New Year, New Contest, New Pages

Happy new year, readers, gamers, and all you other people reading this blog. Okay, so, my New Year's greeting is a bit late this year, but I can always resolve to stop putting things off and be more prompt about these posts...next year.

The new year is bound to bring some new changes. After all, it's what we hope for - new days, new opportunities...new games to play. Well, better games anyway. Of course, for Guide2Games, the new year also brings a new contest. I'm guessing this is probably going to become a yearly occurrence. But with a new contest, we also have a new way of playing.


I and boyward, two of the top finalists in last year's contest put our heads together and decided to come up with a new format for this contest. Instead of being about the number of wins, we've implemented a point system. We thought it might make the game a bit more interesting.

How does it work, you may ask. Well, it's actually pretty easy.

Games will be scored according to difficulty and length. Now, since these can vary, we knew we had to standardize it. Thank goodness for sites like GameFAQs and HowLongToBeat.com because they let us do just that. GameFAQs provides ratings for difficulty, and HowLongToBeat speaks for itself. We'll score games on a rating of 1-5 for difficulty, and we agreed on 1 point for every 5 hours worth of gameplay. Oh, some games may not take that long, but we thought it would all even out.

And let's not forget bonus points. For this contest, we award bonuses for extra content or 100% completion. Say you have an expansion pack or DLC. You can win 10 points per item of extra content. Kind of provides enough incentive to use them. And if you're the kind that has to have 100% completion, you'll win 15 bonus points.

We're betting this is going to be mighty interesting, especially with it being so early in the year.

I'm currently updating the Contest Leaderboard page to reflect the changes. And speaking of updates, there's some New Year's changes coming to this blog too. Well, one actually. I've added the My Game Page for myself. Even though I've retired from competing, I thought I'd still track what I've been playing for the year. Now, I doubt I'll put up the same total I did this year, but hey, it was fun tracking what I was playing.

So, that's about it for the new changes. Now, let's all sit back and watch to see who will be Guide@Game's new champion for 2015.