100k Pageviews

The hitcounter on this blog (tip: it's on the very bottom) has finally reached 100,000, and the blog has essentially lost most of its original purpose.

As a new milestone has been reached, let me say a few things.

I remember last year when it was very difficult to get pageviews and attention towards the blog when this was first started, but it rose dramatically once I posted a few tips up. Last May, I was more or less excited about my blog hitting 1,000.

Now that I'm in the six digit hit count area, my posts get a lot more attention. Youtube videos that I feature (even to promote friends) have received a significant boost in the number of times people have clicked on it. It can be evident by going to the video and clicking on the graph button, which one my site is usually listed. One such example is Mrs. Langone Rap.

I believe my success towards this milestone was Zuma Blitz. I didn't initially expect it to be much of a success when I started it last December, but I was proven wrong when my hitcount doubled within a week. Following the level up table which I published because a person asked for it, my # of visitors rose dramatically. By the next month I noticed many people in discussion boards linking to my blog for some helpful info, as well as some sites featuring my tips and blog, such as Games.com and Hubpages. I proceeded to publish more on the topic, such as score mechanics and weekly tips. Nowadays I can't really find anything that has 'zuma blitz' as a keyword search and not land here within the first few pages of search results. (It's 90 percent of my 100k hit count, if you were wondering.)

Speaking of that, I was planning to move all of the Blitz material to a different site that I own (so that site could be more specialized, separating my personal blog with the gaming related blog), but it turns out that a lot more people are linking over here than expected.

This site, despite having lots of tips and stuff, wasn't originally very navigation friendly; this blog was more designed to host pictures of various things in life, not gaming material. I later learned what the audience was clicking on in order to navigate around the site and updated it appropriately to make it more user friendly to users. (At least I learned something out of my HCI class.)

It's good to be one of the few people to get this many hits and visitors. I learned what it feels like to run a high profile blog. Meanwhile, Brittany, who I mentored in the past, has* somewhere around 25k followers on tumblr.

Next Steps

• With the success of this blog, I intend to expand a bit. First: Most of my background images that were previously on photobucket have now been publicly released and are available here.
• Youtube / Deviantart will probably be up to showcase more of my stuff (The latter because I've picked up interest in Graphics Design / Art but haven't told a lot of my friends about this. This blog will feature some work.)
• My senior project (and finals) are finally done, so I can concentrate more time on some program development.
• I will continue Zuma Blitz related material on this blog until I can find a way to transition this to another of my sites.

Star Forge: Hold your base... forever.

Playing through Star Forge, the newest game from Hero Interactive. On Hard difficulty. (I don't typically go for easy difficulty unless I plan to rush through the game quickly.)

Essentially it's a unique form of real-time base defense where your forge is either constantly producing turrets or turret upgrades. Once the 'forge' produces a turret / powerup you drag and drop on the spot where you want it to be built, or drag a powerup on a turret to upgrade it (max 6 upgrades per turret).

I managed to complete the game in one sitting, and learned that a formation of a turret with (3-armor / 1-amplify / 1-range / 1 shock) surrounded by 2 towers with 4-armor / 1-range / 1-explosive worked quite well the entire game.

TIPS*:

• Powerups are introduced in this order: Armor, Explosive, Heal, Range (must have), Amplify, Slow, Recycle, Bomb (destroy one non-capital ship onscreen), Shock, Anti-Capital.
• Save some upgrade slots for later when new powerups are introduced.
• Range is a must-have when it's available.
• When building a turret late-game put all of its upgrades on at one time, or it might get destroyed while trying to build it up.
• Keep building heals otherwise. Do that and you can survive the last wave with around 12 fully upgraded towers or so.

Ninety-Degree Dreams

Vertical Flip of the Zuma's Revenge Board Shark Den (link to tips from the older board), with 90 degree turns and curves of forty-five degrees. (As well as modern point gaining strategies.)

To be honest, I'm starting to run out of creative titles for my blog posts (I have produced around 200 posts in the blog's 20 month lifespan).

Meanwhile I've also managed to find a tour of SF in a marble run, this might help me out in exploring SF when I visit my friends over there in the summer. (maybe not, but the toothpick structure looks very nice.)

Addendum: Leaderboard is pretty high on the board. From various sources, 3.63M is required to get top 5, 3.46 million for top 10, 2.8 million for top 25, and 1.6 million for top 50.

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TIPS:

• The new tiki talk video introduces the double tap. Similar to the rule in Zombieland, one will open a gap. One more, and you'll be 100% sure to get a gap shot with max score. This board requires some triple tapping.
• The bottom right fruit is almost always accessible due to the design; you don't need to work your way through a row of balls to grab it.
• If you're having trouble double tapping the left-right sides (balls alternate directions and move quite fast), go for top/bottom gaps, where the gap shots / balls are more controllable.

Playthrough: Missile Command Boss 2

It's been seven years since I've last picked up the Hasbro remake of Missile Command and completed it. Since then I've only found one video of the game on it on the internet, so I've decided to play through a bit of the game again.

This is a four minute run of me playing through the 2nd boss level on Ultimate Mode. Yes, hard and tricky bosses (like this one) are probably why reviewers didn't get very far in this game mode.

One thing that I did like about the game was the breakbeat music soundtrack (which the game reviewers didn't cover or say anything about it).

At the Oz Korean BBQ Restaurant

Hmmm... so many to choose from.

Today we headed to the Oz Korean BBQ Restaurant in Sascramento after the Sac State CKI meeting. It's essentially a buffet with various types of meat, with the main difference being that you have to cook the food yourself. (You are given a grill to do this).

I originally wasn't exactly sure of whether to go for the 'all you can eat' for $25, or a single meal for $10. But after those who didn't want the all you can eat left, I decided to go for it. It's actually pretty good.

I say it's very fun, though with a lot of people, it took nearly three hours for everyone to finish eating.

Easter Egg Board

This week is Easter, and that means I'll be hiding some more eggs this week...

This will probably be a tl;dr intro, but if you want some board tips (which is hardly any) skip past the bar. Otherwise if you want to hear random stuff, keep reading.

• The board looks like the egg's made of chocolate, just pointing that out.
• There's two weeks left of school to go for me. And then summer school comes directly afterwards...
• I managed to get 1st place... barely. But getting a gold after 6 weeks of not getting one is quite a feat.
• After hearing J-Ann's Everytime We Touch and a few other songs (who she is considered one of the best singers back at my hs) I've always wondered how she would sound like if she did a cover of "Hey, Soul Sister" Fireflies by Owl City.*
• The song title reminds me of Cascada's Everytime We Touch.
• Spring 2011 in Artwork might become Summer 2011 in Artwork... lol.
• I've decided to open up my twitter again. It's up there on the top left in the nav pane. (Note: It's not available to the open public until I clean things up a bit, but if you request a follow I'll accept it.)
• The most points that I have gotten on this board is 3,689,430, with a video replay (need xvid codec to play). It has since been improved in 2012 topping over 6 million.

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TIP: This is not a good board for curve clears / gapshots, as you will probably need sun frog at minimum to clear a curve. For the latter, you will need to not clear balls right away and wait a bit. You can only gap shot one side effectively.

Meanwhile at UOP

(Note: Event occurred a few days ago.)

Meanwhile at UOP (Univ of the Pacific), AES is having their BBQ, and I decided to have a bit of fun in the 'Pie the Professors' segment, despite the fact that I didn't know a few of them who I were throwing them at.

I later used this image as my profile pic, but none of my friends knew what this image was about.

In this Photo: Plenty of students were watching, including Gary, Kim (who wasn't watching, at least not in this picture), and Prof. Chen.

Small Note: UOP is no longer the name that you use to call Univ. of the Pacific. Instead, Pacific is the name to use. It disrupts quite a few names, like UOP Circle K -> Pacific Circle K. Many people still use UOP when they mean this university, though.