Forums > Contributor Zone > RotW // 17th December – 23rd December // The End is Near

Something something Christmas, mumble mumble tides of joy, blah blah blah goodwill to all.

Here are some reviews people wrote last week.

ALMOST CLUB

Actually, I’ll add another note; there was no stand out winner this week, nor was there an easy call for any position. Everything seemed to exist on a similar quality standard, which was good, so I more or less placed things based on which had aspects that annoyed me the least. Which may not work out well because everything annoys me.

Hope you all avoided food puns...

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon Mariner

Mariner’s review is solidly written, but talks less about Bloodstained as a game and more about how there’s these other games that Bloodstained is very similar to. In this he’s pretty unlucky because I’m probably the only person on this site not to invest a squillion hours into Castlevania or Mega Man. So, in talking so heavily about these other games in order to better talk about Bloodstained, a lot is lost on me. To his credit, he admits his heavy reliance on these comparisons to older titles and starts to talk about Bloodstained on its own merits, but it’s the penultimate paragraph by this point!

It’s unlucky, because if this was read by a Joe or a Rob who love that Castlevania nonsense, or a Jason who sleeps with a Mega Man plushie, it almost certainly would have placed. But you’ve aimed for a relatively niche audience for this review and I’m not in it.

Thief Simulator Zydrate

AKA That time you outed yourself as a kleptomaniac.

This would have placed higher because it’s a good review that leans in well to your ramble-heavy blog style, but, man, does it need a heavy proofread. There’s errors all over the show in this review; I’ve pulled out a handful from the first few paragraphs to demonstrate, but there’s certainly more:

This game scratches and itch in a way
I like how it only gives you a few hour block of scheduling - blocks? Or, if singular, take away the ‘a few’.
I do find the logical leap of being able to somehow ‘detect’ a few hours of someone’s day just by looking at them -- you do find it what? You just carry on without finishing that line of thought
though I wish the backback came at a boosted amount - I had to read this a million times before I thought you might have meant backpack.
And so on.

You should go back to this and proof the hell out of it. There’s a very good review waiting to be rescued from these typos; maybe one of your strongest. And you’ve managed to place all your screenshots in the right place. Give it a little more of a shine, and you’ll have finished the year strong.


THIRD Mega Man Anniversary Collection Overdrive


Some things will never change. Grass will always be green, rain will always be wet and Rob will never miss a chance to ramble off topic good naturedly, like an elderly relative who has forgotten what he was talking about but is loathe to let his audience escape. So, rather than talk about Mega man games, we get little asides like how he’s still not written as many reviews as I have, weird advice on the best way to tackle playing compilation collections and duck shaming.

Some of this works, and some of it is a bit distracting, but I’d probably beat around the bush rather than talk about a compilation piece, too. Still, there’s some weird choices made throughout the review. Multiple exclamation marks, calling a final stage a final exam for some reason. I think Rob usually juggles these little ‘talk about meeeeee’ moments quite well, but this review seems to be pretty top heavy with them. You’ve got a hard road ahead of you, trying to talk about eight base games and X bonus unlockables; you should probably devote more of your words into that.

Chantelise: A Tale of Two Sisters Joe

I think I (barely) preferred this review to Joe’s other effort because it felt a bit livelier, which is probably just down to the game choices. Joe gets on with the very difficult job of describing a meh game, trying to juggle how the things it does well is ultimately cancelled out by the things it does poorly. I think it’s biggest flaw is that it doesn’t often take the chance to show rather than tell. For example, you list a bunch of late-game monsters that provided more challenge than early game cannon-fodder and singled out a fish monster -- this would have been a great spot for some showing. Why was it such a fiendish opponent? How did you eventually counter it? I’m just now realising how poorly the show don’t tell metaphor works in a written format. Let’s skim over that…

The review itself does feel a bit listless, which is common in middling score reviews, because there’s not a lot to get excited about nor a lot to complaints to really sink your teeth into. It’s just bouncing back and forth between pros and cons while trying to remain fair. It may not sound like mad praise, but Joe’s able to do this solidly -- which we all now at this point is a lot harder than it sounds.

WIN Battle Princess Madelyn Masters

Marc’s shooter reviews aren’t his best work; they’re short and stilted and read like an author getting a bit bored of the subject material in front of him (which, considering it’s his 119th R-Type review, does make some sense). Madelyn presents a different topic that he seems more interested in discussing, even if the game fails to meet the lofty goals he sets it.

The review starts strong, tackling a lot of subject quickly. This is a Ghouls game; there’s not a lot of Ghoul tributes and that’s because Ghouls hates you considerably more than most games, and the majority of players no longer (or never had) the patience to deal with them. The “I’ve beat some of these” line may seem like a subtle brag, but it does well in establishing where he stands. I’m one of those guys who liked Ghouls enough to bluster through it. I’m probably this game’s target audience, and it still barely stumbles above meh.

He claims to be immune to sour grapes (something I can deny due to the aftershock of mentioning him in the lightest of derogatory tones in my last review that I still suffer 3am IMs over) but, frankly, he thesis is the most solidly presented this week. The levels are too long, the bosses are wars of attrition and the combination of these things makes dying far too costly and the constant replaying soon stops becoming fun. Marc buries this game with that argument. And then scores it above average. What a weird week…

For us. For them. For you.

I wish I had reliable friends to help give me stuff an editing run. I've asked acquaintances before and they always fall short of getting back to me.

Usually I catch a few things when giving it a second read a day later but clearly I couldn't find it all.

I fixed all the ones you mentioned. My statement of "few hour block" might make sense to people who actually played it, but reworded it to "section" to help out.

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Thanks for the topic, EmP, even though I was barely mentioned. Which makes sense, as I didn't contribute anything during your week. So I'll forgive you.

Zydrate, I don't know what program you use when typing up your reviews, but there are tools that can be surprisingly helpful and mostly eliminate the need for readers to go over your stuff and spot minor errors. If you're using Microsoft Word, it'll highlight things in red and green that your eyes might miss. It's very useful. If you don't have that software, you can use something like Write from the OpenOffice suite, which is free. Then you can install extensions that will provide grammatical and spelling assistance similar to what Word offers by default. I write essentially all of my reviews in OpenOffice, even though I have Word, and that usually works out reasonably well for me.

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." - John F. Kennedy on reality

"What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things." - Shigeru Miyamoto on secret doors to another world2

Thanks, Emp. Thanks for giving one of my reviews the win even while dissing my other two. It takes a special kind of RotWer to pull that off. I thought the Saturn review was decent, and I worked it about as far as I'm inclined to. But! On the matter of R-Type, I actually didn't 'finish' the review before posting it, which isn't like me. I had always planned to go back and work in another paragraph or two, but didn't get around to it. Holidays and all that.

I don't have to prove I'm refined - that's what makes me refined!

Thanks for the placing and comments. Ordinarily, I'd agree with the gist of them, but I will, until the grave, stand by my feeling that with it being my 500th, I had to give the people (ie: me) what they (ie: I) wanted and that is more me, Me, ME!!!!

But now that we have that over with, I can go back to normal, where I only spend 25 percent of each review talking about myself.

As a sidenote, do we still have those site listings for who has the most reviews up? I know Jason has persistently been #1 and I think I'd moved up to #2 for a while, but figured you'd passed me by now. So am I still #3 or has Joe (or Marc, with his frenzied return) passed me, also? Too much quick-review Steam games for you guys, too many 100-hour epics for me, I guess!

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

I'll give that a look Jason, but for me it's less spelling and more syntax. Accidental pluralization, extra words and such. I use Chrome which underlines spelling errors so that isn't usually my issue.

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Rob, Jason is still number one by a long shot. Then Emp, then you, then Joe. I'm a very distant 5th -- I might have 100 reviews fewer than Joe, who, despite my huge year (by my standards) has only widened the gap.

I don't have to prove I'm refined - that's what makes me refined!

I've just updated the Users page so that there are two leaderboards. The first still keeps track of total views, while the second one tracks how many reviews the top contributors currently have posted on the site. That should make it much easier to find that sort of info, for those who care. :-)

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." - John F. Kennedy on reality

"What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things." - Shigeru Miyamoto on secret doors to another world2

Oops, I forgot Pickhut, my bad. That knocks me down a peg. Review and view numbers pretty much correlate exactly, give or take.

I don't have to prove I'm refined - that's what makes me refined!

Thank you for the placement. I struggled a bit with that review because, as you indicated, it's difficult to get a good discussion going with such a mixed bag. I've also been horribly distracted by Gothic 3.

The only thing my milkshake brings to the yard is a subpoena.