Some small changes to blog format

By the former admins of TAG

Salaam alaykum! We have great news!

For quite some time we have felt that taking care of the blog is far harder than we ever could have thought and consumes too much of our leisure time. Frankly, it has often been a real pain in nether regions to wake up some days and think of all the work, we have to do for blog maintenance. We found that we started spending hours just to make up excuses for avoiding blog editing shifts - Ilmari spent too much time washing his hair and TBD even signed up for a pottery class. Finally we admitted that we had to let the blog go. Still, we didn't want to leave our faithful readers completely without their weekly adventure game dose. We thus decided to find a new maintainer for our beloved blog – someone dedicated enough to do the work we had grew so tired of.

We had discrete discussions with some major gaming sites on the Web, and the amount of interest surprised us. IGN, Valve and Gamespot all made reasonable offers, but something was always lacking. We wanted our successor to continue the heritage of Trickster and this proved too much to many potential sponsors. Many offers would have meant selling the soul of the blog to faceless corporate game industry – running ads as fake reviews and praising new hit games for money just wasn't our way. We bravely decided to keep the integrity of the blog intact, rather than accept such terms.

Some suitors were really persistent. Adventure Gamers wanted to buy us off, just because our blog was taking away so much traffic from them. A guy called Bill bragged on and on about his multibillion corporation and kept telling us how the blog should concentrate on nothing but X-Box games. We were getting desperate, but then it clicked.

At first we thought that all the e-mails from Shaikh Haroun el Serenia from the small caliphate of Vrangor and a CEO of Trusted Arabian Gasoline Corp. (see, it rhymes with TAG!) were just very bad spam. After some actual transactions on our bank accounts we realised that the ridiculous name was just an alias of a benevolent and enlightened ruler of a Middle-Eastern country who wanted to remain anonymous, because adventure gaming is not really allowed in Quran.

No, it's not this guy.
This guy is dead, as far as we know.

We are not saying it's this guy.
We are also not denying it.

In retrospect, there was nothing amazing in all this, since TAG has a history of attracting wealthy sponsors from rich oil countries. Shaikh, as we are going to continue call him, is a dedicated fan of classic adventure games and has expressed his deepest wish to provide fully paid employees from his personal staff to keep the blog going on to distant future. The originator of the blog, Trickster, and the two co-admins, Ilmari and TBD, have been rewarded generously and will be shortly living in pleasant surroundings on a tropical island.

The admin will soon be spending their time here

What's the catch, you ask? There isn't any! The staff of Shaikh are eager to provide us with all sort of extra information on oil prizes and all new ways of using up gasoline, and especially interesting and reassuring tidbits about how the oil industry is not polluting the world.

We will have occasional articles of this sort on the blog

But rest assured, we haven't forgotten the games! A new exciting feature of TAG will be the ”Missed Arabics”, which will go through the history of the Arabic adventure game. Just think of all the oriental mystery! We will get to see such less-known gems like Al-Farabi: Mulla Sadra (translates roughly into Date Quest: The Mission for the Succulent Fruit), Ibn Gabirol (The Secret of the Camel Oasis) and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (Above a Sand Dune).

 

Just look at this picture from Date Quest!
Aren't you just dying to read more about it?

We will give 20 CAPs to the one getting best score on Secret of the Camel Oasis

Above a Sand Dune has plenty of cool minigames

Fans of Quest for the Glory -series will delight to find out that the blog will host a semiannual playthrough of the second game in the series. Also, you will see nothing else, but games with similar intriguing themes, like Prince of Persia (I know it's a bit stretch to call it adventure game, but we must obey the man who pays for the whole thing).

During the transition period, the Shaikh has hired a well-known commenter of the blog to deal with all the concerns and worries of regular readers.

The temporary assistant manager of the blog was rather enthusiastic to get the job

So, big changes are ahead of us! Oh yeah, you should probably all start to learn Arabic, because that will be the new language of the blog. But don't worry, I hear it's real easy!

Just start here!