CalmDownTom began as a blog where I (Tom) could complain about everything that’s wrong with the games industry. Since transitioning from a wordpress blog to a proper site 7 months ago we’ve seen our traffic and our popularity increase and our profile skyrocket. There’s still lots we want to do to make the site better, we’re a long way from achieving our goals and we know we need to keep improving to make sure you keep coming back.
Despite all that we now have over two hundred thousand views and we thank every one of you that has contributed to that figure. To celebrate our little milestone, here’s the 5 lists on the site that have proven the most popular and what I think of them today. I hope you all keep coming back. If you do, we promise we’ll keep trying our hardest to create interesting, quality content for you all.
5. Top 10 games to play when you’re depressed
I wrote this list when I was having a tough time so it came out a little uneven in tone. Some of its funny, but other parts seem a little cloying and patronising. Still, I think this might be one of the best things I’ve done. It pretty much turned out how I’d hoped so even if it’s not perfect I can’t think what I’d change about it.
4. Top 5 games characters having a worse day than you
Again, another list I wrote to cheer myself up as much as for anyone else. I think it’s a little lifeless and lacking in humour, but the content is interesting at least.
3. Top 5 Mini-Zangief Remixes
This was really just an opportunity I grabbed when it presented itself. The original video was shown to me by Lapsed Gamer before it became really big on the net. By being one of the first sites to post it and include the remixes we got pretty high on the Google search traffic and if you typed in the kids name (Casey Heynes) we were one of the top search results. I didn’t add much, just posted other peoples good work.
2. Top 5 unintentionally funny game moments
Again, this was popular mainly due to other peoples hard work. In particular, the YouTube video compiled by stuff from the Audio Atrocities website just needed to be exposed to a bigger audience and its nice to think that we did that.
1. Top 10 worst cartoons based on videogames
A controversial list, I’m nonetheless proud of this. More than anything else I’ve done, this showed me that people take lists (and cartoons) very seriously. For some reason my personal opinion on what constitutes a good or bad cartoon upset people greatly. Checking my incoming site traffic, I found out that a whole Wing Commander forum thread was set up with fans of the game calling for my blood. Perhaps the facetiousness of putting a “good” cartoon at number 1 and including some entries for humour value rather than lack of quality was a mistake, but I still stand by this list and think anyone, be they gamer, cartoon fan or otherwise would find something in there that’s funny or interesting.