Review: Halo Blog

Halo: Combat Evolved

https://sacredicon.blog/halo-posts/

I think that this will be a good source to fashion my assignment 3 around. I went through this blog and the first post was about the initial impact of certain campaign missions in the game and how seeing them again makes you reminisce. I chose this blog immediately after reading this post because when the author described those moments, I was pulled back to the childlike amazement I had when i was younger. The specific times he chose were the same ones that ran on loop in my head, the same ones that every time I played through the campaign I would get chills. It's posts like this that people who understand the game can truly appreciate and get a grasp of how much the author really cares about it.


Blog title: Sacred Icon

What are the visual/formatting features of this blog's home page:

This blog is not entirely dedicated to Halo. It has sections for Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who too. The homepage gives a brief description of what the blog entails, telling you how it is a opinion based blog. It does seem a little hectic since the author does categorize each of his topics and then all of the articles for each topic linked under them. It has a sidebar that is kind of repetitive to the homepage, but I assume it is meant to be for when you are on a specific post and want to navigate from there.

Single or multiple contributors:

From the articles that I read, there seemed to be only one author, Cameron Walker.
Titles of (at least) 3 blog posts I read:

"Ranking the Levels – Halo: Combat Evolved"

What were the forms/structures/startegies used by the writers? (were they more opinionated? informative? what kind of knowledge of the field did their posts display?)

I think this author does a good job of convincing the reader that he is well versed in what he is writing about. It is a heavily opinionated blog of course, but having confidence that the author is genuine makes it feel much better to agree or disagree with what he thinks. He did have some 'click-baity' post, like the '10 Best' this or that. I think these were nice though, I liked reading them and learned some stuff that I didn't know about the Halo series. His posts of this nature take a very linear approach, listing the order with a description of why he put them there and what he thought of each. His actual reviews and discussion posts take a pretty straight forward approach. He introduces the topic and shows the reader what he discusses, breaks the paragraphs into distinct examples, and then ends with a conclusion on his thoughts. Despite the basic nature of the organization, it makes it easy to skim through some of the longer posts and focus in on the examples and details you want to read about.

What did these authors do that I would like to avoid?

The formatting of the homepage was an eyesore and had too much going on. I would like to make sure I spend some time to make sure that mine is functional and works out well. On top of this, he has links to other posts in the same game/genre category at the end of each post, but I don't think they are updated so some are missing. If I'm to link other stuff at the end for "What to read next", I want to make sure it's updated and relevant.

What did these authors do that I would like to make my own?

I liked the way that the author did incorporate very relevant pictures into his posts. They helped a lot and the nostalgia was very real when viewing them. I want to consider putting something describing the blog and the author somewhere on the homepage. It helped get a feel for the blog and made it feel more genuine to me.

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