"My brother is dead. He's not here anymore! But on my back, and in my heart, he lives on in me! Drilling a hole to piece the heavens! Even if that hole becomes my grave, as long as I break through, I shall be victorious!"

• 11Oct 12

  The Reviewing Process

  Most of the times, whenever you try a new food, or go to a new restaurant or meet this new person you ask a friend what do they think about it, is the food great? does the restaurant have a nice vibe? is this new person interesting? Depending on their opinion you add that to your judgement and decide what to do. It does not matter if the review is good or bad as long as you can trust it, it works for you.

  

  Game reviewing is pretty much the same thing, you look at a video from someone else's experience playing the game and based on that you decided wether to buy it or to put your money into something else or if it's even worth playing. A decent review takes in account the good and the bad things in a game objectively, gives credit when credit is due and mentions the game's flaws or improvements it could have made. Sounds pretty simple and yet the reviewing process can vary a lot from reviewer to reviewer.

  Haven't you ever wondered why sometimes a game gets a 9 here a 6 there and a 10 in another place? One could easily blame the site, "meh they're delusional how did they gave it a 6 the game is really good jabba jabba" well it's not the site or the reviewer, it's the experience, the main reason we like or dislike games is the emotions it makes us feel while playing them, feeling that on games from the same publisher (Metal Gear, Mario, Halo) makes us defend the series and feeling that on similar games makes us defend the genre, we stand up when someone criticizes them, but the truth is we're not defending the series or the genre or the publishers we're defending the experience, we defend the joy we felt while playing them.

  Think about two people who play Metal Gear, one has so much fun trying to be sneaky and clearing missions without being detected replays the levels several times to get familiar with the enemy, doesn't mind getting caught every now and then he sees every mistake as a lesson and lives the story as muchas snake, he has such an amazing experience playing the game that it easily makes it into his favorites list, in fact he probably plans to make a playthrough in a cardboard box. The other one keeps getting caught starts to get frustrated dislikes all the silent secret agent stuff and prefers to go all out gunning people and keeps losing, doesn't even finish the game and sets it aside puts it below a stash of games for it to rust in dust.

  Then ask each of them to write a review, the first one will say how inmersive the game is, he'll probably compliment the story the creators the gameplay the publishers the guy that made coffee at kojima productions hideo kojima himself, encouraging everyone to play the game to feel the same joy he felt. The other one will say how bad the game was, he'll butcher the gameplay destroy the story, trash talk the series and the genre itself, discouraging everyone in ording to prevent them for playing it so they can avoid the torture he just endured. One does not have to be a genius to realize that once the score comes into the equation these 2 guys will probably give completely different scores but that's not based on the game itself it's based on the experience they had. Now, is metal gear a good or bad game? See for yourself

  Anyone can set up a video camera take some gameplay footage and talk about the game, but reviewing is more than that, is trying to share your experience of the game to the rest of the world is trying to explain the way the game made you "feel" sure you do it by talking about technical things like the gameplay, graphics, sound, story but they're all affected by the emotion produced by the game, a reviewer that is 100% objective has no enjoyment is just a machine that clears a game gives a score and moves on to the next one. It kills the purpose of gaming.

  Now the problem comes in when we let reviews affect our judgement, we decide the fate of a game based on the score it got, I see this everyday at the boards. The game got a 6? Not good enough for me, this site gave it a 4.5 this one a 6.3 that one a 3.2 while there is a tendency at the end of the day it is you who should decide not a score, not the experience of someone else but yours.

  When you let a review influence your judgement is when you lose sight of the value of your own experience as a gamer

  "Because to influence a person is to give him ones own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone elses music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him"

  Quote from: The Picture of Dorian Gray

  Reviews should be a guide, not a veredict. It's not about the quality of the camera or the footage or the fancy words we use it's about sharing an opinion, an opinon of a friend, one that we can trust. At the end of the day it is you and only you who should decide what to do, to have your own experience to share it with the rest of the world

  • Posted Oct 11, 2012 11:29 pm GMT
  • Category: Editorial
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• 12Aug 12

  An overdue blog

  Wow it's been almost 6 months since my last blog entry, well I certainly need to change that.

  It's amazing how can you get caught in life so much that you lose track of most things. College sucks most of my life, this past semester was awful. Lemme share the story

  Ok so the semester started on march and ended this friday, my god was it hard, I had to take 8 courses my schedule was usually from 8 to 1 most of the days, one would think "well you get out at 1 so you can have the rest of the day for yourself" (Yeah right) I had to study a lot after that.

  On a regular day I took my bus home at 9:00 pm I remember one day me and my friends got kicked out because it was way past closing time in the campus around 11:30 pm. I had like 0 time for gaming whenever I could I would grab my psp and do some on the go gaming but still it wasn't enough, eventually my time it gamespot got reduced from an hour to mere minutes of me using someone else's cellphone to check the forums and check everything was in order I missed A LOT of the gaming industry news, missed E3, comic con and many other stuff, In fact the other day I was at the campus cafeteria and I overheard two people talking:

  "Oh you heard bout this new Zelda for the wii u?"

  "Yeah it's pretty cool they're remaking majora's mask, oh and that RE6 looks pretty good too, looks like a movie it kinda lost its survival horror theme, now it looks like an episode of 24"

  "Yeah totally, I remember the days where I would play resident evil on my playstation with my brother I had to keep him close so I didn't get scared, it's like everything is changing now, they even released this new pokemon black2 game"

  That's when I chimmed in

  "They're releasing a new Zelda?! And resident evil is already on 6 also there's gonna be a new pokemon game?! What? Who? Where? When? "

  They took their android cellphones to show me some news and then I knew I was so behind everyone.

  Right after I got out of the semester I went to get some beer with friends who haven't seen me in a long time and it was nice worrying about nothing for a change, yesterday in fact I played my first game in a looong time, Inversion I think it's called reminds me of gears of war it was pretty decent and I sucked big time at it

  This semester promises to be an easier one (less time consuming) I plan to manage my time properly this time around. As for GS things have changed a lot while I was gone, some users left some have returned, I don't even remember how to moderate properly but I think I'll start slow. It's so good to be back hopefully some of you guys still remember me!

  Until next time

  See ya!

  • Posted Aug 12, 2012 3:52 pm GMT
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• 16Feb 12

  So the Foo Fighters won 5 Grammys

  And I needed an excuse to post a blog

  Sup everyone, been a while since I wrote something here, it's just that I see the "Post blog" button and the thought of having to type a couple of pargraphs makes me feel soo lazy.

  I've been doing great, good on college, good on life been playing a lot of RPGs lately (at the same time) It's kinda shocking the amount of leveling up you gotta do on an RPG.

  Say I start with Final Fantasy V, I'm fighting against some boss called Atomos or something, I'm too weak, level up my party for 5 levels and beat him I decide to put something else, Final Fantasy I fighting against Tiamat, I have to level up a little and then beat it, I decide to try a different thing, Disgaea (the max level is 9999 so yeah I gotta do a lot of power leveling there). I've been wanting to get back to Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops but I just can't find where the rations are!! Whenever I try a mission Snake is hungry, his comrades are hungry and soldiers don't drop enough rations to feed all of them so I've avoided that game for a while.

  After a few months of not having a cellphone my dad made a new contract and they gave him a new phone, he gave me his old blackberry 8520 for me to use, which is quite the improvement from my old nokia phone from 2007. I'm happy with it, it may not be the newest stuff out there but if it survived 18 months with my dad as the owner...it'll probably survive a nuclear explosion so the thing is sturdy as hell.

  Finally I saw the Grammys the other day, I was really happy that the foo fighters got 6 nominations and they won 5 of them (imagine! each band member took home a grammy lol ) they only lost to Adele who won all 6/6 grammys and even Dave Grohl said before the ceremony that Adele has done an amazing job and she totally deserves to win. Still 5 Grammys is a pretty outstanding feat

  Best Rock Performance

  Best Rock Album

  Best Long Form Music Video

  Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance

  Best Rock Song

  Album of the Year (Nominated)

  And I'm really happy, they did that record in Dave's Garage, they didn't use any computers they used old tape machines that while offering a pretty good quality has no room for editing so what you play is what you get, if you mess up there's no fixing it, even with that though they managed to produce an amazing album. I'm just gonna leave this here. This is what Dave said in his winning speech and it's very true

  

  Best Part is....he basically insulted half of the people in that room

  Until Next Time

  See ya!

  • Posted Feb 16, 2012 8:50 pm GMT
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