Boomtown X

We didn't disappear off the net but we've hardly been prolific recently. Over the last few months I've been mulling over whether to retire the site or keep going. There was a date in my diary that held special interest in making that decision. This date was the expiration of the original boomtown dot net domain name.

My old bosses at AATech held the domain until last week. I didn't know if the company was planning to keep the domain so I set a diary entry to remind me to take a look when it expired. My plan was to buy the domain if possible and so this site would actually become that which we once were.

However AATech renewed the domain. Perhaps it was on automatic. Perhaps the company plans to continue with a videogames site. I wish to hell it would at least continue to pay me the money it owes me. Anyway, that event passed by and I decided that no, this would not be the end of Boomtown.

So we will carry on. And so expect to see more frequent updates in the near future. I'm going to have my hands full with other work from next month but I do intend for BTX to have regular updates. Obviously that means we can't cover up to date news, but we will continue as a reviews and editorial site.

Thanks to EA kindly sending over SSX we'll have a review of that this week. And I've got reviews of Wargame: European Escalation and Microsoft Flight on the go. So BTX is back. Sure it's not a full time return, but we're not going away just yet. We fight on.

Dear friends I want to thank you all so much for the support you've shown our new little site over the couple of months we've been running. The figures for October are in and we've passed an important milestone. During the month of October we played host to over 10,000 unique users - 10,361 to be precise. The growth in the site over the two months has been really encouraging and we're delighted so many of you enjoy what we have to say.

This is the kind of thing that warms one heart and gives us the encouragement to keep on going. To be honest I was devastated by the closure of the original Boomtown site and felt that we had a lot of unfinished business to attend to - hence the creation of BoomtownX. The traffic figures show we were right to soldier on.

We've lots of work still to do - certainly in terms of turning around reviews quicker. Rockstar was kind enough to send me a review code for Undead Nightmare last week but I haven't finished that up yet. Thanks to the generosity of the industry we've plenty of reviews to bring you but with such a small team it's been hard keeping on top of things. I'm delighted to tell you though that many of the old Boomtown writers have joined us over the last weekend and we'll be bringing you many more timely reviews in future.

Of course we're a new site (albeit with a six year heritage and now a strong team of experienced writers) and there's plenty we can do better. We'd certainly welcome any of your suggestions or comments.

But for now I just wanted to say a big thankyou to those of you who read our new site, those of you who take the time to engage in the comments and those of you who have entered competitions. I'l also like to say a big thankyou to Electronic Arts, Rockstar Games, THQ, Paradox Interactive, BradyGames and Sony Computer Entertainment Europe for your support of our new venture. Thanks one and all.

This is just the start, onwards and upwards.