2011: FleshEatingZipper’s Year In Review

You and I have both spent the past few days reading everyone else’s 2011 Year In Review articles and come to the same conclusion: they’re all talking about the same stuff. The Japanese earthquake was terrible, Nintendo didn’t do well, Steve Jobs died, we already knew all this. One of these articles is nostalgic, the following are just re-hashing the same stuff. What we’re going to do is slightly different: we’re going to talk about us. That’s right, if you’ve been on the FEZ train or not, sit back and enjoy all of our wonderful adventure again as we begin writing out all our new ones for 2012!

January

We were only around for three days in January, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t rant about Bulletstorm, let Rob take you for a tour of Aces High 2, or talk about Spartacus for a while! Since FleshEatingZipper has been a bootstrap startup, we were basically just asking our family and friends to check our cute little articles we were doing on that web page we’d put up with the cringe-inducing name (thanks for putting up with us back then, family and friends!)

February

What better way to start the month than with our very first FEZCast? You’ll have to remember, we started out as a couple guys with a podcast that started a web site. We split up into a variety of smaller podcasts before consolidating back into the Monthly Caucus toward summer time, but we’re definitely going to expand in 2012! Oh, and we did reviews. Tons and tons of reviews of everything. From the new Gawker sites and Catfish to the state of Best Buy and the state of comic book movies, we had an opinion for you about pretty much everything. Oh, and did you know that Schwarzenegger was seriously considering a return to acting before he realized he’d had sex with his help a decade ago and totally forgot? That happened. Finally, our new writer Keith showed us that Microsoft should really take advantage of the P90X crowd by using Kinect. We think it’s a great idea.

March

Android overtook iPhone, Charlie Sheen overtook Twitter, and Google’s self-driving cars started WWIII. (Sorry, that last bit’s at least a few year’s out.) We continued to rattle and hum behind the scenes and I was still excited about getting a Windows Phone some day. Guest writer Sam brought us his 10 favorite animes while Rob hated THQ’s Homefront.

April

Okay, we don’t quite know what happened this month. Even as I comb through all our articles during those 30 days, we still can’t recall what was on our minds at the time. To put things in perspective, we currently get about three times as much traffic per day as we did during that entire month, which was our worst to date. Still, we had some great stuff, just in shorter supply. I let you know how Rise of Nations was the best real-time strategy game ever made, we got a swag interview with Matt Rorie from Screened, we did our first hardware review on the HTC Arrive Windows Phone, and Rob wanted to let you know about amateur radio. Yep, sloooow month.

May

Rob rang in the month by letting us know that we got Osama bin Laden. Has it really been eight months? Sheesh. I read books while Rob loved L.A. Noire. But all of that was small potatoes compared to our coverage of the Phoenix Comicon. All of us traveled (well, Rob and Keith just walked down the street) to Arizona’s capital and gave blow by blow coverage, including a crazy video of Max Brooks ripping up an attendee for questioning his integrity on zombie-related matters while Johnny ended up wrapping the whole thing up beautifully. We’re gearing up to bring you the best opinions on E3 2012 when we head to Los Angeles in June.

June

For some reason or another, the internet didn’t seem to agree with us when we said that Duke Nukem Forever was an awful piece of garbage when the demo landed early for us. It sucks to be right sometimes. Guest writer Doug was nostalgic for the Gears of War 3 beta while we did a series of article regarding our 90s crushes. Rob pined for Erika Eleniak and Keith was super hot for Misty from Pokemon. The things we learn… We got to chat with Jay Watts, creator of Solar 2 and Hal Halpin for the Entertainment Consumers Association about the Supreme Court ruling that games were a protected form of free speech. So hot!