An update

By Peter Butter · April 18, 2009

Updated my review for Neptune's Daughters, leaving the content untouched (if I'd change that, soon I'd start secondguessing myself on all my old reviews) but cleaning it up some. The "good points/bad points" bit at the end that I used to do back then has been removed to avoid redundant redundancy, an instance of 'practically' that should have been 'pragmatically' has been corrected, and I got rid completely of the first person plural style of narration that annoys me nowadays. "We" don't go through a level, either I did or you are going to. "We" is appropriate only to cops ("what do we think we're doing?") and nurses ("did we sleep well?"). And queens, I suppose.

It's all pissing around of course, submitting small batches of screenshots or correcting existing reviews, what I really need to do is write. But this already marks a lot more out of work activity than I've been able to get myself to do for a long time, so here's hoping it's the start of a beautiful, er, submissionship.

About the blogger

Peter Butter

Starting out as a small time reviewer and FAQ author on GameFAQs, my writing has been even more tilted toward the old school than my gaming. I enjoy games of many eras, but I always found it more compelling to write for something that hasn't been done extensively already, which often ruled out the more modern games I played as I tend to run at least a couple of years behind the facts. My Honestgamers catalogue was initially just copying over much of my old GameFAQs work, and then for a time dual submitting to both sites. But over 2015 I posted my first HG exclusives, with hopefully more to follow.

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Comments 9

bloomer Apr 18, 2009

'... submissionship

Hahaha!

Okay, I don't know if you want to hear what I'm about to say right now, because I'm not sure whether you created this new glitch when you revamped the review, or if it was there before, but:

'Instead of simply requiring quick reactions, strategic thinking or simply concentration and nerves of steel,'

I think you wanted the second 'simply' to be 'simple'? Or maybe you could drop the word entirely?

Anyway, I hope you find this does lead to some new writing. I have found dusting off an old review or just poking at things often does, especially compared to not dusting or poking anything.

EmP Staff Apr 18, 2009

Rewrite your Shining in the Darkness review! There can never be enough Shining in the Darkness reviews!

sashanan Blogger Apr 18, 2009

bloomer: that is indeed an awkward sentence which was already in the original, and which I didn't spy on this update until you just pointed it out. I'll give it some thought and change the sentence - but I'll still keep myself from rewriting the entire piece. There are probably more things in there that I could word better now than I could in 2001 when I originally wrote that piece, but dwelling on that leads to the dark side. The dark side of pulling all my reviews and starting over as so many people have done.

aschultz Apr 18, 2009

Aww, you're just trawling for HG points! I'd present the evidence, but I need to go poke the admins about adding games I recently wrote guides and reviews for at GameFAQs.

Seriously though, good to see you back. I think updating is very worthwhile. Some reviews, I'm happy with, and some I immediately want to correct. I think proofreading works just fine as the warmup for "real" writing. I mean, proofreading is part of real writing, but proofreading stuff you might be ready to admit you could've taken another look at is a Good Thing.

sashanan Blogger Apr 18, 2009

A big part of why I never bothered updating reviews in the past is that was a fuss. Heck, when I started contributing to GameFAQs, we still e-mailed our submissions (possibly that was only FAQs though, memory's hazy). For a long time after, updating a review still meant just submitting it as though it was new.

Now that GameFAQs and HG both have a convenient edit option, and HG even lets me update reviews realtime without needing reapproval, there's really no excuse not to snipe a typo or a badly worded sentence as soon as I bump into it.

aschultz Apr 18, 2009

Yeah, it's amazing the convenience that's there. I know I worried what I'd do with so many games, some of them the same name on different platforms...I guess it is convenient for CJayC--err SBAllen too. I also like the new feature of saying if a FAQ can port to another system.

Only FAQs were emailed I think. I don't remember -what- I did for games without game-information. I think you were allowed to wing it, and CJayC would check it. I never got rejected. Maybe we could use archive.org to see the old rules on how to submit FAQs/Reviews.

I remember a big to-do about the switch to submitting FAQs online but not reviews. I also remember when the FTP server for FAQs got closed down! Ah, FTP--such old school stuff.

sashanan Blogger Apr 18, 2009

We did wing it, yeah. When I got to submitting C64 reviews en masse - summer 2001 if you remember, on the premise that my girlfriend was away and I needed to pass the time - all of the games I submitted for had no entry because the database for C64 games was limited to games that already had a contribution. I think it was late 2001 or early 2002 that GameFAQs finally imported a database of C64 game names and suddenly had thousands.

aschultz Apr 21, 2009

That was cool when all the game names got dropped in. Your work probably had a good deal to do with that. There are still Apple games floating out there that I'm adding game data for.

To address the question of how reviews were submitted, check out:

http://web.archive.org/web/19990417152150/www.gamefaqs.co...

It always was online, though you had to submit an email address.

sashanan Blogger Apr 23, 2009

Who knows :) Back then when the list was manageable, it wasn't much work to tally up everyone's reviews and discover that some 30-40% of all C64 reviews on the site were mine. I probably still have a good sized chunk, possibly more than anybody else, but it's harder to say for sure now (or maybe it isn't - I haven't checked out the advanced search settings much yet but maybe it's possible to get a total review tally per system).

On Backloggery, too, I'm second place for both beating and completing the most C64 games, topped only by people who have a LOAD listed and no comments to go with them, leaving me to wonder exactly what standards they use for calling something beaten or completed. Their lists include quite a few games that do not have an ending.