We are big fans of Penny Arcade here at Celestial Heavens and, frankly, if you disagree that this site is awesome for gamers, there is something wrong with you. My personal favourite is the comic strips drawn by Gabe and as we leave 2012 behind and look to the new year, PA's wonderboy has put up a list of his "Top 10 comic strips" of the year. We don't really do comics here at CH anymore (mostly because I suck at drawing), but I have managed to draw up a list of the 10 best things that happened on our end this past year:
10. My editorials. Sometimes I like to write about things that are not directly M&M related, but have connections to Ubisoft or gaming in general. I continued this in 2012, notably with three articles: Ubi Online Weakness, Slow Broadband Holds Back Gaming and Reselling DL-ed Games Legal in EU.
9. H6 maps available. We never got many maps for H6 (mostly because the editor was rubbish), so when a couple finally trickled in, my hopes for the future rose a little bit.
8. The news is what we're all about nowadays. Focusing less and less on game/creature stats that change with every patch and are posted on the official sites anyway, CH is now the only active and independent English-speaking M&M news site. We have tried to keep you posted whenever something has happened, which is not necessarily that often, but I like to think that we know what is going on and are able to inform you as soon as possible. See this archive for all the news stories on CH.
7. Our forums are not as active as that of the Heroes Community when it comes to the Heroes games, but if you look in our Heroes VI forum, you can still see that it works as intended - fans coming in to talk and ask questions about everything from patching to gameplay. We also have an active Might & Magic forum, a fact I like since it means that our Round Table has a lot of diversity.
6. A Q&A with Marzhin - I always enjoy talking to that guy; he's such a committed fanboy.
5. Heroes IV Text Collection. Assembled by Corlagon and Zamfir, I am hoping we will one day be able to host similar texts from all the games.
4. The Expansion Q&A. We are quite good at Q&As and this one was long in coming; hardly any info about the H6 expansion had been released and the fans were thirsty for info. We were only too happy to bring them a drink.
3. Our H6 review. Long in coming, I was neither prepared for nor comfortable with reviewing the game before I had had some time to digest how good (or bad) it actually was.
2. A Q&A with Ubisoft from back in March/April, at a point in time when the state of the production and communication were such that we were doubting the very future of the franchise. We spent quite a lot of work on this Q&A and we have never formulated questions in such a harsh tone before. While the fans were not necessarily happy with all the answers, we are still impressed that Ubisoft agreed to actually answer all of them instead of just telling us to get lost.
1. The walkthroughs were completed by Maltz just in time for the beginning of 2012 and set the trend for CH as a fan resource this year. We bring news and articles, yes - but from a fan's perspective, the site is mostly about help and resources. Since there are very few H6 maps around, the walkthroughs is by far the most helpful thing we have been able to do for the fans.
How would you sum up the year? What are the biggest things for you?
