zConnection’s Top Reads of 2011

It’s officially 2012! Last year brought us many great things, just as we tried to bring our readers great things: we published a total of 288 articles last year, a number we’ll be trying our best to top this year. In our efforts to sum up the turbulent year just gone by, here’s a recap of our most successful articles from 2011 in order of their popularity – and if you missed any of them, here’s your chance to indulge yourself in some of our top hits. Without further ado, here we go… First up is a somewhat boring news piece: the announcement of Konami’s Metal Gear Solid, Zone of the Enders, and silent Hill HD collections. Published early in the morning of June 4th, this piece broke a record by being first ever article on zConnection to break 10,000 unique views alone. Not one of the collections has been released in Europe as of yet, but Metal Gear Solid HD Collection will be seeing a February launch, with an exclusive limited edition available for pre-order. [Original article] next is a recent piece, our critical evaluation of the “life events” feature introduced in Facebook. Published only on December 17th, this managed to sneak in as the second most popular article of the whole year. the “life events” feature has now rolled out to Facebook users using the new “Timeline” profile, which was expected to become a mandatory upgrade on Christmas Eve, but it appears this has not happened, to the relief of some. [Original article] Taking third and fourth place are two more news pieces, the first concerning the Xbox 360 dashboard layout update, and the second concerning the delay experienced by PC customers who bought the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim from Amazon and could not play the game until it arrived, unlike midnight launch Steam customers. the Amazon piece’s comments section soon became a complaint centre for those who received the game well beyond launch day, despite promises to the contrary. [Original article] [Original article]

The fifth most popular article last year was our first real technology piece, a review of RIM’s 7-inch tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook. the huge piece turned out surprisingly successful for what was a first, frightened foray into the realm of technology journalism, and establishes technology as a new focus for zConnection in 2012. we said the PlayBook was “one of the most powerful and appealing tablets on the market”, to the agreement of many commenters. [Original article] you can thank mass panic and anger for the popularity of our sixth most read article, a short news piece relaying Sony’s announcement that the PlayStation Network outage may continue for a few more days, following the notorious cyber-attack on their servers earlier this year. It heralded many more technical issues for Sony to come later in the year, none of which we covered extensively. Sony’s PSN outage started on April 20th and ended on May 31st. [Original article] our review of dark Souls takes the place of seventh most read article, possibly for the most notorious reasons; due to miscommunication, our review briefly went live ahead of the scheduled review embargo, emerging as one of the earliest reviews of the game. It was brought down temporarily and then reinstated after it became apparent that the embargo had been utterly destroyed by a number of other publications. we gave the game a score of 92%. [Original article] In eight and ninth place are two articles from occasional contributor Ross Proudfoot, the first his impressions from the Call of Duty Elite beta, and the second his impressions of the Battlefield 3 multiplayer beta. He said Elite was “definitely worth a look”, and that “you won’t be disappointed” by the Battlefield beta. Ross’s latest contribution is a Call of Duty vs. Battlefield article from early November which you can find here. [Original article] [Original article] Finally, in tenth place, an article reflecting our origins: an editorial called “the Scots Who Made Grand Theft Auto”, offering a brief history of DMA Design, the Scottish independent developer which created the original Grand Theft Auto, then ultimately became Rockstar North, a subsidiary of the American developer Rockstar. we published it on November 20th, following the announcement of the latest GTA instalment, Grand Theft Auto V. [Original article] With that out of the way, it’s finally time to forget the past year and focus on the future. we hope you’ll be with us for the next three hundred and sixty five days while we work our hardest to expand our coverage and enlarge our team. to all our most loyal readers and fans: thanks for sticking with us, and have a Happy New Year! Don’t forget you can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

zConnection’s Top Reads of 2011

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