I wrote a review last year (wasn’t here at FileFront, so don’t bother digging for my reviews) and gave the game a poor score, and was overall pretty negative. The game simply wasn’t fun, and I reviewed it as such. The PR person was none too happy, and dissected my review, citing specific inaccuracies. After quite a number of back-and-forths between myself, the site’s PR person and the PR rep, we finally got him to realize that he was mistaken in thinking certain features were included.

Long story short: lots of pissy e-mails and calls over (what he assumed to be) false accusations. Fun times.

@Ron, .. well stated. I also like how we got away from the 1-10 thing.

Pretty much any review that anyone writes, regardless of what site they write it for, is just one person’s opinion. Luckily, in this day and age of gaming, we read hundreds of reviews for the same game if we so choose, and that allows us to be more informed before we spend our precious gaming dollar. I can’t fathom how that could be anything but good.

To everyone, thanks for reading and commenting.

Usually, when a game is being submitted to one of us to review, most of the time (from what I understand) it is given to the person who is most familiar with that genre. For example, since I prefer an RPG, RTS or survival horror, I would be the prefect candidate to review the latest Resident Evil, Oblivion expansion, Age of Empires, etc. Lets say that Shawn is more familiar with MMOS, he would be the one to review the latest one to hit the market.

All of the writers on staff have their favorite gaming genres just like everyone else, but the great thing about us is that all of us are familiar with every type of game on the market – therefore all of us are more than qualified to do a review on any game that comes our way. I mean, I may not PREFER racing games, but I have played enough to make an educated decision as to whether or not it is indeed worth the play or not.

Also, another wonderful thing about our site, is that we are not subjected to certain standards like word counts. Our posts can be as long or short as we like, therefore you never have to worry if we have been edited for size. We get to say what we want with as much gusto and length as we wish.

Thanks for your loyalty too, we do this not only for the love of gaming, but for you guys as well.

That’s not to say I don’t think some have its points; I’ve quickly come to respect GT’s standards because they (you guys) seem to include more than the numbers 10, 9.5 and 7 in reviews. Obviously, you can’t do it on numbers alone, but the quality of the tone here seems to make sense. Like other reviewing journalism, I sometimes struggle in understanding when a conclusion has made that goes against the tone of the content in the bulk of the read, and see the problem in reviewing games as common as other similar occassions.

What would it take to change my mind?

I’d like to see the review process. Not just them typing it up, I mean know the person, enough to know if they’re the right person to be doing the review, or at least most capable, then see them receive the game in both being handed to them and their initial thoughts of it when playing and how that transports us to what I read on the various sites or articles. That way, I’d know if the person was being honest, or not just nit-picking. Sure, that sequence may have bad camera angles, but the rest of the game is flawless, so why have you written all the game has bad camera. The game is still fun, right?

An example of why this would be good is in that recent article about the journalist who reviewed Mass Effect, but hadn’t played it for long enough. Without knowing the way he did it all, we wouldn’t have known if that was entirely honest. Fortunately, the advent of public opinion in terms of being able to speak so openly on the net has stopped these things. Unfortunately though, it’s not wholey worked. I’d have thought journalists would be prompted to push a bit more to get it right (they talked about extremes in that video, which is probably true) but it seems as if they’re stuck in their way of writing random drabble that somewhere along the line includes the necessary content and required point to turn it into a review.

And why on Earth are reviews limited in word count online? I can understant a minimum word count, but journalists should really be able to push out as much as they want in some cases, so we get a real understanding of it all. The details. I’ve seen on 1up before that they mention word counts and I just think “why?! It’s not as if a few extra words is killing trees due to paper”.

Before buying games, I check the following sites,
1UP, Gamespot, IGN, GamingToday and GamingForums (part of FileFront) and Play.com for player reviews, and take the best written ones from there. Most importantly though, I ask my friends who have played it, because they’re regular-gamers like me (except, I seem to be the biggest gamer in my friend group, yet the only one who doesn’t play WoW).

However, in showing brooding loyalty, I’ve gotta say I’ve come to really like GTs journalism style. I like the fact you cover different angles. You get down and dirty with your personal opinions in the comments section and you do self-made editorials that have no prompting other than what happens to you. I’d like to see more of those. Heck, I got a million ideas in my head for editorial ideas! FPS’, Admin abuse on servers, cost of games, reliablity etc. You’re the ones with the power to write this stuff…do it! They can be more interesting than any of the other news that day, especially when it’s bloody HD this or Red Ring that, or peripheral for Wii here.

Generally, I don’t trust gaming journalism a whole lot. I think a lot of people will be disheartened with what happened on Gamespot too, however there are some exceptions. And I DO trust them.