As we enter 2016, I thought it would be fun to bring back a favorite series on the RF Generation blogs: The People of RF Generation! My first interview is actually with the former writer of the series, Fleach! I had the pleasure of meeting him when we were at RetroWorld Expo back in October. Continue on through the break to learn more about him!
As I write this, I'm sitting in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport on a 3 hour layover. I've been up since 4:45am after going to bed some time around 2am.
Ahead of the Nintendo Direct today, we got some very insider information on an announcement that will be revealed by Nintendo. Via a patch coming to Skylanders: Trap Team, Disney Infinity 2.0, and Amiibo supported Wii U titles, your favorite characters will be coming to each other's worlds!
In Trap Team, you will be able to lead Baymax and Yoshi around to defeat Kaos!
Disney Infinity will bring Spyro and Mario to your favorite Toy Box set!
But, in true Nintendo fashion, they have brought the best touches to their own games.
Smash Bros. already lets you bring your favorite fighters along with you and level them up with the Amiibos, but they will be adding in Spyro and Mickey to the roster when you tap their characters to the Wii U Gamepad. Other characters will come to life as assist trophies. Trigger Happy sets up shop with a turret to fire at your opponents while Captain America's shield frees your opponents from their stock.
Captain Toad will allow Rip Tide to have his chance to find treasure. Wreck-It Ralph simply smashes through towers until he finds the stars he is looking for.
Mario Kart 8 doesn't have quite the interactivity, but will bring you dozens of new Mii Racer costumes that you can use to dress up as your favorite characters not in the Mario universe.
Mario Party 10 is a similar situation where you will have more characters to use in Amiibo mode.
I'd like to welcome everyone to the newly rebranded NFC Generation! We are still working on a few things like cleaner graphics, some colors, icons, and Google Wallet support, but we feel ready enough to do a soft launch while we work out those finishing touches.
In the mean time, we have a quick video to show off one of the coolest new features that the site is going to offer! The video was made while this was still in production, so please don't mind the old look.
In the video, the first tap corresponds to the main logo in the upper left hand corner. This will launch the website automatically on your phone or tablet that has NFC on board. The second tap, however is a little different. As you can see I tapped the Google Play icon. If you tap the icon with your phone and the app is installed already, the NFC Generation app will automatically launch. If the app is not installed (shame on you!), it will take you to the Google Play Store so you can install it!
We hope that you will use the new technology that we have built in to share RF Generation with friends and help promote both the site and the Android app with your friends!
Just over 5 years ago, I wrote a small blog post thanking the community. It may not have been seen by many that are here currently, but I was just thinking about it tonight. Here's the contents of that blog post.
"Over the years, gaming has gone from a sort of niche hobby to a full-blown, mainstream activity. I seen gaming go from an activity that only a few of my friends growing up did to dorm room gaming to my 1080p, 5.1 audio setup at home. The first community I was a fairly active member of was the GameFAQs forum. Did the collection on IGN, tried out Digital Press forums before finding my way here. I lurked for a while, primarily using only the Collection tools. I finally started posting more and more, and the people here are extremely nice and really my kind of people. Then came the chat.
I jumped in, and as the new guy, I sort of found it difficult to jump in. After 2-3 times (that I could tell), I felt like I was starting to feel as a part of the group. I am now on a first name basis with pretty much everyone in chat. This type of small community is what I need. I grew up in a small town, and that's the sort of vibe I get here. These people are RFGeneration, down to the roots.
I'm very thankful for this place. It's kind of hard for someone like me to put myself out there and jump into conversation, but when I did, I wish I would have sooner. I plan on sticking around for a long time and I really hope that the community grows while keeping the roots of the small site. I consider all of you my friends and hope to meet many more of you along the way.
Thank you."
I re-read that when I was thinking of it and I still feel it is relevant, even 5 years later.
It's been quite a ride since then. Personally, I have gone through ups and downs. Trouble at work. A minor bout with depression. A new job. And now my family is going to be getting bigger in a few months. I'm now selling and trading more of my collection off rather than hoarding every single thing. The site has gone through some issues and come through very strong after each of them.
This site has been a huge part of me. Despite the fact that I haven't been posting as much as of late, I still stop in to threads as I can. I've gained more and more friends. I started and gradually wound down a podcast only for another team to jump in and step in with their take in a huge way! We have an app!
I went from a user and the occasional (non-staff) contributor on the blogs and database to a director.
We had 3 years of forum posts that were gone... Thought the whole thing was going to be lost. But it's always come back. We had months of nagging server issues from speed to just plain failures. But we're back on a blazing server.
I know, it's not the standard "Thanks" blog post, but I really felt that I needed to let every single member know that as long as I'm here, I'll try everything I can to ensure that this site stays up and running. It's not for me (well, not all for me). It's for everyone that uses this site. It's for the community of RF Generation and for video games in general.
But I can't nor don't do it by myself. There is an excellent group of people on staff that take what they do seriously. There are plenty of users who submit data on new games and old, pictures and screenshots, to try to document everything that we can on a game or hardware.
So, this is to everyone. Thank you all for continuing to make RF Generation the best site on the web.
So, we just migrated everything over, but we're moving back!
This new server is just too fast. It reminds us on staff about broadband and new technology. Pages loading when you click them? Pshaw. We need to go back to the golden age of the Internet.
Until we make this switch, I'll be artificially throttling the speed on the server so everyone can get used to it again.
Also, after working with theGrue, we're going to dump the Android app and develop only for Palm.
RF Generation coming here soon!
We feel that this will take the site back to its roots in classic gaming, when you didn't need "day one patches", "DLC on disc", and "stability updates". Things broke when they did and that's the way we liked it!
The big server move is going to happen beginning tonight. At 6pm Central time, when I get home, I'm going to begin the change so this site is redirected to our new emergency blog. This will let us finish transferring some items as well as pull a fresh DB backup so we can move it all, optimize everything, and bring the site back up on the new server.
Feel free to get your IRC client ready for the down time.
Server: irc.quakenet.org Room: #rfgeneration
Feel free to stop by and chat with myself and others while this is in the works.
Maybe I'll even start a Google Video Hangout tonight...
So, we have some word from the web host. After my investigation, I found that one of our drives had some bad sectors. After unmounting it, the site seems to be running much better. Good news is that it was our backup drive, so none of the site data should be damaged. They will be replacing the drive, but in order to do so, they will need to power down our server to swap out the drive.
We have this planned for Wednesday during the day. Most of you will probably be at work or school, so there shouldn't be many that this will affect. We will be making solid backups ahead of time, just in case.
So, to sum it up, site is having planned downtime to resolve a hardware issue that should help our performance once it is resolved. It'll be down Wednesday during the day and hopefully back up by that night. I don't have a time as of right now, but we'll redirect somewhere.
Go ahead, kick it over to channel 4 for a little bit on Wednesday, but be sure to bring it back over to channel 3 soon!
We have been running over our logs and settings and are in contact with our host as well to try to sort out exactly what is going on.
Please be patient. Your calls are very important to us. Have you considered buying an extended warranty? *shakes head* Sorry, went in to call center mode for a second.
We know just how important this site is to you guys. Personally, it means the world to me to have this site up and running well for everyone to experience. We hope to have everything running better very soon.
Don't forget to keep it on channel 3! (Even if there is a little static every now and then.)
Hey guys! I'm late on this one, but we have another set of thanks to give out for August!
In August, we had 2550 submissions! 2324 of those being games and the other 226 were hardware. That's back up from our summer lull of July! This month also pushed us over 30,000 submissions on the year! Thanks to everyone who submitted!
The top submitters for August were: ApolloBoy with 1043 submissions! Nearly half! Then there was Shadow Kisuragi with 328, thegreatska with 236, Sirgin with 154, and ericeskapade with 127 to round out the other members with over 100 submissions.
The top approvers for August were: Shadow Kisuragi with 390, Tynstar with 215, Paully3433 with 198, and ApolloBoy with 118!
Great job everyone! Let's keep up the awesome work!
As you all know, we recently held our annual donation drive, which was a huge success, meeting our goal to have enough funds to pay for the server throughout the year. However, something has changed here at RFGen. The Collectorcast has been a runaway success, and while that’s awesome for Duke.Togo, Crabmaster2000, and WildBil52, its putting a strain on our servers. Due to the increased traffic and bandwidth use, our host is requiring us to upgrade to a bigger and faster setup. This as I’m sure you all can guess, means a heftier price tag. Which means the funds we raised earlier will no longer suffice. But we won’t be holding another donation drive this year; instead, we’ve decided to change our business model a bit. Don’t worry, we’re not going to going to be adding ads, we would never resort to that...
We’ll still be funded solely by donations, but instead of the few paying for the many, the many will now be paying for the many. In other words, RFGeneration.com will now be a pay-to-use site. I know, I know, it sounds bad, but here’s the good news, you only have to pay once and you’ll never have to pay again, and you get to choose how much you pay. So click the Donate button in the forums and set your payment amount. Once your payment is verified, you’ll be allowed to access the forum and all those wonderful collection tools you know and love.
We'll still be allowing current members to access the site today so they can make this transition and get their payment in as soon as possible.
And remember, even though we keep it on Channel 3, we’re more like HBO now.
This is just a little different than the typical "RFG Thanks for (insert month/year)".
I was going through some of my old blog entries and I found one I wrote as an open letter to the community. It was written 3 years after joining, but a mere 2 months after I really began to get involved with the community.
As I sit here now, my son is playing Pokepark on the Wii as I look at my TI-99/4A that I need to test so I can sell it. There have been a lot of changes for me personally as well as for the site in the time since that blog post. I have gone from grabbing everything in sight to being selective and selling off stuff that I have just to have it. I'm now a director on the site. We had a pretty big disaster on the site that easily could have been the end of the site potentially. I recovered what I could with what I had, losing a couple of years worth of forum posts and maybe 6 weeks of database submissions.
The forum was slow to come back, but here we are. We have a bunch of new members and old members who have returned. We have new bloggers and a new podcast. We are nearing in on 70,000 software entries and 5,000 hardware entries! We have a new server with more power and drive space for us to grow with! And we have continued to do so with just the support of the community and their donations. We have no plans to be sold or put up ads.
We're doing this on our own. I see and hear things happening elsewhere that I never want anything to happen here. We want you to communicate to us and let us know about any issues you have or any ideas to make things better. Together, we'll continue to get better as well as grow.
What this all boils down to is... thanks. Without the passion of the community, we wouldn't be here. Thanks to the bloggers for writing about your perspective. Thanks to all of the staff for your work on keeping that submission queue low. Thanks to everyone who was here before me who started the site right. Lastly, thanks to every member for making this a great place to be, day after day.
So, this is now painfully late. I was slow to edit, then once I had it, the file locked up and I lost all of my edits. In the middle of this, RF Generation had a major issue on the site, causing us to lose 3 years of forum posts and a couple of months of database work. But, here it is! Our awards show and also an interview with lisalover1!
0:00 - Intro 1:40 - Interview with lisalover1 33:37 - End of the Year Awards! (I know it's 2012 already!) 1:09:45 - Community Award Submissions 1:30:55 - Game Shout Out! 1:39:30 - Top 5 Reasons the GameCube is the best console ever! 1:40:35 - Top 5 Things we didn't find ourselves saying in 2011. 1:41:35 - Outro
Please leave us comments here, in the forums (they're back!), email us, call us, write us, telegraph... The contact information is in the episode!
Subscribe to the podcast with this RSS feed: http://rfgeneration.podomatic.com/rss2.xml Find us in iTunes, rate, and subscribe! It's been submitted at least twice, but still not in the Zune market (sorry WP7 folks!).
