Today sees the release of Red Faction: Guerrilla for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 here in the UK. The game is an action adventure game that takes place on a sandbox style planet Mars.

I’ve reviewed the PlayStation 3 version of the game for my gaming website Gamebrit.com, and the review in full can be read in full here. Below is a small excerpt of the review can be seen below:

“Red Faction: Guerrilla offers plenty of gameplay, yet sadly the poor storyline and the lack of variety within the game world brings the overall experience down and fails to truly engage beyond the first few hours. A fun experience at first, that soon becomes a chore. The real enjoyment is to be found in the multiplayer modes, which really are explosive pure fun. “

As promised earlier in the month, I would come back and review which of my goals I reached that I set in 2008. I somehow don’t think I did to well, but the way I figure, I can’t move forward and set new goals or even revised goals, without overlooking those I have set in the past. You need to look back in order to go forward.

So without further a due, lets get the ball rolling and take a look at the goals set back in Janurary of 2008.

1. Get a custom blog design – Fail

As with any good blog a custom design is a must, and ever since opening my blog I have been using the free theme you are currently seeing, which of course means I failed in getting a custom theme for my blog online in 2008. Although this goal is/was not a complete failure, I started to create a custom design very early on last year, but for one reason or another, decided not to use, despite developing it nearly to completion. I may end up finishing of the theme and releasing it for free, who knows. But ever since deciding against using the above as a theme, I began working on a new design, one which created more of a personal branding for myself and my blog, and what I want the blog to be overall. Hopefully, that should be online soon, but it seems I always end up wanting to tweak, so don’t hold your breath!

2. Increase blog earnings – Success

I pointed out that although my blog was a place for me to detail my online activity, I also wanted to use it as a revenue stream. I detailed how I would like to earn about £100 per month from my blog, and although I didn’t reach this goal, I did earn a somewhat regular income from my blogging activity, mainly through writing reviews. I shall continue to do so, and hopefully it will become more of a regular part of my blogging overall. In addition to reviews, other income methods will be integrated in to my blog.

3. Learn to drive – Fail

“I hope to learn and pass my driving test, thats the goal. Buying a car is not.” - That’s what I said back in January of last year, and I can safely say I came nowhere close to passing this goal. I do have my provisional licence now which enables me to learn, but as of yet I have taken no lessons. I figure failing this goal came down to a lack of desire, and no need at current to drive, public transport does me fine. As to whether it does in the future, who knows, either way I need to learn eventually.

4. Blog More – Success

Despite saying I was hoping to blog at least five times a week, which I clearly did not, I am marking this one as a success anyway, as my posting frequency did improve to a level at which I am now happy with. I think making more regular short posts while ok, may not be deemed as valuable, content wise, as more infrequent larger posts. Your thoughts?

5. Launch WebmasterPlay – Fail

A central hub for videogame webmasters, ‘webmasterplay’ didn’t see the light of day in 2008, and I am really bummed out about that as it’s a project I have been longing to get on the road, but it requires a lot of attention, which it just didn’t see due to work on Gamebrit, and starting Kufu.

6. Increase RSS Subscriptions – Success

By no means did I hit my projected goal of 500, but i did increase my subscriber count from it’s initial zero. This can only continue to rise by promoting it more, and integrating subscriber opportunities into my blog more effectively.

7. Get into my final year of University – Success

I am currently in my final semester of my final year of University, meaning I acheived my goal of getting into my final year of my Web Technology degree. For my final degree project I am making a website which I hope will be usefull to a lot of freelancers in the online space, so be sure to catch some future blog posts about that.

8. Launch and make a success of Gamebrit – Success

After a hefty development period and many delays Gamebrit finally launched in the summer of 2008, August to be precise. I outlined in my goals how I wanted the site to be attracting a minimum audience of at least 15,000 uniques per month before the end of 2008. It reached that goal, and then some, reaching over 50k in December. Keeping up this momentum is key to the success of the site.

9. Purchase an iMac – Fail

This just did not happen. Plain and simple, other things came about, like my holiday to Turkey, going to Leeds festival, and moving house yet again. It was always somewhat of a dream goal, but hey, we can all dream. Maybe 2009 will bring me some desktop apple joy.

10. Increase overall earnings – Fail

Sure I made money online in 2008, than I did in 2007, but not to a level I was happy with, I’m mainly putting this as a failure as a means to motivate myself further. Let’s see the potential.

So that makes a total of five successful goals, to five failed ones. I met you in the middle 2008. With this reflection done, it’s useful in scoping future goals and what I can and can’t reach. Look out for my 2009 goals soon. How was 2008 for you?

2008 was an interesting year. ChrisBrandrick.com had somewhat of a rollercoaster year, some months having more posts than others and at times my blog experience lots of traffic to nearly none. This is my ‘Year In Review – 2008′.

January

In January of 2008 I made a total of 18 blog posts, covering such topics as promoting your RSS feed for free, adding a favicon to your site, and of course my goals for the year (which I will review in an upcoming post). The site received over 1,300 unique visitors from a variety of places including the UK, US, Japan, Brazil, Australia and so on. Back in January I had just under 5 or so subscribers to my RSS feed. This is also the month I started to heavily use Entrecard, as can be seen by this January blog post.

February

February saw 20 blog posts being published onto the site, two more than that in January, and this month I was clearly feeling generous as every Wednesday was an opportunity to win some prizes, in what I dubbed ‘Winning Wednesdays‘. Winning Wednesdays was an effort on my behalf to attract more subscribers to my blog, and due to the regularity of prizes, ranging from free blog reviews, entrecard credits, to cold hard cash, it clearly worked as my subscribers jumped from a pitiful amount in January to over 70 subscribers by the end of February. Running contests in addition to other content such as, how to install gravatar support on your blog, giving some link love on valentines day, and my findings on facebook advertising, was a massive help for improving traffic also, as February’s traffic was more than double that of January, coming in at over 2,600. In February I also began using the Kontera plugin in an effort to further monetize my blog.

March

The month of March saw a drop in posts, down to only 11. As for why my posting frequency dropped I’m unsure, but either way it seems to be the start of a dissapointing trend for less blog output throughout the year. During March I blogged about the progress being made on the development of my gaming site Gamebrit, the then upcoming version of Wordpress 2.5, along with how to watch videos in high quality on You Tube. Despite posting considerably less in the month of March, visitor numbers remained encouragingly ‘high’ coming in at just shy of 2,500 uniques.

April

Not a lot happened here at ChrisBrandrick.com during the month of April, and I only managed to post four times. This complete drop off in post frequency was down to personal matters, such as sorting out and actually moving house. It wasn’t all bad though, as I managed to share with you how awesome of an application GrabUp for the Mac is. Also back in April I upgraded wordpress to the then current version of wordpress 2.5!

May

In a very similar fashion to April, May suffered from a lack of blog posts, only this time it was due to my internet connection not being installed for nearly over a month, not at all a good thing when you work online, in addition to this I also had University work and an exam to prepare for! I sure did spend a lot of time at my local coffee shop using the WiFi that month, yet still only managing five blog posts, one of which detailing how to follow me on twitter!

June

One post. During June I only posted once. Not cool. The only post I did make was explaining why I wasn’t posting, reason being of course I was in the process of starting up a new company with a few good friends of mine. Kufu Design LLP is the name, and web design is our game, check us out! Suprisingly enough I still pulled in more than 1,000 unique visitors. Oh and at this point in the year, I had not gained any RSS subscibers, but lost about 10 or so.

July

A slight increase in blogging returned to the site for the month of July, despite me speding two weeks of it on holiday in Turkey! During July I blogged a total of 7 times, twice about the aforementioned holiday, along with updates on my photography over at flickr and my page rank increase. Unique visitor counts were up on the previous month.

August

During the month of August over 1,200 of you stopped by to see what was going on, and I was clearly enjoying my summer to much! Not only was I working at Kufu, but I was also getting ready to attend the annual music festival at Leeds! In addition to that music related blog entry I also updated on what was going on over at WooThemes and how twitter decided to drop support for SMS updates for those in the UK, a sad day for us UK based twitter folk…

September

This month I returned back to University to commence my final year of my degree, so naturally i blogged about it, along with how Google Chrome was introduced, how the iPhone was hitting Pay & Go and another update on yet another WooThemes release. Traffic increased this month to over 2,000 uniques, most of them coming to read about the release of Googles browser.

October

In October I posted 8 times, and during this spooky month I posted a fair number of reviews, in a somewhat successful effort to generate income via my blog. All of October’s posts can be found here, including one revealing details on how my gaming website project ‘Gamebrit‘ is going.

November

Novemeber only saw four posts, including more reviews, and word on how Google had finally added theme selection to their email service GMail. During November my RSS subscriber count stablized at around the 50 mark at which it has remained since.

December

A disappointing end to the year with only two blog entries, one of which was Entrecard releated, the other wishing all my readers (thats you!) a very merry christmas!

An epic blog post I’m sure you will agree, but that is my year in review of what went down here at ChrisBrandrick.com during 2008. Be sure to look out for my goals for 2009, (and a review of my 08 goals) soon along with more blog updates!

Gamebrit, my gaming website that myself and a good friend currently run, which I recently blogged about here, is running it’s first competition (details here). It’s simple to enter and a £10 iTunes voucher is up for grabs. All you have to do is be a member of the Gamebrit forum community with 10 or more posts. The Gamebrit Forums are a place for like minded gamers to come together to discuss various videogame topics along with more general day to day topics.

Recent topics include the release of Microsoft’s New Xbox Experience, LittleBigPlanet’s upcoming downloadable content, and even the recently televised TV movie 24: Redemption. So be sure to join up and be in with a chance to win yourself some free music. 

I have mentioned Gamebrit on several occasions during the life of my blog, and for those of you who keep track I last posted about it all the way back in July. Since then the site has gone on to launch and is currently in it’s third month, more details about it’s early development can be found in this March blog posting.

During the development of the site I had a number of people asking me which content management system the site was running, and I can now reveal that the site is running on the relatively unknown CMS ‘Adapt CMS‘. The Adapt CMS website explains the system as so:

AdaptCMS is a PHP CMS that is made for complete control of your website, easiness of use and easily adaptable to any type of website. It’s made easy with advanced custom fields, a very simple but powerful template system and much more.

The system is far from perfect but it is really simple to use, easy to customize, and get to grips with and the support is superb, friendly and personal, so it’s a CMS worth checking out.

As for the sites success, I mentioned back in my January ‘Goals for 2008‘ post that launching the site and making a success of it was one of my many aspirations for the year. The post details that I wanted the site to be reaching a target audience of around 15k uniques per month before the year is out, and thankfully the site is well on the way to reaching that target, with a growing popularity month on month, with it currently averaging around 8,000 uniques. I will revisit my 2008 goals, once the year is over, so be sure to check that to see if I make a success of it.

Finally, if your into gaming, then be sure to check Gamebrit out, join the forum community,  oh and please do follow the site, and it’s two owners (myself and Leo Worsdale) on twitter!

As some of you who follow me on Twitter or have me added on Facebook may have realised I am now back in the UK, after my holiday away to Turkey. I had a really nice break away, and you can now check out the pictures of my trip on my Flickr page, I also have some on my Facebook too.

Now I’m back I would also like to announce that Kufu (as previously blogged) is now officially open for business, and we are on the look out for new clients. So drop us an email!

In addition to working for Kufu, the rest of my summer will involve finally getting Gamebrit off the ground, which has been ridiculously delayed for several reasons, it’s amazing to think I have had the domain for nearly a year now! But yeah keep an eye out for updates on that one.

But in the mean time, keep it on ChrisBrandrick.com! Subscribe to my RSS feed, or even add me as a Technorati fave.

Apologies for the lack of updates in the past week, it’s been a busy one!

Goal number eight in my goals for 2008 is to launch gaming site Gamebrit, I briefly mentioned it in the linked blog entry, but today I am going to go into more details as to what to expect.

Development on the site began just before Christmas, with the basic design being completed (see blog image for a sneak peak). The site is currently functioning and running on a good content management system, currently I am just adding content, and of course games into the database, which is taking far more time than I would like. I could outsource this menial work, but trying to keep costs down is key.

The site, as you may have guessed is going to focus on gaming, specifically within the UK. I hope to eventually be able to interview, and run features on UK game development houses and studios. I have successfully gained a foot in the UK gaming industry before (although a small one) so I see no reason why I cannot do it again with a more focused site.

In addition to the aforementioned CMS, which I will touch upon in more detail in a later post, I will also be implementing a forum to hopefully gain some community around the site; a collection of UK gamers, interested in the development of the UK in the gaming industry, oh and bloody good writing.

I initially wanted the site to be ready this month, but due to lengthy input processes I can see this being knocked back. Either way I will keep you updated on it’s progress, this post was really just to let you know, and because I am excited about the opportunities the site will bring. Any questions or comments, just leave your thoughts in the comment section.

Happy New Year! I hope you all have a great 2008 and achieve all that you aim to. (Also to bring in the new year, a congratulations from Scott at mythermos.com for winning my small holiday entrecard contest.)

Now as for my plans for 2008, these include goals for my blog, my sites and personal aims:

1. Get a custom blog design:

Mainly a goal I hope to achieve far before 2008 is even close to finished, I want to give ChrisBrandrick.com it’s own look and feel. It’s commonly known that using a public free theme (despite their merits) is frowned upon. Having a design unique to me gives my blog an identity, a brand, and recognition. John Cow has various cow theming, John Chow has that big car, TylerCruz has that nice custom avatar, all memorable stuff. Being unique is a big positive. So hopefully I can achieve this goal fairly soon. If you know of any good Wordpress design folks, let me know.

2. Increase my blog earnings:

Now from the offset this shouldn’t be to difficult, especially considering my blog is currently earning me £0. That’s right, I am currently making no money from this site, but this isn’t because I can’t, it’s because so far I just haven’t. The goal for 2008 is not only to make money but to make a specific amount per month. For those big internet entrepreneurs out there this may not seem like much, but it’s a goal I am realistically aiming for. By the end of the year I hope to be making a consistent £100 per month ($200 for you reading stateside) from ChrisBrandrick.com. This will be handled carefully, as for a start this blog will never be plastered with adverts, if and when I do implement ads it will be subtle and well placed. I hope to make the majority of this earning via reviews. Watch this space, as once I do start earning from this blog I will no doubt keep you guys in the loop.

3. Learn to drive:

I’m 21 in two days, here in the UK you can drive from the young age of 17. It’s about time I got a driving license and learned to drive, it’s a life skill I want. Sure traveling by train has served me well, but having your own set of wheels is an independence which I eventually want. This year, despite it’s pricey nature I hope to learn and pass my driving test, thats the goal. Buying a car is not.

4. Blog more:

All you have to do is look back over my archives for the past year to see that postings here at my blog have been lacking, sure it may well have picked up in the past month to a rate I am happy with but I intend to improve more, mainly to keep myself motivated and working. I intend to post at least (at a minimum) of five times a week. Hopefully you the reader will appreciate this to! More posts on my web developments, reviews and personal musings coming your way.

5. Launch WebmasterPlay:

You may remember all the way back in June of 2007 I posted about a webmaster forum I was creating, since then little work has took place on it for several reasons. Initially things were going well, with the front page created and the sites feature set building impressively. Unfortunately I hired an individual who wasn’t quite what I was looking for when it came to skinning the vBulletin forum. Due to this misfortune I took a break from developing the site, and this break lasted far longer than expected. I still really want to WebmasterPlay finished, and hopefully 2008 will be it’s year. Videogaming webmasters keep an eye out.

6. Increase RSS Subscriptions:

Only yesterday I made a posting detailing how I had installed Feedburner tools to my RSS feed. With this freshly installed I figured it would be worthwhile to make a goal relating to my readership. So with any luck by the end of the year my RSS subscription will hopefully be at 500, I have no idea how hard this goal will be to reach, but why not start me on the right path by subscribing now.

7. Get into my final year of University:

An academic goal which relies on me working hard(er) and getting the required grades, from now until May. Although without sounding to cocky, I am fairly confident that I will get into the 3rd and final year of University, this goal will act as a reminder as to why I am doing the course I am (Web Technology) and why I want to do it. The 3rd year starts in September so be sure to check back for the results then!

8. Launch and make a success of GameBrit:

This is the first time I have mentioned GameBrit on my blog, but here we go. GameBrit simply put is a british gaming website I have been working on for a short while, I hope to launch it within the next month or two. But more details on GameBrit coming in a separate post. I want to make sure I get it launched with the desired features, and getting at least 15,000 uniques per month before the year is out.

9. Purchase an iMac:

This goal really does depend on my online earnings, as I intend to fund this expensive purchase almost entirely from my money earned online. A new 20″ inch iMac, will it be mine this year?

10. Increase overall earnings:

What with me launching a small number of new sites this year (more details soon) I hope to start earning a healthy income from my online endeavors. As detailed above I would like to earn £100 a month from my blog, so on a whole £1000 a month from all my sites seems like a logical target. This will require a lot of personal effort and hopefully I will see the results. £1000 ($2000) per month from my portfolio of websites.

Those are my goals for the year, and hopefully when I come back to review this post in a years time, it will have been a successful year. (The above aims are in no particular order.)

I wish you all a productive new year; be sure to share your goals with me!