I'm almost at the point to start rolling out some reviews in the next few days. I will also try and keep the blog up to date on current events in the gaming world. Before we get to that, a few words regarding reviews and the site in general.
There will be no distinct format when it comes to reviews. As we add contributors to the site, each person will have their own distinct style of writing and judging how a game is reviewed. Personally, I am going to take the approach of not giving a game a distinct score or letter grade or things like that. I do that for a few reasons: a.) There is no perfect game, no unicorn, no "10" or A++ out there. Therefore, I don't see a need to rate a game based on how it can be relative to that unattainable number. b.) giving a game a quantitative score can bite me in the ass later when games are compared to one another. Say I would have given a game 8.5 and another 8.1, but I liked the 8.1 game better and put it higher on a 'best of' list. Does that make me hypocritical? No, because I'm not going to give a game a rating. And finally, c.) I just don't want to.
I like how Kotaku does their reviews. They say what they liked, what they didn't like and leave the reader to determine on their own based on whether more pros than cons or vice versa were mentions on how the tone of the review went. I haven't quite decided yet if my reviews are going to parallel that style or just go straight forward and summarize the game, and give critiques along the way.
I also want to take a bit and talk about reviewer bias. I want this to be the one post where I explain where I come from in the world of gaming and not after every review or commentary made. It is up to the other now and future contributors whether or not to identify their biases for your amusement; I'm not going to ask them one way or another. The world of gaming appears to have many factions, many divisions. Sometimes, these divisions can be contentious, and like the political climate in this country, people are quick to be labeled and more so dismissed when they appear to favor one division over another. Having said that, I'm going to clarify where I come from, so that you will know where I'm going.
First off, I am in that small divide between the casual gamer and the hard core gamer. I have been playing video games for over 20 years, I've worked on the retail side in the past selling games, determining what the market is looking for, what sells, and what doesn't. This is not my life, it is a hobby (and an expensive one at that).
I own a lot of both current and past generations of gaming consoles. I grew up a Sega kid, owning the Master System, Genesis, and Game Gear handheld. I was always envious of the Nintendo kids, but I didn't own an NES of my own until I was out of high school. In college I was a hard core Playstation guy up until my mid twenties where a good buddy of mine convinced me that the original X-Box was a superior system. Since the release of the current generation of consoles, I am primarily an Xbox 360 gamer. I own a PS3, but the extent of my gaming collection, and gaming networking has been done on the 360. I purposefully do not own a Nintendo Wii because my kids are too small to play one and I am not a fan of 99% of the games out there. Therefore, you will not see a ton of Wii reviews here from me. I will most likely leave that to other contributors or outsource that all together. Now, I'm not saying this to incite a flame-war between Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft fanboys, but most of the multi-platform reviews I will do will be on the 360 version of the title.
My promise to you is this; regardless of the gaming platform I use, I will focus on reviewing the game, and not make any commentaries about why this console is better than that in the course of a given review. There are many positive things to be said about every next gen console out there, and there are a lot of negatives. But I will be honest with you, and sometimes the truth hurts.
TL;DR - We're going to be subjective. Not a surprise.
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