Acid Media Blog

That website there...

2010-01-21T15:57:00.000-08:00

Alright, so a few years ago, in eighth grade I believe, I registered the domain name "AcidMediaOnline.com". AcidMedia.com was already taken, yet it still isn't being used for anything. Granted, in the two or so years my domain has been registered, I haven't really done anything either.

Hold on, let's back up for a second. I use Kongregate to host my games, Youtube to host my videos, Zetaboards to host my forum, Deviantart to host shit I don't care about, Google Pages to host my website, and of course blogger to host my blog. Do you see a trend here? I only have very basic HTML skills, and little knowledge about webpages themselves. However, being that I don't have a popular website or anything, I don't think that matters. Right now, it seems alright to host all my stuff on other websites.

However, what plans do I have for the website? Well, none now. You see, the service I used to register my website is very cheap, but it doesn't have many features. Basically, I get the domain name, an email address and an extremely crappy page builder (which is why I redirect everything to google pages). However, if I want the pro page builder it costs money, too much money for a jobless highschooler to afford. So that's why I use google pages, sure it looks unprofessional and noobish, but it gets the job done, and it's free.

Anyway, perhaps in the future, if I get popular and I earn actual money, I may opt to learn some webpage designing skills, and get a real website. One that would feature all my flash games, videos, blog posts, and so on. So, until then, I'll stick with my current, crappy design.

So, if you were wondering why my website is such a terrible mess, now you know.

And knowing is half the battle!

Space Strike, Kongregate, and Newgrounds

2009-12-28T14:16:00.000-08:00

As you may or may not know, I am a flash game "developer", developer in quotes because I've really only made one game. The one game is: Space Strike: Wormhole. Now, I'm not going to say this game is awesome, however, I wouldn't say it's bad either. Personally, I like this game, probably beacuse I made it, but that's beside the point. The 2.70 out of 5 rating the game has on Kongregate says it's pretty bad. However, the 3.25 rating on Newgrounds says it's actually pretty good. I wondered why there was a fairly large gap in the ratings, so I did some investigating

Alright, all I really did was check the high scores of the kongregate version, but I found something interesting. Some players only passed the first round, and quit playing (As evidenced by their high score in the "Round" stat being one). This, in its self isn't a problem, they probably just didn't like it, no big deal. The problem is that they rated the game. How can you rate a game after playing a single 40 second round?

Let's back up for a second. This game was uploaded for the "Stride Longest Lasting Game Contest" where the one of the top 15 rated games get a chance to win 10,000$. So is it possible that a contestant would down rate games to make their entry look better? I think they would.

Let's take one user as an example, piman314. Piman submitted the pretty fun game Microbe Chain, personally, I enjoyed this game. However, I don't think Piman thought the same about my game.

As you can hopefully see from this poor quality picture above, Piman has only played one round of the game, again, not a big deal. However, if you check his points record you'll see that he has rated the game. How can you accurately rate a game after a single forty second round? Well, if you check his points history, it shows him rating nearly every game in the stride contest. I bet if we were to check his scores in those games aswell, he probably didn't play them very long. So, he played one round of the game, and rated it, we can assume that he went to all the games in the contest and down rated them to make his entries look better.

Alright, alright, I know how this sounds. It sounds like I'm trying to crack down on poor Piman for doing no good. Well, that's not what I'm trying to do, I'm sure plenty of other people did this, I'm just using Piman as an example, I have nothing against him, he was just the first person I caught. Besides, who knows, maybe the scores didn't submit correctly, maybe he played through many rounds and gave the game a fair rating. I could be 100% wrong. I'm not trying to insult Piman, I'm not trying to get him in trouble or anything, I'm merely trying to come up with an explanation for the rating difference between my Newgrounds submission and Kongregate submission

So let's just get one thing strait, I'm not accusing Piman of being a bad person, I'm not saying his games are bad. I'm just using a little bit of evidence to suggest that maybe he down rated games. It's this a big deal? No, not at all, tons of people do this, it only makes a slight difference. I'm not mad, I'm not complaining I'm just coming up with an explanation for the rating difference.

So yeah, I hope that was at least slightly interesting. Hopefully I didn't sound like some crazy conspiracy theorist, or a total douche, or both. I'm simply sharing some interesting information that can easily be totally wrong.

First!

2009-12-28T13:50:00.000-08:00

I figured it's about time I join the masses and piss into an ocean made of piss that is the blogging world. I never really understood blogs, what's the point? You write about random shit and hope people like it, unless you're important in some way, who cares?

Anyway, I really decided to make this blog for my website, www.Acidmediaonline.com. In retrospect, "Acid Media" is a really stupid name, then again, I came up with it in, like, eighth grade. And my equally lame username, "Acidlava" I came up with before that. I guess I lack the originality to come up with something better.

Anyway, now that I've established that I don't understand the point of blogging and made apparent that I know why name is stupid, we can move onto more important things. Like, what this blog will be about. I've thought about it, and I'm not entirely sure, I might post progress on boring development stuff for the flash games I make, or something. Maybe I'll make pointless posts about, uh, things, I'm still not sure. Chances are I wont be as funny as The Kwanzaa Gecko, I'm more likely to post piles 0f shit nobody cares about.

Well, all I wanted to do in this post was introduce this blog into the world of blogging, and now that I've done that, I suppose I have nothing more to say, I should probably stop before I start saying more stupid shit.