About the site

Brief history

Launched on April 22nd 2004, Bad Cyborg was originally created to describe what I called the rockslide megabattle, which I'd been enjoying for many months. I couldn't find anything about it on tips pages, yet to me it seemed like the single most important 'extra' for any trigger-happy Halo fan to know about, so I did a lot of writing and launched the site to help spread the word. A lot more Halo fun followed and in due course I covered later games as well, though the original remained my favourite by far.

The site's main focus was always in squeezing additional fun out of campaign play, particularly in regard to obtaining novel combat situations, be they serious or mischievous. Most of that stemmed from my own explorations but there are also quite a few articles based on things I've read about or that people have suggested, which I try to make clear as appropriate.

For a long time my content was text only, but eventually I got kitted out with image capture tech, and in September 2009 I released my first movies, along with a visual restyling of the site that included pictures. Thereafter, movie production was a big part of my work, and I also worked on adding pictures to old articles, though I never did get through all of them.

Quite often, when I returned to an article to do movies on that topic, I ended up making new developments and expanding the article considerable. In that way, movie making often led to new fun and more depth.

The scope for making movies was always dauntingly huge, but I got through plenty and also continued to release articles on new discoveries. Eventually though, in June 2020 I announced the cessation of my Halo work to spend time on other things, something I'd had in mind for quite a while. I also mentioned that I was relinquishing my site, but then HBO kindly offered to house it so it could remain available to the masses. So that's where it is now (minus a spot of non-Halo content it used to include).

A return to content production!

In my announcement, I mentioned that maybe I'd be able to return some day to cover some more topics. Well, that day eventually came on July 10th 2023, after I'd felt the need to show some more glasshouse battling. At that time I was expecting my new output to generally be at a slower pace, and probably somewhat sporadic, but as I write this paragraph in Septemeber 2023, things are in overdrive as I have two fascinating new megabattles to explore and document, namely the tower zone megabattle and related tunnel megabattle. So for now at least, it's a case of "Let the good times roll!"

H3 and Reach

I'd hoped to one day get around to making some movies for Reach and H3, but alas I never did. I also had quite a lot of old notes on things to pursue in those games, but I never got back to those after I mercilessly prioritized my H1 work. If you're a Reach fan though, let me urge you to go try my 'Knock-off' game concept in Firefight, particularly in regard to jet-packing. I'm not sure how many folk know about that stuff, but it was absolutely the most fun I had with that game.

Posting dates

Most of my articles have a posting date, but many got updated over the years - sometimes quite radically. So the date just refers to the original version of the article, not necessarily the version you now see. In some cases I also say "updated later" or suchlike, to indicate that some fairly significant changes have been made since the original posting. A few early articles are undated because I'm not sure when I posted them; I wasn't dating things when I started the site.

Viewing the site

To get the full functionality of the site, such as getting drop-down menus and seeing pictures in a pop-up window when you click a thumbnail image, you need to have Javascript enabled. That's a setting you can make in your browser's preferences. The site should look ok in any modern browser but the design was done particularly with Firefox in mind, with default font size set to 12. You should be able to set your default or 'standard' font size in your browser's preferences, and the site will reflect that preferred size like it should. For reference here's a snapshot of how part of one of my pages looks in Firefox on my iMac, with a drop-down menu activated. If you're using Internet Explorer you'll want version 8 or higher, as the site no longer makes any effort to support earlier versions.

Other Rocksliders

Just to let you know, there's another gamer out there with the same name except with a lowercase r giving 'rockslider' (which is originally how I wrote my name, but I switched to a capital in 2006). Weird huh? To help distinguish, bear in mind that I'm not on bungie.net or halowaypoint.com, and have never done multiplayer. On Xbox Live I signed up as 'Rockslidey', as my name was already taken.

Contacting me

Sorry, I currently have no public email address. But I may add one later, just in case anyone wants to communicate. Check here again later if you're keen.