Last year’s XYZZY reviews were awesome, but we didn’t exactly give them the most user-friendly presentation. Nobody likes a wall-o-text. So this time around, we’re going to be rolling them out a few at a time, and we’re going to be using a goddamn blog. A blog, I tell you. (We have other plans for the blog, but let’s just focus on the reviews for now).
Looking forward to the rest of the reviews. There is some great stuff so far & not just because it was good to see writing on my game. As a tester for Manor I was glad to see some ideas I couldn’t express about why I liked the game overlap with Carl Muckenhoupt’s writeup.
And looking forward to whatever other plans you have for the blog.
The blog isn’t functioning for me. A few minutes ago I could access the main page, but none of the ‘continue reading’ or jumps to games links worked (they gave 404s). Now the front page is also giving me a 404:
“The requested URL /blog/ was not found on this server.”
Yes - with the seamless coordination for which the XYZZY organisers have become famed, it’s now just the XYZZY Awards front page.
This is, of course, all part of my plan to take over the XYZZYs and use them as a platform for my aimless ramblings about Wittgenstein and underground hip-hop, which is what the IF community would care about if it knew its own mind.
Well, didn’t he just say there are a whole bunch of others? So that…counts, if you’re into giving the other guy the benefit of the doubt, or five or six doubts?
I’ll do a 180 here and say that, as one of your testers, there were a lot worse mistakes that got caught. IIRC the accomplishments were a relatively late addition & most importantly bug-free.
I actually remember the text raising a small red flag (“Hey, wait, Helen only has one L”) but I figured I’d only watched the movie once…so hooray, me not googling. And hooray another entertaining essay set today.
Shore here. I was an usher at a movie theater in 1986, and I saw Aliens 26 times that summer (and a few times since). If anyone makes a game which references Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School, I am uniquely well-positioned to catch its errors as well, let me assure you.
If this is the worst mistake of your life, well, I think things have gone pretty well for you. I thought the game was terrific. I maybe should have also mentioned the brilliant cover, but that’s probably in someone else’s review.
Many thanks to the authors of these reviews! I’m very much enjoying reading them, and I find it really interesting to see analyses that focus on specific aspects of the nominees, as opposed to the more typical all-round review that might have one paragraph dedicated to each major aspect of the game. The time and effort is highly appreciated.