Forums > Contributor Zone > RotW // 14th January – 20th January // Open World Mech Dragons

No Almost Club this week. No Venter, who is recovering from all fifty of his reviews, no Marc despite the daily insistences that he’s totally going to post a review later on, like, for real, dude. So places for all that wrote, and for all, a deserved place.


THIRD Front Mission [DS] Hastypixels

One of the few things that I enjoy about RotW work is instances like Hasty. I remember when we started doing this rota again, he would show up more weeks than not with decent reviews that were obviously made from the same template. He’s gotten so much better since then, and while I’m not going to say it’s the sole reason, I like to think that this little waste of time we call RotW has helped. We will, at times, say things that might sting a writer’s ego, but only in the vein of constructive criticism. I’ve genuinely enjoyed seeing Hasty take these comments onboard and how his reviews have grown systematically stronger as a result. I think he’s since established himself as a unique and important voice on this site. Even if he accidently reignited the Chrono Cross war for a brief period.

So, then; Front Mission.

I think the review starts out strong, but weakens the further it goes. The ‘talk about me!” intro works insofar as it addressed how many of us first played the original Front Mission; via a rom and a fan translation patch. Still, there’s a lot to unpack from there because Front is a complex game that lets you fiddle and fine-tune so many different aspects of your mech army. You held the discussion down well for the majority of the review, but started to lose focus with the end in sight. The paragraph about the pilot’s levels reads a bit listy, and the following ones feel like they could be condensed. You don't always have to drop encylopaedic descriptions; sometimes offering just the jist of it to the reader is the right way to go. Not realising that is something we’re all guilty of.

Team Typo:

...are at each others throats for one reason or another other’s

SECOND Gothic 3 [PC] Joe

If you prefer more structure to your adventuring, there's plenty of that on tap

That’s awfully close to a food metaphor. Hmmm…

Despite this unforgivable faux pas, Joe’s Gothic 3 review has the most solid start of all this week’s entry. It focuses in on something PBRPGs seem to do so much better than anyone else; they make a little slice of a living world then drop you in it completely unprepared and force you to slowly claw and scratch your way to relevance. He talks, with no small trace of affection, about the varied locales you visit and the way you can play both sides off each other for the majority of the game. Eventually, Gothic 3 forces you down a linear path so it can finish its story, but until then, it’s desperate to try and drown you in freedom. That no. 3 dials this up from the two previous games is clever explained with a pool-to-lake comparison.

But then trophy hungry Joe makes me bust out the Golden Joe award again.

From the combat section down, the review loses its flowing narrative and becomes a bit of a rush to the finish, awkwardly dropping information because it needs to be said rather than it fits in with what your saying. The title starts popping up a lot more, too; the last three paragraphs all start the same. Gothic 3's enemies may, Gothic 3's dumb AI, Gothic 3 presents a huge world -- it makes the wrap feel pretty uniform, which is a shame. This was a very good review that was only a tighter conclusion away from being a great one.

Team Typo:

The game leaves you travel from one town to another...
...of wandering and hunting for secrets stashes and…

WIN Double Dragon II: Wander of the Dragons [360] Pickhut

I had a hard time picking between Pick’s reviews; they’re both very different from each other, despite being remakes of the same game. The Revenge is very clean and easy to digest, talking about how it’s a rejigged version of the original, bringing in little modern touches, but remaining dangerously faithful to the original source. Although I’ve given the win to the more complex deconstruction of the complete remake, it is not without issues that the other review doesn’t suffer from. For example, that opening line is a jumble and I had to read it several times before I could catch the gist of it. There’s nothing grammatically wrong with it, but the rapid fire progression of titles makes it hard to follow your line of thought. I struggled, anyway; it’s very possible that it’s just me.

But there are a lot of positives that bring it back in line. There’s some stand-out lines, such as: Double Dragon died in the 1990s, WayForward Technologies brought it back to life in 2012, and Barunson Creative murdered it in 2013. After that, whereas you’re more open to bare ridicule than you usually are, you stay locked in your “HG’s fairest basher” role that I’ve forced upon you, and murdered WotD with a parade of damning facts. Taking the lack of invincible frames and stun locks to task is a great way of showing genre knowledge and burying the game at the same time. The conclusion was strong, too, pointing out that that over-the-top Neon has been an anomaly in a sea of bad-to-blergh remakes, remasters and reboots.

For us. For them. For you.

Emp, you've outdone yourself here. Impossibly punctual and pretty thorough and useful feedback to boot. Congrats to Pick on the win.

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

Thanks for the RotW, EmP! Been quite some time since I nabbed one, so this was a pleasant surprise.

I understand what you mean with the intro. It's pretty much an info dump, and I guess the only reason I went in hard at the beginning was because I didn't want the "history" angle of the series intruding in other parts of the review.

Thanks for liking the other review, too. I was originally going to submit the two reviews on separate weeks, but it felt more fitting to have them back to back in one week.

Good job to all that participated this week, as well!

I head spaceshit noises.

I really don't notice when I do that title thing. I gotta watch out for that. Thank you for the placement and crit. Congrats to Pick!

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

A certain amount of title use is good. It helps with SEO, so people are more likely to find your review. Google and other search engines look at "keyword density," and so a few references to the title and/or variations is ideal.

What I usually try to do is include the title somewhere in the first paragraph, and in the little summary field. That will usually help a review perform better in search. I also try to include it a few times, as warranted, elsewhere in the review, but not more than once in a single paragraph and it's always nice if I can go a paragraph or two without using it at all. This seems to work very well for me and for readers, and that's why it is my own standard operating procedure. Paying close attention to such things means I'm also likely to get chided in a RotW topic for using the title too often.

Isn't it lovely how many things a writer needs to keep in mind while crafting a great review? And the thing is, a lot of people won't even notice the effort when you're doing things properly. Good times. Good times!

"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

Good insight, Jason, I hadn't considered the search engine side of it. I tend to agree with the usage. I'll usually use a full title at the start, and if it's a bit wordy, cut it down. Probably not going to use initials - referring to Final Fantasy VII as FF7 is not particularly classy.

I can avoid death by not having a life.

My rule of thumb has always been that if you're saying something often enough that you have to abbreviate it, you're probably saying it too much.

For us. For them. For you.

Thank you, EmP. It was a risky move for me to write with this bronchitis, since it's had a stupid impact on my tenuous sleeping patterns... buuuut... I can't blame that for the dwindling interest in the topic. I'm sure you know it's not easy to write about something with which you are intimately familiar and need to keep interesting ... somehow. I might well have been better off taking a single example and using that to explain the game's mechanics. Getting personal is a lot of what Front Mission is about.

As for the typo... consarnit! I thought I was so thorough! I gave it at least 12 hours and ... ah well. I could have printed it out... but... sigh. It was a good line, too. Go figure. At least I can edit it.

Look, the only time I'm not wrong is when I'm right, so...