thinking about writing game reviews?

In addition to Mindfield's comments, you may want to pick up the AP Stylebook from a bookstore. This is a relatively inexpensive guide that I use regularly for writing projects and serves as a rule book covering everything from grammar to syntax. You can also access it online for a fee at http://www.apstylebook.com/

 

The AP Stylebook is definitely something someone should at least leaf through, and the online edition is great. They can be a little over-prescriptivist at times, but frankly it's the best resource there is on proper use of the English language. There should be a high school course just on that alone.

 

Try using this, it may or may not help...

Try to describe the whole game in a very long detailed write. When you write your reviews, think of it as a school writing assignment that makes up 100% of your full grade for the year. With that thought in mind, you will write a very detailed and great review. Always remember to keep the review to the point and not commemorate other apps, this will leave your readers bored and not want to read any further (Personal experience). Try to describe different parts of the games in separate paragraphs, and do not trail off to another subject. All in all, give your truly honest opinion. Honesty and telling the truth always come through for you in the end. (At least in most cases)

Try to provide a side bar or some type of additional information such as the app info (Name, description, developer, price, etc.). Remember to give the correct information, if you don't, the reader may get mad since he is not finding the app he was looking for. I highly recommend using iTunes to find your information and provide an iTunes link to the store. Include your rating and tell why, this is where you summarize your whole review into a few short lines. Sweet, simple, and to the point. Usually do ratings on a scale of 1-10 or 1-5. 1-13 or any other number like that just doesn't make sense at all. At the very end, tell what is good and bad about the game, why? Let's say someone is in a rush, he/she may not have time to read the review, thus only wanting to know the goods and bads of the game.

One of the most important parts is to provide some screen shots. Screen shots really help describe what the game is about and what kind of game play can be seen throughout the game. If you have time and are a genius at cooking up simple phrases, provide a caption under the screen shot describing the picture, or, say something funny about it (Not in the bad way, but in a good way).

If you have a camera that isn't of bad quality, try to provide a game play video. If you are good at speaking like Mr. Pence AKA: Mr TapCritic, then provide a video review. Make sure to either provide a short simple video of the just the gameplay. Or a long video of the gameplay and all the features included in the game. Make sure that your camera is a high quality camera and is not blurry, no one likes crappy videos.

Hope this helps...

 

It sounds like you are going to be one hell of an app reviewer! Feel free to check out our site if you need any ideas, good luck with the reviews, you should make your own site while also on iFanzines!

 

I think quotes are better for emphasizing especially when you are using a term you mean in a different way, such as slang or a phrase. Using bold would be to outline a key word or title. Italics is more useful for emphasizing a different tone to what you're saying. That's the way I see it at least, then again you're the Englishman and I'm an American, and Americans have been using slang or loose English often for a long time.

 

I guess the problem is too many people associate quotation marks with other things. Some people use -these- for emphasis, which I always thought worked quite well... dunno what the hardcore grammar police would say about it though. I might even have seen it in books, I'm not too sure... perhaps Mindfield can enlighten us on whether or not there's an official word on using hypens for emphasis.

 

Why don't you just join an already founded reviewing site? I don't mean this is an advertising/recruiting kind of way, but I'm sure many review sites need a reviewer and you seem pretty good from what i've seen.

 

Dashes, slashes, asterisks, and underscores (-this-, /this/, *this* and _this_) or even uppercase were commonly used in the BBS and early Usenet days of straight up 7 and 8-bit ASCII when users didn't have the ability to use bold, italics, or underlines. Certain platforms had their own unique ways to add emphasis; Atari 8-Bits could use the ATASCII inverse function to invert the text; VT-100 and VT-52 users could also swap foreground and background font colours; ANSI (IBM PC with colour cards/monitors) users could change text and background colours; and so on. They weren't common except in platform-dominated cliques because other platforms couldn't usually view another platform's translation or special character sets. So mostly ASCII characters were used for emphasis and were perfectly acceptable.

These days though we can bold, underline and italicize 'til we're blue in the face so that's what we use. Informally you can still use ASCII emphasis marks if you really want to, but formally it's generally frowned upon.

I don't know if that's the official word as I don't think the AP stylebook covers the glory of the BBS era, but since we're all capable of writing with formal standards now, I'd take it as implied.

That's using quote euphemistically, not emphatically, which is one of its proper uses, so that's fine. It's when you're using it for actual emphasis, as I see on so many handwritten (and even professional) ads, eg.:

We have "new" turnip twaddlers in stock! "Lowest price!"

Given current usage, one assumes "new" is a euphemism, which makes one assume that said turnip twaddlers are not, in fact, new, and either they do not have the lowest price, or they're quoting someone who happened to exclaim "Lowest price!" for some reason.

So, do "not" use "quotes" for "emphasis."

Commonly, italics are used for several cases:

- Emphasis
- Depiction of a word or phrase in a different language, exempli gratia, Latin
- Titles of things (movies, songs, etc.)

Italics are often used in place of quotes for movies, songs, book titles, and things of that nature, but there's no particular reason to choose one or the other. It's a style choice. The use of italics to distinguish foreign words and phrases is a case where italics is really the only way to do it, as none of the other methods would really work here due either to being ambiguous or out of place. Emphasis is obvious.

 

You asked for it.
Just reading the beginning, I found a few typos/errors. (only first paragraph or so)

Its - means that the thing belongs to "it," it's means "it is."
Your - Your is also possessive, should be you're, which means "you are."

 

I've only skimmed that article, but I did notice that two of the paragraphs more or less begin with the same statement. The first one starts "I really liked Doodle Army a lot", and the last one starts "I really liked this game a lot". Nothing technically wrong with that, but if you can mix it up a little, variation goes a long way in keeping your article interesting from start to finish. Even changing it to something as simple as "Doodle Army really impressed me" would make a difference.

 

What doesn't make sense is, why say it's a no-brainer at 99c but literally flunk it at the rating? a 7/10 would make sense since the gameplay does get tiring after a while, but it's by no means bad.

 

I think you should make the rating with respect to the price. So you don't get the wierd ratings like the one Kamazar pointed out.