Jolt Country

I've been considering writing reviews of this and that, but since TK has such a fine history of entertaining reviews, it really sets a high standard that I usually don't have the energy to attempt.

It's my worry that the game reviews that I'm even considering might turn out to be mini-reviews that aren't even worth uploading, so I'm wondering whether anyone has tips about what points reviews should try to cover and so forth.

Maybe I'll try writing a review tonight, anyway.

I have been going back and reading some of my reviews as of late, after several months or maybe a year of not looking at them at all. Bryan and Ben's are really good, of course, but the thing that I am picking up on was how sloppy mine are. There are a lot of times where that thing we (I) do (did) about tangentially talking about the game at the beginning starts to be rather annoying. It was only something I realized after taking a long stretch of time off from the games.

On the other hand, Bryan would get right to the point, and Ben would craft these reviews that read as fantastic articles from start to finish, so being the undisciplined one in a gang of three was no problem.

Anyway, I got some great advice and editing when I wrote up that Postal II review for Caltrops. The things I took away from it were:

1) After writing each joke, ask yourself: is this as concise as it could be? If I rip out these words or this sentence does it still work? How funny is this, really?

2) How clear am I coming across here? I had personally gotten into the habit of writing these long, drawn-out sentences filled with hyphens after spending almost an entire year writing as a scatterbrained character in Yar when I got home from work each day. But my personal problems aside, reading some of one's sentences aloud to see how they flow isn't a bad idea in some cases.

3) For the review itself, you can never go wrong if you stick to the game itself and frame your piece as sort of advice to the author. I usually tried to never slag amateur (non-paid, I mean) IF in a cruel manner on RFTK -- as text adventure reviews are a niche interest, giving your good and bad experiences with a game is really helpful to authors who plan on writing more of the stuff.

4) Going through it in topic form (Writing / NPCs / Puzzles, etc.) is fine, too. We're all friends here.

I know that I, personally, have a lot of work to do and if I am going to get myself set for "Update Week" (C) I have my work cut out for me just to keep up with the three solid citizens who are swinging the lumber so far. So it's an adventure we can go on together, Roody! Like Animal Crossing! Only in this case, we aren't asking each other what we can get for our cherries.

Hey, thanks for the words, man. And that's a memorable picture.

Of course, I'm still interested in hearing anybody else's thoughts on the matter, even if I pretty much knew that I was mainly asking Robb and thought he would likely be the only one to answer.