Forums > Contributor Zone > RotW // 6th-12th March //

Just the ten again this week - just in case people thought the pace was dropping down. And that’s without serial big hitters like Fiddlesticks, Joe and Jason turning up to bother me with their rows upon rows of organized words about a video game they’ve recently played.

NOTES:

OD’s review kind of felt like he was going through the motions, which is why he was narrowly pipped this week. He’s been doing this Kemoc thing for a while now, and I suspect starting to struggle with the games such as this one where they’re just ordinary and do little to stand out. It’s still a very fine effort. I’m pretty sure Jerec’s first review is a repost because I remember it or something similar. But his second review is considerably stronger anyway, even if he has to badmouth Ash and therefore break my heart. I also liked Zydrate’s review, but the tone did feel overly-relaxed in places.



THIRD Vaccine [PC] Joe

It’s kind of shame this game doesn’t really work, but the angle you take is highly effective. Talking about how it makes a play at old-school horror nostalgia and then cripples this with a game-breaking bug and a war of attrition against your interest is a decent double punch. I mean, think about an early Resident Evil or Silent Hill wherein you can effectively write off the threat of the monsters around you and also there’s no plot or sense of discovery to drive you on. I don’t think they’d have garnered quite the same following.

It’s a shame. I thought the combo of randomly generated maps and retro survival horror might have been different enough to have worked better than this

SECOND River City Ransom: Underground [PC] by PickHut

Pick’s review is Authoritative. See that out of place capital letter? That’s not just there to wind Venter up, but as a way to capitalise (ho ho) just how authoritative it is. He’s had some help in a recent run through the River City Ransom backlog in recent weeks, and it shows. Here, he’s able to talk about what the indie reboot gone corporate continues and often improves upon from the original foundation. And then, ultimately, talks about how and why it goes wrong.

The couple of examples offered are specific but devastating, really driving home the opinion that for all the obvious love poured into the game, some very clumsy choices rear up and overwrite the good intentions. Going into them in such detail was a good idea, because you do genuinely make the game sound very good in your opening paragraphs, so really need to take a crowbar to it if you’re going to come away with a below average rating.

And then you get to the last paragraph, decide you should say something mean about the plot, and the review just kind of ends randomly. Like this

WIN! Steamworld Dig [PC] by Nightfire

I really like this one. There’s a kind of relaxing of prose which is very evident which makes the review kind of endearing. There’s a few things I didn’t like that I’ll bitch about early; anything written starting with ‘ah’ should be punishable by hangnail, for one, and mentioning the price point at the end will date your review when that price is inevitably dropped (still bitter about that one biting me on the arse with Julai.) I’m not sure why we should care about your AFK time (if you think you wasted a couple of hours idle, just knock a couple of hours off the total playtime figure.) Also, we’re a site filled with retro elitists, so we know what Dig Dug is, and thus assume the whole world must. You can be sure you lost points for ‘hella’….

Yeah, I’m stretching. I’ve played games within this sub-genre and, as such, I know it can be hard to talk about (or really understand) why just digging around can turn into such a time sponge. I think you do a good and concise job in doing just that. I also think we’ve all had the moment where we’ve looked at the clock and found we’ve lost a handful of hours somewhere in game-time and have been sleepy little grump-heads the next day because of it. Using that as a way to talk about the game’s one-more-go factor feels like a good inclusion. What a exceptional purchase this game was; a sure sign of fine taste.

Next week's already shaping up to be a good 'un. Jason's on about a Nintendo game again, and I'm just happy to see a new Neir game. What else will surface? Let us see.

For us. For them. For you.

Thank you for the win. Steamworld Dig was actually gifted to me by a good friend of mine who loves my reviews even though he is mercilessly critical of them. He's kind of a weirdo.

Anyway, as you hinted at, I went for a more casual approach this time. It seemed to pay off despite the rough edges, but your criticisms are relevant. The only one I will rebut is the mention of AFK time; I included it because I do not, in fact, know how many hours I put into the game. I may have only put in the paltry four hours that Robotic_Attack did with his playthrough, but I have no idea. I imagine that I probably logged closer to six or eight, but that would be a guess. The point is that it is a short game.

Gratz to the other placers, and kudos to Overdrive for staying the course and banging out another solid Kemco review, even if it didn't make placement. It was a solid read and had a great tagline, at any rate.

placid like acid

Not a repost. Wrote both reviews as one blog post for my daily 1000 words and then split them.

I don't badmouth Ash... just his inclusion in this game

I can avoid death by not having a life.

You were right. To the point where I felt the best aspect of that review was that it was fairly short, so I at least felt I was being concise.

At least the next Kemco review I'll have is for a game I'm kinda digging, so there's that. Well that along with how, if I ever get the free time, I have two reviews for non-Kemco games I really need to get to writing before I beat a dozen more games and have to write for them, too.

I'm not afraid to die because I am invincible
Viva la muerte, that's my goddamn principle

So few things bring me joy, Jerec; X-Com, Evil Dead, children and/or old people falling over. Why you got to try and bring one of those things down?

Kidding aside, I'm not knocking you for making that observation. If it's not Bruce Campbell, it's not really Ash. I also headed right to Steam to bookmark Poker 2 and the trailers showcase that you were exactly right. I could have sworn you reviewed the first poker game back on your last run, but I have been known to be wrong. Try not to leak that. The world isn't ready to hear it.

Take heart, OD. The fact you're sticking with this run is consistently impressive.

For us. For them. For you.

Oh hey. Slight mention. Neato.

I've spoken to Nightfire at length and after giving me an editing run of my For Honor review, he more or less didn't like the more robotic tone of it. I was purposefully going for a more journalistic style and it didn't resonate with anyone that I know of. Meanwhile my other reviews have more "soul" and tend to flow better, so I find the "overly relaxed" comment a bit odd, but hey. Can't please everyone.

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Yeah... the ending to my review sucks. It was my cheap way of shoehorning the ridiculous plot into the review somewhere, since I barely bring it up anywhere else.

But thanks for the comments! I really wonder how the review would have turned out if I hadn't played and reviewed the other two River City games so close to one another. It was also admittedly a "depressing" review to write, because it was almost like I was reliving the experience by describing the ups, followed by so many lows.

Congrats to Joe for his placement, the other participants this week, and Nightfire for nabbing RotW! I really need to get around to playing these SteamWorld games. They genuinely look and sound interesting.

I head spaceshit noises.