So, it’s another new year. I wound up skipping my typical year-in-review thing this year because it just wasn’t clicking. I was pretty happy to get another strip in before the end of the year, anyway. Another thing I’ve been having increasing trouble with in those yearly-review pieces is honestly, I usually grab games once they’ve been out for a while, and I usually wind up having to research my favorite stuff from that year to see whether or not it was actually FROM that year. That said, most of my ‘current’ purchases wound up within the [+/-] comic reviews, so, may as well take the chance to backtrack for my thinly veiled opinions on those releases. Xenoblade or Devil Survivor 2 probably rank up there in my choice as a favorite game this year. Xenoblade in particular offers one of the most “adventurous” feeling I’ve gotten from a game, let alone RPG in years, creating a vast, sprawling world that feels amazingly vast, and is colorful and fantastic enough to set itself apart from drab fantasy countrysides and post-nuclear Armageddon wastelands. And I LIKE wastelands! As much as I made fun of the battle system and astoundingly British voice acting, it’s really a blast and worth hunting down if you don’t already have a copy of it. It just may take a while before you really understand what the hell you’re doing.

I really want to ante up in 2013 and get comics done faster and better, as well as pursue some other side projects to share here. (Among them, getting a decent looking WordPress theme again since I have been studying up on my CSS and so on since some of my older editor software stopped playing nice with my computer.) I’ll also be trying to get around and do more collaborative projects, enter contests and open submissions for exposures’ sake, so keep an eye out for that.

There is another [+/-] strip already in the works, and that animated series pilot isn’t totally dead in the water (actually working on that some this week again, too), in case anyone was curious. I have a half-finished draft of MyGames to poke at, too. Thanks again to everyone who liked the strips, I honestly didn’t expect them to be as well-received as they were. It’s been a big help through kind of a rough year. To be honest, the whole reason it existed was because I was tired of NOT doing everything and attempting to ‘save’ my drawing for something big, like submissions to publishers, but it isn’t like I have a finite amount of drawing that I can ‘waste’ on my site and be left with none for later. So I just kind of took the plunge and ranted about Vanquish for about six-seven pages of rag paper. I stuck to the Sharpie markers for the first half of the year as an exercise in trying to draw things ‘right’ the first time with no chance to go back and do it over. I’ve considered going back and ‘remastering’ them, but that would kind of kill the joke at the start of the Mass Effect 3 review where Eishi turns the color on, so I left it.

Thanks again for reading, everyone. It means a lot to me knowing someone gets a chuckle or two out of my works. The best way to stay up to date on my crap is to can follow me on Twitter @TheThreeTwo, and Like “Third Half” on Facebook.