It was pointed out in the comments that we average a paltry 5 blog posts a year at this rate. That is beyond terrible and we apologize wholeheartedly. It seems like on every blog post we earnestly promise to post more often, and then two months go by and we still haven’t found the time. This time, we mean it — this time, we have a plan!

So prepare yourself, brave reader, for the stupendous onslaught of…

DAILY POSTS ON THE METABLOG!!

Yes, that’s right: for the next several days we vow to post every single day. In a row. Not only will this enable us to write individual blog posts which are less book-like in stature, it should also help to bolster our woefully low rate of posts-per-year. In your face, statistics!

On a more practical note, part of the problem with our lack of timely blog posting is that it takes a disproportionate amount of time to write a post — it seems like it should take an hour at most and then we find much of the day has gone by and it’s still not done. This particular post had been especially daunting since, as time passed, there were more and more things to write about, creating a snowballing infinite loop of blog-posting-procrastination. For reasons which we’ll hopefully get to at some later date, spending the entire day writing a blog post wasn’t really going to work.

Hence our insanely brilliant discovery of the idea to post smaller amounts at a daily rate, thereby avoiding the infinite regress of non-daily-blog-posting. Daily blogging: another mind-blowing innovation brought to you by Metanet Software Inc.

So fear no longer, for the time has come: post we shall, and with gusto! And about more than just the fact that yes, we are indeed finally posting something; despite our name, most of the time we do try not to be too meta.

Today’s item of interest: XBLA game rating

For those of you who aren’t on the cutting edge of console OS/interface updates, some background: a ratings system was recently added to XBLA, allowing players to assign each game a rating of 1 to 5 stars, either via the 360’s menu system or the website.

This is a really welcome feature, since it will (hopefully) prevent the worthwhile games from getting buried under new releases. In the Community Games section (“Indie Games” now, apparently) this was especially a problem, so kudos to Microsoft for enabling this feature — we’re sure it caused their lawyers many a sleepless night. Or something. Who knows why it wasn’t implemented earlier — the point is, it’s here now, and that’s awesome!

Of course, for some inexplicable reason the actual implementation seems to be half-finished, or perhaps half-broken, since you can rate games you haven’t bought or even downloaded the demo for… but it’s better than nothing, right? Right?

To get to the actual point: so far, 11k people have rated N+, and we were delighted to find that its rating is quite good. Thank you so much! This is definitely a great start, but we were a touch underwhelmed (if that’s a word) by the math: it turns out that means that less than 1% of gamers who have tried N+ have given it a rating.

We briefly considered some sort of “cash for votes” program, but it was quickly abandoned due some pretty obvious problems; aside from the glaring ethical (and possibly legal) issues, the volume of XBLA users (well over 10M by now) means that even at payments as low as 10 cents per star, we could very quickly become superbankrupt. (Superbankruptcy is like regular bankruptcy, except that subsequently the company may form a neutron star or black hole.)

In light of the above, we’re just humbly asking everyone to rate N+ with however many stars they feel it deserves. Please take a few minutes, rate N+, and spread the word — every little bit helps! 🙂

This concludes the first of many daily posts which shall be forthcoming on this, the Metablog.

So, what adventures await us tomorrow?

What exactly is the elusive “Hand Eye Society”, and what transpired on the evening of August 27th, 2009?
(spoilers: this is and this did)

Will Mare and Raigan ever learn how to write posts of a lesser verbosity?

And what of the identity of this mysterious foreigner in our midst?

Tune in tomorrow for more of the incredible postings of Mare and Raigan! Same bat-URL, hopefully similar bat-time. (Okay that sentence was hard to write. Being unabashedly cheesy and ridiculous is harder than it looks!)