would be funny. My wife did something like that in one of my posts and it was pretty funny.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yeah… I started thinking about ones I have played and that is a pretty long list… Current game systems might be a good one to just begin the list. ;P
His comments about liking my reactions is why I TRIED to do a YouTube channel once. But we both realized that my initial reactions were best so the ones I had for recording were just egh. But I play like hours at a time so showing what I play and initial reactions is just TOO long. For real. XD
(I need to figure out what to do with that channel for real though.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Finished (I think)!
YouTube/Twitch is a little intimidating for me at the moment. I know there’s a good chance for expanding an audience on there, but my experience with videos is low and I’m not sure if I’m ready to deal with the cesspool that is the YouTube comment sections.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ha. Psh. Comments I can handle. Quality equioment not so much. I have a twitch just…. Eh. I chose not so interesting routes so…. XD
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yeah. My brother-in-law has a streaming setup, but as far as I know, all he streams is Archage for hours on end until the wee hours of the morning.
LikeLiked by 1 person
…. What is Archage?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Some F2P MMO. Like WoW except has pay-to-win economy.
LikeLiked by 1 person
….. I am now interested because I miss WoW….
LikeLike
I really like your reviews and opinions! I also found your Survivor Stories pieces very entertaining. My only feedback is to tell you to keep writing great things 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
I appreciate that. I actually started working on another Survivor story today because of the feedback from you guys.
Thank you 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person