So, a hundred comics has been and gone. If we were doing a TV show this would be a good chance to put up some sort of cheesy highlights reel. Or alternatively possibly a goof tape. Guess which one would be longer for us? I'm not really going to cop out and do that, but I will quickly mention a few things.

First of all the site's been down more often than your mum in the last few days. AG's growth has been pretty steady, with occasional spikes such as the recent Yahtzing it recieved. Spikes are OK, because they're just bandwidth hits. We pay for more bandwidth and we get on with our lives. The problem (and I use the term loosely... like your mum) is that a lot of the people who visit seem to like the place. They pop in, say hello, steal our biscuits, and then settle into a nice comfy chair to watch some TV. So our bandwidth growth has been pretty steady, and we've managed it.

What we haven't managed and haven't been nearly as aware of is that hosting companies don't like...

So, a hundred comics has been and gone. If we were doing a TV show this would be a good chance to put up some sort of cheesy highlights reel. Or alternatively possibly a goof tape. Guess which one would be longer for us? I'm not really going to cop out and do that, but I will quickly mention a few things.

First of all the site's been down more often than your mum in the last few days. AG's growth has been pretty steady, with occasional spikes such as the recent Yahtzing it recieved. Spikes are OK, because they're just bandwidth hits. We pay for more bandwidth and we get on with our lives. The problem (and I use the term loosely... like your mum) is that a lot of the people who visit seem to like the place. They pop in, say hello, steal our biscuits, and then settle into a nice comfy chair to watch some TV. So our bandwidth growth has been pretty steady, and we've managed it.

What we haven't managed and haven't been nearly as aware of is that hosting companies don't like you when your website gets so big that you need four of their wholesaler accounts to manage it, and the site is entirely database driven and the weight of people viewing it brings the database to its knees. We weren't even aware that the database had knees, but now we're finding out that it does, and those knees are raw and calloused. Like your mum's.

Still this has meant we've been forced into taking a big step, the website has grown up and has had to move out and find it's own home. Rather than the shared standard hosting environment we're used to Australian Gamer now has its own dedicated hardware, a server specifically for it (though little brothers VURP and GamersEvents came along for the ride). This makes it more stable, more reliable, and faster. And, regrettably, vastly more expensive. Yug and I have had to whore ourselves on the street corner for AG hosting money. We saw your mum down there. She said to say hi.

So 100 updates. You'd think that was pretty good, it's a nice round number. Well, the 0 is a round number, and there's two of them. 1 is kind of straight. But actually in some ways it's an admission of failure. We've been going for more than 3 years now and to have 100 comics after that time sort of shows how far off the regular "weekly" mark we've been.

Nevertheless, it IS an achievement. In fact, AustralianGamer in general is an achievement for Yug and myself. We started the site with a clear agenda - bitching about things. And I'd like to think we've kept that focus pretty well. And it's not like there's nothing left to bitch about. Super Smash Brothers Brawl finally has an announced release date, but 4 months after the US and 6 months after Japan. Game prices in Australia are vastly above what they are in other countries. And we still don't have an R rating, despite some small steps in that direction.

So we bitch when we can, when we get the chance. Podcasts give us a pretty good opportunity, and then there's this little article that Yug not-at-all-dismissively refers to (dismissively) as a "rant". I actually quite like writing it. I fancy myself as a bit of a writer, but you can only really claim that title if you actually... you know... write. And apart from arguing with people on the Forums (who are invariably wrong) I really don't get that much time to actually really write things. So these articles give me an opportunity to really sit down and think through what I want to say and how I want to say it. That or leave it till the last minute and then just write whatever shit comes into my head. Both are options.

So I like writing this because it's one of the few things I get to write that isn't a statement to the police that includes the word "livestock".

100 comics, 100 updates. 98 of which probably involved Yug and I bickering about it at some point, whether that was trying to think of one or bitching at the other one to finish it. Updates are surprisingly hard to do. I'm sure you and your friends all have some cool ideas for "a comic" but every week gets harder than you'd think. We'd really like to do them regularly. But honestly at this point us actually doing regular updates would be weird and creepy but strangely appealing, like a Hannah Montana sex tape.

Australian Gamer has a lot of potential. It always had. Like the BioShock movie it has the potential to be truly great one day. But like the Dragonball Z movie the losers involved don't exactly inspire confidence. Seriously, though, why is Goku a white guy?

We have some interesting things planned for the future. Some of them are exciting and relatively predictable (we'll probably do a comic with GTA IV in it soon... seriously) and some of them... not so much predictable.

Some things have to be dismissed out of hand. People have often asked us if we'd ever make a game. At this point I can't really see that happening. That would sell about as well as a Rosie O'Donnell sex video. On UMD.

Still, we will have some very exciting things to show, probably in about two months.

We'll try to get in another comic between now and then.