It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these and now that we’ve added the Nidzumian to the front page it would make sense to make use of this section, right?

Well a lot of stuff has happened since the last one. We found out that our last skin was a bit limited for what we really wanted to do so for the final time (we promise) we re-designed. The front page is now full of content that hopefully you’ll enjoy. Last night we put a lot of work in so the header looked as good as the rest of the site. Although we’ll always be making tweaks to the site, not much will change in terms of layout. Although we are thinking of making a white version of the skin but black is more environmentally friendly, apparently.

We’ll be running a series of features next year and that’s what the banner in the top right is for. At the moment due to the large amount of games we’ve just got links to the reviews page.

Talking of features we will be running series in the true sense. We are talking weekly editions of a certain series. We’ve got a load of ideas floating around and we’ll be releasing information about them soon. Obviously I’d love to share these ideas but nothing is concrete yet so instead of promising series and not deliver on them, we’ll go back to just not delivering on them in our own time.

One feature I can confirm will be our first annual Games of the Year awards. We’ve got 25 different awards to hand out to this years greatest and worst games. Hopefully it will be worth the wait as we are putting a lot of effort into this years awards. It will be one of few articles we actually put out over the christmas break as like a lot of sites we will be slowing down the content to recover and play this years great line up of games.

You might have noticed the different look that the site has today and for the purpose of filling a post out there is a story that goes with it.

We’ve been preparing a more complete re-design/re-align of the site for a while now and have been making small little improvements here and there. Last week we added Preview & Review pages and started to include thumbnails along with previews of articles. The other night we went to improve the front page so it appeared to be more of a content hub instead of a blog. Unfourtantly we had some formatting error’s that forced us to go live with the complete theme as soon as possible.

So if you do find a few bug’s or errors, let us know. We haven’t had time to scan the whole site but are currently in the process of doing so. Luckily we did find and iron out most of them in the brief few hours we were down. We’d like to apologize if this caused any inconvenience.

On to the good stuff. We’ve introduced some many more features and navigational options. Firstly we have changed the nav bar to reflect our views and opinions. We don’t believe that the site should be spilt up into separate consoles and have lumped every review, preview & feature together. You’ll also notice we will have ‘Infofiles’ on games that we be working retroactively asap. We are also welcoming back ‘The Hot Topic’ back to the site in a few weeks and the links around the site reflect that.

There are way to many new little touches we have added to list them all so we will leave a few surprises around the site. Let us know what you think and what you would like changed.

Now I know we don’t normally do news because it takes time away from articles but we are looking into get a few news editors for the site soon. In the meantime E3 is happening and it would be stupid not to have a e3 news-off so that’s what we are going to do. A few of us are dedicating next week solely to covering news for E3 and if the news thing goes well we will make it a full time feature at Nidzumi.

While you are waiting for the feast of knowledge that is E3 to begin, we recently put up reviews for Beijing 2008 & Super Smash Bros Brawl. Hope you are enjoying the new reviews page, it makes our back catalogue of reviews easier to search through and we are looking into improving that even more in the future.

Talking of reviews we’ve recently changed the way they work every so slightly. We’ve built a simple little summary box at the end of every review that basically shows the score and the games pros & cons. Hopefully that will provide a bit more help when thinking about what game is right for you.

Still talking of reviews expect reviews of Unreal Tournament 3 (Xbox 360), Trauma Center: Under The Knife 2 & Battlefield Bad Company all to be up later this week.

Thanks for your continued support of the site.

Sam Morris - Editor In Chief

I guess this is the first official post as part of the Nidzumian and it would be rude of me not to explain what The Nidzumian actually is. Basically The Nidzumian will be a site development and staff blog.

We have been working on the site for a long time and still do every day but it is still missing a lot of features so this a place for you to voice any opinions or complaints on how we are doing. Expect a lot of ‘x feature coming soon’ posts on this blog. Hopefully The Nidzumian will provide a decent platform for feedback.

We will also be running a staff blog on this part of the site. That will normally consist of smaller thoughts on news and what we’ve been playing. Obviously if we have anything big to say it will be a main article but for smaller thoughts and observations this will be the place. Think if it as a mini twitter but slightly longer.

Well that’s basically it for this week, for your information these posts won’t be displayed on the main page only in the sidebar so the only way to stay tuned to The Nidzumian is that bar. I’m sure we will get some kind of RSS sorted out specificity for this.