It has been revealed that Star Wars: The Old Republic will be released on the 20th of December in North America and 22nd of December in Europe. I’ve already pre-ordered my copy of the Collector’s Edition version of TOR so I’m all set and really can’t wait to sink my teeth into my first proper MMO experience. Seeing as this is such a special occasion for me for many reasons, I was thinking and came up with a nice idea…

I’ve been paying close attention to all of the information coming out for The Old Republic and have decided that for my main character I will become one of the Republic’s finest… a Trooper Vanguard. I’m going to invest quite a lot of time and effort into TOR (though not obsessively, still have lots of other games to play after all) and have come up with an idea to tie the experiences I have in the game with this web site.

I will be starting a “Trooper Log” on this site which I will update every so often as I progress through the game. I will be keeping these log entries as short and concise as possible to make it easier to read but also because I still want to spend most of my time writing up proper Articles and Game Spotlight entries for the site. Nevertheless, you’ll be able to follow my progress and unique decisions I’ve made throughout the game as I play it as well as view screenshots I’ll be taking of the game including the various looks my trooper and companions will go through as we get newer and better armour… and I’ll also take some happy snaps of the local scenery for the family photo album, of course.

I’ve already put some thought into how I’ll be writing these log entries and have come up with different log sections to make things easier to follow. So here they are:

• Mission Log: This log will outline what’s happened on my adventures as I go on various missions throughout the galaxy.
• Ship’s Log: This log will keep track of events that occur on my ship such as crafting, etc.
• Personal Log: This log will keep track of my relationships with companion characters and other people who play the game with me.
• Computer Log: This log will have a real world perspective of the game unlike the three in-universe log types listed above.

Can’t wait to play this game… it’s gonna be so awesome! But yeah, what do you guys think? Do you think it’s a good idea? Got any suggestions for me if you have ideas of your own you want to share relating to the Trooper Log?

I won’t bother doing the whole No More Heroes style introduction like I did with last years entry and the first entry for the site and get straight to the point…

There’s actually two things to celebrate in this entry, the first being our third anniversary, the second thing being that the The Nintendo Wii U tablet controller needs some changes entry was our 100th entry since Twilight Lynk began.

Another year of me rambling on about video games

It’s been pretty up and down this year, actually this year of Twilight Lynk hasn’t been any where near as successful as the last year, but I think that’s mostly to do with the fact that I’ve been very busy with University related stuff.

Still, I am pleased with the way this site has been evolving since it first opened… though I still find it difficult to figure out how to get certain kinds of activity on the site with different audiences.

The biggest problem I have is that some entries end up generating a lot of discussion from existing members on the site, but fail to generate any outside interest. However, there are other entries that have the opposite effect and seem to generate A LOT of outside interest but no discussion from existing members.

Of course, it doesn’t help that I haven’t really been posting up many compelling entries these last few months, though as I said before, I’ve been really busy with Uni work.

What now?

Despite this yeah not being as great as last year, there’s still plenty of traffic coming through the site when I do post up certain entries.

I’m definitely going to have to start following more of the Internet marketing rules and also change a few aspects of the site if we’re going to get more interest in this place. I mean, I’m not really doing this just so I can get more page views, it’s mostly so I can get more people to join and actually interact in the community so this place can be a lot more interesting than it is now.

I’ve done a bit of rearranging with the categories and tags and I plan to do a few more tweaks to the site by adding more detailed information on the side bar about games I write Game Spotlight entries for. Oh, and of course… I’ll be updating the forum to match the Hyper Twilight Lynk site design very soon since I’m on my mid-year break from Uni at the moment.

As always, if any of you guys have suggestions or whatever, feel free to post about them in this entry.

Right now only the blog half of the site has been converted to the new Hyper Twilight Lynk design, the forum half on the other hand is still in the older Mega Twilight Lynk design… but this should change in a few weeks once I get the time to work on it in-between doing assignments for uni and such.

Most of the design changes were made just to streamline things and to make them prettier, but I’ve added some new things to and changed others around. There’s now a random quotes in the header and the top menu layout is slightly different. Also, the Private Messages button shows your total number of messages you have in your inbox instead of the number of new messages. Also, I’ve moved the category info to the top of the blog entries and have the tags listed at the bottom of the entries. There’s also a tag cloud on the side bar. Oh yeah, each post will also have its own little tagline sorta dealie which you will see on the “CONTINUE READING” button when you view a post on the home page or archive lists.

Also, I have now shut down SMS since it wasn’t being used at all. Don’t worry though, I’ve cut and paste the text that was in the blog entries into the forum threads themselves and have moved them to the Video Games forum so they’re still safe.

There’s probably going to be a few other minor changes along the way to optimise things, but who knows… still have to convert the forum over too.

Anyway, enjoy the new look for the site, I’m pretty proud of it… and let me know if you come across any problems so I can fix them.

Twilight Lynk now has its own group on Steam Community… which you’d think would’ve happened sooner but I’ve only now just started a Steam account and bought a few games on there.

The group is currently set to private since this is a pretty small community, but if you add me to your friends list I can send you an invite right away.

Once a webmaster of an anime site; the bodies of anime babes littered my mind… Much has changed since then; anime no longer has any value for me and the true video gamer that I’ve always been has taken over once again. This was my chance to engage in a web site about something that I truly loved, something I could share with others… but everything I wrote about in my first entry on this site hasn’t gone according to plan. While this site has gotten some nice traffic coming in, it seems that the community interactions I talked about long ago aren’t as active and lively as I thought they would be. Here, there are few who post and many who lurk. And through this all, one truth is constant: I’ll still post blog entries even if people don’t comment on them. I won’t walk away from it, I’ll keep posting and say what I have to say… This is MY “Desperate Struggle”…

Hold it you video game loving bastards! Before we start our desperate struggling, you should drop a nice save…

/ end introduction with No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle references thrown in just for fun.

You know my name

Everyone in the community who is still active knows who I am; I’m just some guy from Australia who happens to like video games a whole lot and can be bothered spending time and money writing about it for his own amusement on the interweb.

Though, it’s a shame there aren’t any new people in here who don’t actually know anything about me at all. Despite the set backs, I’ve enjoyed the last two years with Twilight Lynk. I’ve had more fun adding content to this site than I have through all that time I spent with The Bubblegum Crisis Center and then The Anime Crisis Center after that. As I’ve already stated in the intro, video games are my true passion and no matter what fad may come and go, video games are always here to stay for me.

What’s been going on with this place?

I’ve posted up many entries over these last two years… 59 (not including this one) if I counted that correctly from the archives bit on the sidebar. I’ve talked about many things, some of which were interesting… and some of which weren’t very good entries at all. I’ve had some surprise hits though such as the Stunts entry I posted not long ago. From time to time this place gets a surge of traffic depending on what kind of entry I post up. Some of them seem to draw in quite the crowd… the kind that doesn’t stay, unfortunately.

While newcomers are non-existent, I’ve decided that I should try to do my best to keep the small…tiny community I have right now happy. So, with that in mind, I’ve opened up SMS, or the “Supplemental Manuscript Sector”… as named by our very own maverick187.

SMS is a guest blog for members of the Twilight Lynk community to post up entries just like I do with Twilight Lynk. It’s pretty quiet at the moment, but I’m sure in the coming months, more and more members will join in and it’ll probably end up having more posts per month than my blog lol. I haven’t done much yet, but I’m going to try to do what I can to give the SMS site and your entries more exposure. Hopefully, in return, you guys can help in your own way to make this place a little more active.

What do you have planned for the future?

E3 2010 is coming up very soon, and before that I’ve got some things I want to talk about as well as a dual Game Spotlight for No More Heroes and No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle. I’m hoping that I can post more than 6 entries this month so I can beat the record set last month. I’m also hoping that I can keep up that pace from now on in order to keep this place active in some small way.

I’ve recently renewed the domain and hosting for another 2 years, but I do think this place will last longer than that. Of course, to make that future a more active one, I’m going to have to come up with ways of getting NEW members in here who will stick around and become a part of the community. This is really where the desperate struggle part comes in. It’s a very difficult thing to do to get exposure for a web site and also to have those visitors come back for more. What drives people to sites like this is the existence of unique content that they can’t get anywhere else… and Twilight Lynk isn’t exactly unique considering there are a fuck tonne of blogs run by regular people.

Of course, I have spent the money to get this place up and running, and I’ve spent enough time and effort on it to get the entire thing this far. I’m going to see what I can do to make this place last into the future…

Continuation…

I’ve talked about a lot of what I’ve been doing with this place, but I was wondering about what you guys thought about Twilight Lynk. What is this place to you? …More importantly, how do you think I could make this place better than it is now? It’s not quite there yet, but I want to make this place even more successful than what The Anime Crisis Center ever was… and I know the only way I can do that is with the support of the community.

Oh, and here’s a present for all the members…

• Download LynkyLynky Ahhhh by Bobicus Lionus (For members only)

Welcome to Mega Twilight Lynk!

I guess I should spend a little time explaining a few things about this design to the folks in the community to help them adjust considering the Super Twilight Lynk design was on the site for a little over a year.

Much of the layout for the site remains the same, but there have been a few small, but very useful changes… for example the drop-down menu system at the very top has links to practically every useful location to manage your account and view some key areas of the site.

Members can now quote/reply to posts from the blog entry page as well as from the related forum thread. Also, I’ve enabled the [img] tag in signatures… remember the signature image limits are 600×150… and since I’ve enabled those tags for the signatures, that means that I’ll be getting rid of the auto-include Xbox Live card… you guys will have to do that yourselves now.

I’ve tried to make the site as animated as possible so it doesn’t feel too flat and lifeless. Oh, and one of the other changes to the site is the darker text… I did this because the new site design is MUCH darker than the previous one and having pure white text was overwhelming… If your monitor is set correctly then you should be able to view the site comfortably still… but a word of warning… if you’ve been viewing Twilight Lynk for awhile and then tab over to a site that has a white or very bright background… prepare to be blinded lol.

Anyway, I think I’ve pretty much covered it… oh, yeah, one more thing… there’s still a few small things I need to do with the forum part of the site… and there’s plenty of debugging to do. If you guys find anything I need to fix, let me know in the Feedback forum… but in the meantime, leave your comments about the site redesign in here. I’d like to hear what you guys have to say about it.

Anyway, enjoy!

Now that that’s out of the way… Welcome to Super Twilight Lynk!

Okay, it’s just the regular Twilight Lynk and nothing has really changed except for a few small things… I just thought it would be cool to add “Super” to the front of the title to make it sound like “OMG WOW!”…

As you can see, there’s been a change in design though it’s not as drastic as it may look. All I really did was change a few CSS elements and a couple of images and there ya go lol. The site layout is exactly the same as how it’s always been so don’t worry, you won’t get lost. This is just a bit of a cosmetic change… because I felt like it. Along with the redesign I’ve also taken the time to update the software that powers this site as well, though you guys probably don’t care about any of that… just as long as everything runs.

If you have any questions or comment or whatever, let me know. Don’t be afraid to tell me what you want me to do with this place if you guys have any good ideas I’m probably not thinking of…

Thanks, and enjoy!

LucasCast is the official podcast for the LucasArts Fan Network where we talk about LucasArts games and the vidya in general… and I’m in it! Go to the site and listen to it there or download it to your PC and/or mp3 player. Enjoy.

Also, don’t forget to vote on the new poll.

UPDATE AFTER A YEAR AND A HALF: Well… easy come, easy go… I left LucasCast quite awhile back after a disagreement with the person who started it. I went out of my way to help this person make their idea actually spawn into something real, but they interpreted it as some kind of takeover of their project. This person eventually took the same stance with the rest of the members of LucasCast and demanded that everything be done exactly their way… as a result this person managed to push everyone who worked on the project away and now there is no LucasCast.

I mean come on, we were all helping to make this thing and going out of our way to do so, but none of us were claiming ownership to it… it wasn’t even anyone’s right to claim ownership to LucasCast anyway considering this was part of the LucasArts Fan Network and not someone’s personal web site… but anyway, LC is dead now thanks to this person not being able to accept that the people who were trying to help him weren’t trying to push him down.

Well done.

I’ve been working on the site design for StarWarsMMO.net which has just launched… right now! This site is part of the LucasArts Fan Network, the same folks who run LucasForums.com. It’s dedicated to The Old Republic MMO which is being developed by LucasArts and BioWare.

To celebrate this event I have created a new section on Twilight Lynk…

Lynk designs is mostly for me to show off my skills, however there are some interesting things in there to check out…

Welcome to the new look Twilight Lynk…

The original design for this place was pretty much a rip-off of my old web site, The Anime Crisis Center, and to be perfectly honest, wasn’t very good at all. I’ve managed to get most of the work done with this new look, but there are still a few small issues to be worked out, such as the forum images which need to be replaced. Either way, this is the way things are going to be for Twilight Lynk from now on.

If you have any questions or suggestions or whatever, let me know. Your input is extremely valuable since this site is here for you guys to use. Tell me what you like and what you don’t like and also what you want out of this web site. Be brutally honest, I need as much feedback as possible to make this place as good as it can be.

Thanks, and enjoy!