Wednesday, December 30, 2009

What goes into a review?

Well I timed myself last night.  To generate THIS REVIEW for Terra Prime, it took me about an hour.  And really, that was pushing it.  I think I would have liked about another 30 minutes to do more editing and touching up.  In particular I would like to have put more in about my wife's views.  And yes, I can still go back and edit it, but I'm not really in a big hurry for this one.  Especially since it appears it will be only so-so popular in the long run.

An hour on a review is still pretty hefty work.  I know the guys that do the video reviews have to spend longer, but still.  I don't know if I'll ever reach that gold review microbadge in my gaming career.  Most indicators point towards no.  I can be proud of the ones I do put out though.

Things I have learned:

Negative reviews don't get thumbs.  People want to be convinced to buy a game.  If you bash on it, you will mostly just pull out the defenders and make an ugly flame war.

Pictures get you more thumbs than almost anything.  EndersGame over on BGG does reviews almost made totally of pictures.  They are very good reviews, but a lot of their appeal is the pictures.

Reviews of popular games are more popular.  Duh.  Especially those with few reviews.  It's that whole supply and demand thingie.

I like my review criteria.  I was thinking about adding something about playing time since that wasn't in there yet.  I might just toss it under "frequency of decisions".  I'll probably dedicate another post just to talking about the review criteria.

Anyway, is there something I'm missing to make a first class review?

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Behave. Your mamma could read this.