Those are insightful reviews. I agree with some of the problems that you raise with The White Bull, but I think that game is ultimately better than that. Just the fact that NPCs not only accompany the PC but are also partly responsible for driving the plot and solving the puzzles seems like a big deal to me. For instance, I was deeply impressed to see that Leo was the one who wielded the trident, and Matt has to work together with him in order to get past the birds.
I see that I happened to have a worse-than-average experience with The Rocket Man from the Sea and a better-than-average experience with The Egg and the Newbie.
That particular puzzle was somewhat spoiled for me because I got the general idea straight away, but
[spoiler]while trying to phrase it correctly, I got a response from Leo that was something like ‘I know what you’re trying to do, but I won’t do it unless you say “Leo, hit shield with trident” or whatever.’ That sort of response might seem natural from certain people under certain circumstances (a situation where precise, coordinated timing was critical, or where a subordinate has qualms about doing something and requires a direct order), but in that case it just felt like parser obstructionism, underlining The NPCs Are Machine-Like Idiots. And the whole setup felt a bit artificial as an NPC puzzle; do you really need two people to swashbuckle?
Better, as a puzzle that actually felt as if having NPCs was a crucial part of the puzzle rather than an unnecessary complication, was the see-saw bridge; but that was too little and much too late for me. I think the primary problem with the NPCs is really a writing one, though; if the characters were more interesting or sympathetic in the first place, it’d be much easier to look kindly on their mechanical roles.[/spoiler]
I can’t tell the reason (or to what extent) but I think I was taken by The White Bull plot more than The RocketMan.
I’m the kind of guy who actually loves a story for the story itself. When it unfolds nicely and has some hook on my imagination, I dive into it and resurface years later. It’s just the atmosphere, don’t know…
I can’t tell why The Bull did this to me. It’s awkward. It IS a B-Movie scenario, after all. There is no sense of a POINT, in the game (as opposed to The Rocketman). But. Usually I hate hate-attracting NPCs, but I think I got in empathy with Leo. I understood he being bothersome was good, in a way I can’t express.
Ah, see, the problem with this isn’t “I’m not able to be objective”; it’s the “I can’t express” part. It’s not necessarily the job of a reviewer to be objective. It is their job to explain their reactions to the work in a clear and accessible manner. Their reactions might be based upon features that will affect many or most of us in similar ways (bugs are annoying, guess-the-verb is inconsiderate, generic characters are tedious), but equally valuable is a transparent dissection of your gut reactions, even if you doubt whether anybody is likely to react the same way.
One of the people whose writing about art I respect most highly almost never writes anything in the objective mode; but she’s able to write with devastating, brutal clarity about her most idiosyncratic reactions. Which often captures something about the work that’s much more important than ‘the cinematography was fluid and confident’ or ‘the figures are arranged in a classical pyramid composition’.
Obviously a writer-wannabe shouldn’t use the sentence “I can’t express this”. Never.
On behalf of the last part of your post: Let me say a thing.
We all watched Pulp Fiction. There’s this scene where Bruce Willis goes searching for a weapon to aid his (former) best-enemy-forever. Many things, even a chainsaw.
Then, he finds the katana. “Hell, yeah.”
I don’t think there is another way to express how that scene was so awesome. You can go and digress about italian movies from the 70s. You can express the link between captor and slave and to what links people when they are both in the same position as opposed to being parts of different groups. You can say many things.
But the only good one, the exact one, is: “Hell, YEAH.”
We are talking about art. Art is for the mind, of course, but it is for the heart more. So, my reviews are “Hell, YEAH.” and to hell with the rest.
Talking about my reviews and my inability to cope with the fact I’m always so incline to downgrading myself…
What do you think about them? Do you think they are worth to be read?
I asked about comfort from peeps in here, but I didn’t get many responses [emote]:)[/emote]
Well, I suppose there are two ends of the review spectrum, really. There’s the criticism review, which unpacks the player’s reactions, maybe talks some theory. (This is what Emily is really good at). Then there’s the reaction review, which is more of a thoughtstream, less structured, a straightforward record of what effects the game had on a player. (It seems as if this is more where your heart lies.) This is where Jenni Polodna really shines, even if, e.g., her summary of a game’s puzzles is ‘Man, fuck these puzzles.’ That’s important information, valuable to author and players alike.
“Hell, YEAH” is fine; it’s much better, more specific than “That was good.” The critical reviewer’s job, to my mind, is to unpack “Hell, YEAH”, to explain what it’s made of; but not every review needs to do that.
Okay, let me see. Yes, in general I think your reviews have good things in them.
“Nice” is one of Stephen Bond’s pet hates, and the reason why is that it doesn’t really say very much. If you’re going to say this is good, it’s important to say how it’s good – whether that’s a systematic explanation of how and why it’s good, or a visceral this-is-how-it-struck me response.
But you use a lot of phrases like “The various puzzles are well done” or “First, the writing is almost perfect” that are, well, sort of flavourless. They aren’t helpful as analysis to the author (what did I do right?) or the player (is this the sort of thing I’m interested in?); but they don’t really say a lot about your gut reactions, either. It’s very easy to fall into using them – I’m sure I do it all the time – but if you catch yourself doing it, stop, step back, and ask yourself what you really mean.
(I often end up rewriting “well done” as “competent”, which isn’t much better, but at least says something about what kind of “well done” we’re talking about. And I often don’t say “this was good” if I can’t find anything interesting to say about the goodness, which can make my reviews come off as far harsher than I really intend. So don’t feel the need to become a crabby old bastard who hates everything; it’s valuable that you’re generally pretty positive about games. But sometimes it feels as if you’re trying to placate the author, and you really don’t need to do that.)
A lot of the difficulty with your reviews, to be honest, is that you’re not fully fluent in English grammar, and (in particular) with idiom.
In English, ‘pest’ means troublesome animals or annoying people, not a disease. Because I know that peste is French for plague, and I assume Italian is similar (plus there’s also the English word pestilence) I can translate to “avoid those games like the plague”. But sometimes there’s no close-equivalent idiom in English, and then it can be a small puzzle to understand what you mean. (Often that’s okay as far as I’m concerned: I enjoy language puzzles! But not everybody does. And it slows things down, and sometimes I’m really not certain that I grasp your meaning.)
Finally: you don’t quote from the text much. Not everybody needs to quote all the time, but it’s a useful tool. If you’re talking about a general point it’s helpful to illustrate it, and if you’re talking about a specific thing it’s useful if everybody knows exactly what you mean.
I’ve lived off writing reviews for over ten years and yeah, the question of “reviewer objectivity” is an interesting one. In the end a review is always an one person opinion. I and many, if not even most experienced reviewers I know simply hate that ridiculous percentile score that’s given to games. It’s just an illusion of objectivity and generally just stupid. It’s only there because a certain group of readers stare at those scores religiously. 1-5 stars is granular enough, the score in any case is the least informative and interesting part of the review.
In my opinion the objectivity of the game reviewer is his ability to see the wider field of games and take that into account when he’s writing the review. “Compared to most games, this one has a crappy graphics”, “the playability is not on par with other games of the genre” etc. That doesn’t mean that the game has to be somehow “objectively bad”. “In spite of those faults I really enjoyed the game, 9/10” is a perfectly valid comment in the end. If, by some weird alchemy, you really enjoyed a game that should “objectively” be bad because of its myriads of faults, then it’s a good game, period.
And, to reiterate: a review is not the word of god, it’s one dude(tte)'s opinion. The craft of reviewing is explaining that opinion to the reader so that he or she can reflect his own tastes to the reviewer’s thoughts and to the wider field of games he or she likes.
Yes, I understand the major flaw is my english. The fact about the pest/plague I know about. It’s just the wrong term that came to the mind in this occasion (and many others, I guess…)
Re: “nice/good/etc” that is another big point. I know about it also. Fact is I suffer from the same problem as above. Sometimes, the best word to me is “nice” cause I can’t find another adjective. I would never-ever say “questo gioco è carino”, in italian. But it is a quantum leap in english.
I won’t surrender, though. [emote]:)[/emote]
I hope, anyway, that the overall sense of what I’m talking about in my reviews comes out, in the end.
PS: I personally love Jenni’s reviews. They are funny (erm, ) and caustic. I really enjoy how she gets to bash on every author thus remaining lovable. Also: I sense something. She is able to talk about a game that is the 10.000th game in a certain domain, making fast and witty comparisons. Like “You made a game about a dungeon. I’ve played 456. Again with the troll on the bridge?!”. That is very useful, imho.
Too bad, I don’t have her experience to make something similar…
This is definitely useful, though I think it’s also important to take into account how much the graphics, playability, et al matter to this particular game’s vision. Endless, Nameless has some irritating mechanics in certain sections – but they’re intentionally irritating and serve an aesthetic purpose, so I had a different reaction than I would have if those mechanics had just been the result of incompetence. The inventory management and lack of implicit actions might still be enough to discourage other players, but I personally was willing to put up with them for the sake of the other things that were going on in the game.