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.

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Feedback
	honestgamer - December 29, 2009 (04:15 PM) I hope that you don't decide to take your reviews and leave. It's been nice seeing you around here more, even if you're not reviewing as frequently as some, plus there's value in older reviews from good writers for old games that someday people won't much remember. Reviews don't necessarily need to reflect your opinions of given titles now. They should reflect your opinions at the time you wrote those reviews. Since opinions are constantly going to evolve, there's not really any point in going back and revisiting all of your opinions. It's nice to have a reminder of how things were so you can get more out of how things are. 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 - December 29, 2009 (05:43 PM) Hey, Jerec, seems you've hit that point where older games lose their shine. Happened to me about, eh, three or four years ago and I didn't adjust until this past year. It's sad when your past gets old.
	honestgamer - December 29, 2009 (10:06 PM) I hope that never happens for me. It didn't take long for PSX and many N64 games to lose their shine, but NES and SNES stuff still hasn't and I'm hopeful that it never will.
	aschultz - December 29, 2009 (10:56 PM) Well, I have a different problem--I got too lazy for newer games! Part of that is that old games are cheap e.g. dirt cheap e.g. free. I just think at a certain point you decide what you like best and stick with it, just like after high school you realized it was impossible to take every course. Good thing is, if what you thought you liked gets boring, there's something better. 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 - December 30, 2009 (11:25 AM) It's interesting -- just over the summer I got this urge to play through both KOTOR games again for the first time in years. I did, and I loved them as much as ever (especially the sequel, which I remember being relatively disappointed by). 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.)