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Flying Omelette wrote:

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5. There was some YouTube reviewer who claimed (and demonstrated) that you never have to dodge anything in Ikaruga.

Well, just because it's possible doesn't mean it's easy.

Some of the others are (or probably are based on what I've been told) good choices. I think this is more a problem with the lack of genuinely good challenging games than with the article itself.

I don't know. Some things are a matter of opinion, but if Portal is really one of the easiest games of last year then it shouldn't be on there. I don't think there are so few challenging games that it couldn't have been replaced.

There are at least (being generous) 6 games that shouldn't be on that list (so maybe it's not a completely terrible ratio).

Is there a lack of challenging games? I can name at least some to replace those six: Punch-Out, Vagrant Story, Goldeneye, Castlevania 3, Super Mario Bros. 2j, Super Mario Kart.

Nah. Out of 25 games, only 11 were from the N64 era or older. It's just that people are forgetting what old games were like.

I probably needed to rephrase what I said. I really meant that there's a problem with a lack of challenging modern games. I can (sort of) understand the sentiment of not wanting to have nothing but "older" games on the list.

Well, yeah. And if you look at the modern games on the list, they are just about all the ones with asterisks. God of War ... on God mode. Guitar Hero ... on the hardest mode. A space shooter ... if you put restrictions on yourself. Etc.

But it's not just that they don't want to have nothing but older games on the list. Older games actually are underrepresented. Not even half the games on the list are from 10+ years ago.

FO just wondered to me, Why would someone start a their own game site, something personal, something that is supposed to reflect who they are ... and then immediately ask for other people to fill it with their opinions? (Gamefaqs envy?)

I think one reason he might have accepted that review was because he thinks Super Mario Bros. 3 is overrated.

Oh, that has one of FO's favorite lines:

Had [Star Fox] been a 2D sidescrolling or overhead shooter, I doubt it would have received half the praise it did.

To which FO replied [well, not to that exact quote]

Well, great shittin' Sherlock, it's not a 2D shooter and it wasn't designed to be one. That's changing the entire game. You may as well ask me if I would have liked The Legend of Zelda as much if it was a football game.

Flying Omelette wrote:

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Another guideline could be, "Write the reviews as though you have actually played the games." There is nothing in that SMA review that couldn't have been said just based on hearsay. You never even have to have played a single Mario game to know that SMB2 was different from the others in the original series because that is what EVERYONE talks about when they mention that game, and yet that's the entire point of his SMB2 section. Notice how Crawl's review of SMB2 mentions very, very specific things from the game.

This is a really important thing. I don't know if I've emphasized it in the past, but I should have.

One review I specifically tried to work personal details into was Mars Matrix. Looking back, the structure of that review is kind of flawed, in that I mostly ran down the game's features: It has a one button control scheme, a mosquito attack that can make you invincible, a gold cube experience system, a shop, a remixed Elite mode. Every professional review, which were probably written after maybe playing the game for about an hour, mentioned all of that stuff.

But I tried to litter details that indicated that I had in fact played the game, like

From seeing the ending video, to earning for the first time the maximum experience of 20 million, to buying the background graphics, each achievement points the way to the less-concrete goal of complete Mars Matrix mastery.

That detail is not obvious. Maybe nowadays, you could look that up in a FAQ somewhere, so you might not strictly need to play the game to know that experience maxes out, and that it maxes out at 20 million. But I personally didn't know that until I myself earned that in the stage 4 score attack, when I had continuous combos through both halves of the stage, after playing the game for a couple of weeks.

The other thing I really wanted to do with that review was describe the bullet patterns. You know, when Mars Matrix came out, the reviews for it were so generic. Like IGN's review starts with the guy talking about how he gets email from Dreamcast players about Phantasy Star Online and Evil Dead, not even bothering to have anything to do with Mars Matrix specifically. Then the second paragraph is about the game's story, which is how most game reviews go, even when it's completely inappropriate for the particular game, as in this case, where the game has almost no story. Gamespot's review runs down the game's features and concludes with, "You know, there aren't a lot of shooters, but here's one." That's about as generic as you can be.

Come on, people! Mars Matrix isn't just ho-hum, here's another shooter. It's fucking intense! Over time, Mars Matrix has sort of become a cult classic, but you wouldn't get any sense of why from those pro reviews. The game was loaded with bullets like I had never seen before, and pretty much no one else described that in a way that was specific to Mars Matrix.

Looking back at that review, it picks up after the line, "Items in the shop are earned at a perfect pace." Before that, the review is just about the game's features, like any generic review, but after that I get more personal, subjective, specific, and interesting. That review made me break out of those generic review structures and try to structure reviews so they fit the game (even if I haven't reviewed so many games since then).

One of my favorite reviews I've written was my one for Rescue Rangers, because it almost completely eschews generic game review conventions -- I don't mention the story at all, or the graphics. I don't talk about things just because they're things that reviews usually talk about; I only talk about things that are actually important (that is, that influenced my opinion on the game, or that relate to the thesis).

And yet I think that review represents the game and my opinion on it a lot better than one that would just run down the game's features.

Though then you could ask why formal education teaches people to write so lifelessly. It's counterproductive. There is really no situation where it's advantagous. Even something like scientific writing can benefit from having a little life in it, if you ask me.

It might not even be that people CAN'T write a little more lively, but they think that their audience EXPECTS them to write that way. After all, that's how they've always been told to write. So, their education has really hamstrung them.

Exactly, to FO. If you really want to emphasize that the game is a footnote, using that word several times in a sentence does that. But that other guy is not trying to emphasize that Super Mario Bros. is a game.

The line isn't really nonsense. I know what he's trying to say. What he's basically saying is

I realize that many people consider Super Mario Bros. to be a landmark game. It's historical importance cannot be overstated. I know it's extremely influential, possibly the most beneficially influential game ever. It simultaneously created and perfected a genre. Beyond that, its ambition set a standard for all console games, moving us out of the era of arcades. Its mixture of action (Flying Cheep-Cheeps! Hammer Bros.! Spinning flames!) and exploration (warp zones! bonus rooms! hidden items!) filled a spectrum that games like Contra or Metroid could only stake claims in.

But let's forget all that and say that the standard for judging games is how well they entertain any random jackass with arbitrary tastes, ie., me. So, I'm not very entertained by this game, so, again, forget all that other stuff, this "important" game is really just a mediocre game that deserves no special consideration.

The reason I know that's what he's saying is that people say stuff like that all the time. The reason people don't come out and be so blatant about what they really mean is pretty obvious from that. If they admitted that, it'd argue so strongly against the point they're trying to make they'd never be able to argue back against it. If you bring that stuff up, you can't so blithely sweep it back under the rug. So, better to be vague and say, "Games are games".