Video Game Tuesday: A Note on Review Scores

This week for Video Game Tuesday I’m answering a question I was asked a few days back. It’s A Note on Review Scores!

Review Scores?: First off if you don’t read my game reviews on GiN, this post won’t really affect you. That being said I ask that you do take a look at them if you can. Now regarding my review scores I’ve been asked why I’ve given several games 0’s, either in certain categories or just across the board in general. I have good reasons for doing that, and they fall into generally three categories, as I’ve only done it 3 times, although the third time the developers actually fixed the issue before my review was posted so I went back and didn’t give 0s across the board like I intially did.

My First Reason: Playing the game, Coffin Dodgers, made me physically ill. I couldn’t play it for more than 15 minutes before I got so sick I had to run to the bathroom to throw up. I don’t get motion sickness in general, though I do get it on extreme cases like very twisty roads like the Road to Hana on Maui. So I gave that game some 0s for it’s score. If it didn’t have frame rate issues, with multiple frames missing each second I would have been fine and I’d probably have enjoyed the game quite a bit.

My Second Reason: Plagiarism and Laziness, Sword and Fairy 6 is a Chinese RPG that was utter crap. It had terrible localization, plagiarized the hell out of Starcraft out of sheer laziness and was in general unplayable, period. It had frame-rate issues, the opening cinematic was utter nonsense and the very first on screen tutorials had multiple instances of improper grammar on just one screen. Games are made by people who should take pride in their work, if I don’t see that in the game, I have very little reasons to score it favorably.

My Third Reason: Being unbeatable, literally. Star Horizon is a game I reviewed very recently and it’s 8th level was literally unbeatable. They didn’t include certain enemy targets in that mission which led to mission failure, nothing I did fixed that issue until they patched it a couple weeks later. If a game isn’t actually beatable, I don’t care how amazing the story and gameplay might be, I’m going to give the game 0’s and advise people to avoid it like the plague.

I hope this clarified my stance on Review Scores.

Temporary Hiatus

Hey all, It’s with great sadness that I must inform you all that I wont be able to write any posts for this blog for a while. My Mac Pro is giving up the ghost after nearly 9 years of use, it freezes constantly and I haven’t been able to fix it thus far. I’ll keep trying of course, but I’ll also be trying to build a completely new computer for myself. Hopefully it will be by the end of March, but it might be a bit into April before I can resume writing these daily blog posts. I’ll try to keep writing some book reviews with my old iPad, but it would be a very frustrating to try to write daily blog posts on that, and the quality wouldn’t meet my standards so I won’t attempt to do so.

If you have want to see some writing in the mean time, my game and book reviews on gameindustry.com will be going up still, I have a few in the queue and they should be going up in the next few weeks. The book reviews will only be for print and ebooks however as I can’t load any audiobooks without my computer functioning properly.

So until I get back to writing the daily blog posts I ask for your forgiveness and I hope to have you all come back in the near future to continue enjoy my columns. Thanks for your understanding!

1096 Days!

Hey all I’m interrupting your regularly scheduled Retro Game Friday to write this instead. It’s been three years, or 1096 days, since I started writing daily without missing a single day. I’ve gone through deaths in my family, moving, getting sick for over a month, and various other forms of distraction for the past three years. I’ve had a blast writing and will continue to do so, but I wanted to state some of the new things that I’ve been doing in the past year.

Tor: Last year, shortly after my 2nd year of non stop writing, I received a group email with some of my fellow writers at GiN from Tor the big sci-fi/fantasy American publisher and I’ve since started doing reviews for them in addition to the reviews I’ve been doing with Audible. I alternate between the two formats, with occasional breaks for a indie author’s book. If you haven’t been looking at them I highly suggest you give them a read. I’ve been submitting them nearly weekly for the past year, so there is plenty of content for you to enjoy.

Video Game Reviews: I’ve been continuing to receive various video games to review, most of them indie games. Some of them have been great, most haven’t been. I also get some AAA games, like Destiny’s “expansions” and various JRPG/Anime related games. I hope to continue doing these, and you’ll be able to read them at gameindustry.com as well. Just so long as they don’t make me vomit like Coffin Dodgers did. Ugh…

That’s it for this post, next week it’ll be back to Retro Game Friday!