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.
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.
