thinking about writing game reviews?

Your giant posts always confuse me...haha like your threads of game ideas..ahaha

 

Don't be biased towards certain developers.

 

Don't accept bribes from developers.

 

Please use that template only as an organizational tool to get your thoughts together. You want your writing to have some flow and spontaneity to it.

 

It sounds like you got some good ideas for reviewing cubytes. I've been a member here for a while and I post impressions/review all the time. I consider myself more of an "impressionist" than a reviewer, someone who writes to get the message out about games. So I just wing it when I write most of the time. Not much preparation, proof reading. I find it better that way than if you were to be some phony looking for fancy uncommon adjectives in the dictionary to describe game details in an effort to impress. The most important thing is to just get the word out, good or bad. Also if some people have an ego about their reviews which is usually a whole separate complex and usually it shows in their reviews.

So my advice is to be genuine, keep it real when you write your impressions/reviews. Fancy words may fool a few dummies into thinking someone is a great reviewer, but being real with good details/info is seen as far more important than a couple of big words.

 

From someone who's done quite a lot of reviewing with his own site (now idle) the first thing you should make sure you have plenty of is time. Writing coherent, thorough reviews takes a lot of time. On average I'd spend a good hour or two on writing an average review. That's just the time it takes to do the writing, insert the screenshots (and video where applicable) and proof. The actual time it takes to check out the game or app and take screenshots could be anywhere from half an hour to a couple of hours depending on the complexty and depth of the app/game. If I want to get video involved you can add another couple of hours right there for the time it takes to shoot the video, edit it, and render it out. I once spent the better part of an entire day on a review for Snapture (Jailbreak version, done before the App Store went live.) That included about 6 hours taking the video, narrating it, writing some background music, titling, etc.

If you don't have that kind of time, then get help. Good help, preferably, though unless you're willing to pay you're likely not going to get much of that on a volunteer basis. I tried numerous times and it never worked out.

Also, I rarely ever spent time planning out a review. Flowcharts, to-do lists, and anything but a general framework were for the birds as far as I was concerned. I never committed to any sort of strict template because I wanted to remain flexible for those cases where a particular review might call for something a little different. Like Freedog, I tended largely to just wing it. Frankly, I didn't have the time for anything else most of the time. So I wrote like I post on message boards (though with a little more proofing and revision for better structure). I preferred the more dynamic and spontaneous voice it gave the reviews -- very informal, casual, like telling friends about this cool (or crap -- I'd hit both ends) app you've been playing with. I thought it made the whole "voice" of the site more friendly and approachable instead of monolithic like most sites.

Of course, my site never got tremendously popular, so it's entirely possible I may not know a damn thing about starting a successful blog. I stopped doing it because I wanted to focus on development though, not because the site never really caught on to the degree I'd have liked; I loved writing reviews. It's just far too immense a time investment to be compatible with other significant projects I have going on.

 

Well said Midian (don't feel like quoting that huge thing).

Usually, I like to review games that I care about, whether they be good or bad enough for me to want to describe to people. There are some circumstances where I'm pretty indifferent about the game, but then I give it a review that reflects that.

Also, make sure to back up what you say with stuff from the game. I know I sound like a teacher telling you to back up your opinions with excerpts from the text, but it really does help the validity of your results. If you write "The controls are terrible", make sure that you tell why. Like I just did in my HP:Spells review, I stated that they're inaccurate sometimes, and it can be pretty difficult to cast the spell you want. It's harder to take a review seriously if you never back up your opinions with examples.

And it's not something that most people can plan out. I play a good amount of the game, and then I just sit down at my laptop and type it up in an hour or so. Think of it as telling someone why they should/shouldn't buy the game. Whatever you feel is an important factor in the purchase should be in your review, whether it be good or bad.

Good luck with the reviewing. Best bet is to start reviewing in the User Reviews section, and possibly get noticed by some small-time websites/blogs, and possibly work your way up to bigger sites.

 

That won't be a problem at TA.

 

It was Mindfield

Noted. I'm prepared to be totally hypocritical and tear apart your work despite my own having numerous flaws scattered about.

 

*flashes Grammar Police badge*

Right. Let's address the good first: You can spell. Mostly. Your sentence structure is decent for the most part.

Okay. The bad. You might want to bite down on some leather, this is going to hurt. I don't know how much of it applies to you so I'm just to to write about common mistakes that turn up all over the place and bug the hell out of me.

1) Learn the difference between "its" and "it's." "its" is a third person possessive pronoun. This is the only place you will ever use "its" -- third person possessive: Referring to something that belongs to some other thing you have already referenced in order to make "it" clear in context. "This is my dog. That is its chew toy. I am its owner."

"It's" is used as a contraction of "it is." If you're abbreviating "it is" for the sake of expediency or casual speech, use the apostrophe. It's your friend.

2) Learn the difference between "you're" and "your." You didn't use it in your post here so I don't know if you regularly mistake this or not, but just for the sake of completeness: "You're" is an abbreviation of "you are." "Your" is second person possessive. "Your fly is down. You're going to get arrested for public indecency if you don't do it up."

3) Use possessives and plurals properly. Again this goes with the previous two. Using an apostrophe with pronouns (You, he, she, that, it, etc.) makes it a contraction (You're (you are), he's (he is), she's (she is), that's (that is), it's (it is)). There is never a time in these cases where you should not use the apostrophe, because, your and its mean something different, and hes, shes and thats are not words.

If you use an apostrophe after a noun (a person, place or thing) or proper noun (the name of someone or something) you're using the possessive form. If there's no apostrophe after the noun, you're making it plural. "That is John's car. He likes to drive it around New York's Times Square. He likes apples, but he hates the apple's core."

There is an exception here: If the noun or proper noun ends in S and it is plural. Then the apostrophe goes after the S and nothing else comes after it. "That's the Jonas family. The Jonas' drive a BMW." You can't use the apostrophe any other way here or else the subject's relationship to the noun becomes unclear.

Also, abbreviations (BMW, IBM, etc.) and numbers-as-nouns (a time period like the 1980s) should be treated the same as proper nouns.

4) Capitalize! Consistently. The first letter of every sentence and after a colon, and every proper noun, including the first letter of every word in the proper noun if there's more than one, such as the title of a band or movie -- except conjunctions and indefinite articles (and, of, a, to, or, the) unless they are the first word (because the first word of any sentence is always capitalized no matter what unless the name of that thing deliberately starts with a lower-case letter, like id Software or iPod Touch). We don't capitalize those even in proper nouns or noun phrases because they once ganged up and killed Noah Webster's cat. So we'd write "Raiders of the Lost Ark" or "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" or "System of a Down."

5) Never use quotes for emphasis. Ever. Italicize, underline, and/or bold, sometimes in combination if you really, really, really, really mean it. But never use quotes for this purpose. It is an offense punishable by a $200 fine and/or death.

6) Oh, while we're talking about quotes, sentence punctuation goes inside the closing quotes. If I were to say, "This is how you embed the punctuation of the sentence this quote appears in," I would be making a brain-melting meta-reference to the fact that the comma that separates the clause containing the quote from the clause that follows appears inside the closing quote, not outside. The only time you need to use it on the outside is if you're directly quoting someone or if the quote ends in its own punctuation like a question or exclamation mark.

7) It's "must have," not "must of." That's why the contraction is "must've" and not "must'f." Same goes for should have, would have, could have, and other such terms.

8) "i.e." and "e.g." are not interchangeable. "e.g." (exempli gratia) means "for example," and is used to provide examples for something you've just mentioned. "i.e." (id est) means "that is (to say)" and is used to clarify or rephrase a point you're making, i.e. when what you've just said would not be perfectly clear without further explanation. You can leave out the middle period if you want ("eg." and "ie.") as both are acceptable uses.

9) There is never, ever a space before punctuation marks. Right: "This is an exclamation point!" Wrong: "This is an exclamation point !"

10) One exclamation point is always enough. Same goes for question marks. If you need to emphasize, use bolding, underlining or italics. Preferably italics.

11) Ciphers (three dots separating clauses and indicating a pause in speech or missing words from a quote, also called ellipses) are always three dots. Convention places spaces before and after the cipher ... like this, but that's a holdover from the typewriter days, so the spaces aren't really necessary. I see lots of people using four, or two, or two with a space after. Use both spaces or none, and always three dots.

Okay, that's off the top of my head but should cover the most egregious and common errors.

 

Quotes were the correct method for emphasis for centuries, it's just never seen anymore. I blame the invention of the keyboard and peoples tendency to think THIS IS MORE LIKELY TO GRAB YOUR ATTENTION. Either way, lots of English teachers will still tell people to use quotation marks because people rarely, if ever use bold or italics when writing with a pen.

BTW that's not an argument, I agree that italics, bold and underlining are now considered correct usage, quotes are too confusing.

 

True, but the invention of the typewriter and the shift in usage has made the usage of quotes as emphasis too ambiguous to use. These days it's either used for direct quotes of speech, to indicate a euphemism, or usage of a proper noun if it would otherwise be ambiguous in a sentence, such as when referencing two consecutive but separate proper nouns (eg. an artist and their song or album, such as John Cougar's "Hurts So Good".) Italics can be used for the latter two as an alternate method though, but now we're getting into the fiddly technical bits of language where most people's brains tend to shut off.

Of course, for an entertaining example of where not to use quotes, I could just point people to the Blog of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. (There's one for apostrophes, too.)

 

Gotta love those unecessary apostrophe's

 

Oh wow... I feel stupid right now...