{"id":71,"date":"2007-05-25T19:02:24","date_gmt":"2007-05-25T18:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/?p=71"},"modified":"2007-05-27T12:41:16","modified_gmt":"2007-05-27T11:41:16","slug":"reviewing-games-on-gametunnel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/?p=71","title":{"rendered":"Reviewing Games on Gametunnel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You may or may not have noticed that I now review games on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gametunnel.com\/articles.php?id=613\">GameTunnel&#8217;s monthly roundup<\/a> nowadays. As usual I&#8217;ve been kicking up controversy with my reviewing style and outrageous review scores (2 out of 10! He can&#8217;t be serious!)<\/p>\n<p>Well, I think I ought to set the record straight on the review thing as it&#8217;s spawned numerous grumpy decisions around the internet.<\/p>\n<p>Gametunnel uses a marks-out-of-ten review system for the monthly round up, which I&#8217;m not a great fan of anyway. It&#8217;s got some advantages but mostly disadvantages in my humble opinion, mostly being that very rarely does anyone ever score anything much below 5, and also that scores just aren&#8217;t consistent from one reviewer to the next or even for one month to the next.<\/p>\n<p>I wanted to make the marks out of ten system work for me, and be consistently reliable so that I could look at a game and know that I&#8217;d always rate it the same. And let&#8217;s be clear here, it is <em>my <\/em>opinion, not anyone elses, so I can justifiably come up with any score I want for a game, just like everyone else does,.<\/p>\n<p>So here&#8217;s the scheme I settled upon:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>1 point if the game installs and runs painlessly<\/li>\n<li>1 point if it doesn&#8217;t crash or go wrong in some way at all<\/li>\n<li>1 point if it&#8217;s slickly presented<\/li>\n<li>1 point if it&#8217;s original<\/li>\n<li>1 point if I think the graphics are good<\/li>\n<li>1 point if I think the sounds and music are good<\/li>\n<li>1 point if I think the overall style is good<\/li>\n<li>1 point if I enjoyed playing it<\/li>\n<li>1 point if I  wanted to play it some more later on even though I didn&#8217;t have to<\/li>\n<li>1 point if I&#8217;d actually buy the game either for me or for someone else<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now, I&#8217;m <span style=\"font-style: italic\">very<\/span> lenient about my ratings for graphics and sound and style. Style is a combination of graphics, sound, presentation and gameplay which is where the whole thing comes together to create a consistent and immersive experience.<\/p>\n<p>The first three points a game can earn are very objective. It&#8217;s not much to ask that a game installs fine and doesn&#8217;t crash, and that it presents you with clear and concise options and menus to let you start playing.<\/p>\n<p>The graphics, sounds, and style are subjective but as I say, I am very lenient and have a critical eye for what works and what doesn&#8217;t. That&#8217;s why Lexaloffle&#8217;s <a title=\"Chocolate Castle page\" href=\"https:\/\/www.lexaloffle.com\/choc.php\">Chocolate Castle<\/a>, with its simplistic 16-bit style unantialised 640&#215;480 graphics gets a point but <a title=\"Magi page\" href=\"https:\/\/www.getmagi.com\">Magi<\/a> didn&#8217;t: Magi has nice icons but very weak particle effects and sprites which just don&#8217;t seem to work.<\/p>\n<p>Then there are the absolutely totally subjective points of whether I actually enjoyed playing the game or not, and whether I wanted to play more than I had to for the purposes of a review, and whether I felt like actually buying the game. And mostly this comes down to plain old <strong>whether I like the game, not if I think someone else might like it.<\/strong> That&#8217;s the whole point of it being <em>me<\/em> that&#8217;s reviewing the game instead of someone else.<\/p>\n<p>But the end result is a scale that works from 1 to 10 consistently. You know what you have to do to get 10\/10 from me. It won&#8217;t be very easy at all, of course, but at least it means that if a game gets 10\/10 from me I don&#8217;t think it could really do any better!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You may or may not have noticed that I now review games on GameTunnel&#8217;s monthly roundup nowadays. As usual I&#8217;ve been kicking up controversy with my reviewing style and outrageous review scores (2 out of 10! He can&#8217;t be serious!) Well, I think I ought to set the record straight on the review thing as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-indie-scene","category-ramblings-rants","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}