5 short of my goal of one review a month. None of these 7 reviews were anything special. A couple of them got runner up in RotW, but mostly they were lazy, uninspired efforts... written so quickly that my mental block didn't even have time to shut it down.
I wonder if people expect too much of me as a reviewer. I can remember a lot of praise about being great, but I don't think I ever really was. I had written occasionally great reviews... but I was always eclipsed by better reviewers who wrote much more, and were always consistently better.
I have one review owing, for Jade Empire, which I might or might not finish depending on whether I can actually be bothered playing the game. I'm finding it really hard to play older games now. Back in the PS2 days, I had no problem playing N64 and PS1 games. But now that I've been playing the 360, I find it difficult to go back to stuff in the PS2/Xbox generation (and the even older stuff I find harder, which is why I sold my SNES, and about three quarters of my N64 collection).
Still. Jade Empire is not a bad game. It's just underwhelming. I think I would have liked this more in 2005/2006 after I'd been playing the KotOR games. I tried to play KotOR recently, and found the graphics blurry, the control clunky, and the battle system incredibly lame. I wonder if it was always like that... I know I loved the game at the time, but it has not aged well.
This makes me want to revise my review, or remove it completely. In fact, I do kind of want to take down my reviews and disappear completely.
Leave nothing but a memory.
honestgamer Staff Dec 29, 2009
And yeah, the Star Wars game for me was always as you describe it now. I wanted to like it and almost did, but those things got in the way for me. I think that I have different criteria than a fair number of folks here, though.
zippdementia Dec 29, 2009
honestgamer Staff Dec 29, 2009
aschultz Dec 29, 2009
As for pulling/keeping your reviews, I hope you have a place to keep your old writing, at least to track it. HG, flash drive, CD, or whichever.
I think HG is a good place to have this stuff. None of us are going to laugh at you for it. We'll be glad to see what you've written. And I think the best way to look at your reviews is this: worst case, you're embarrassed about what you've written (likely because you've gotten better) but probably, you'll either be happy it's as good at it is, or you can accept the mistakes you made, or both.
As for wondering if you were ever great, that's so terribly subjective. I think my biggest troubles have come when I've felt "I used to be great at X or used to learn it so fast." Our memories tend to distort what this means, or how much effort it took to do things.
It seems like review writing is something you enjoy coming back to, with the +'s for writing something outweighing the frustration from the occasional writer's block, and anything like that is a good thing.
Suskie Dec 30, 2009
On that note, though, I don't think I've ever returned to a game I used to adore only to say, "Yeah, this isn't as good as it used to be." Usually, with old favorites, it's easier for me to put them into the context of whenever I played them. Although oddly enough, I felt KOTOR's battle system still holds up considerably, although it's never actually explained very well in the game itself. (This seems to be the biggest turn-off with that game, and I frankly don't blame people who could never get the hang of it.)