game reviews

Games reviewers at the current time face a lot of  constraints which means that the greatest attention to detail isn’t always taken by the writer or publisher because there isn’t always enough time to do so as a 150 page magazine is constructed 19 days give or take and this means a team researching and writing around 60,000 plus words to fill a magazine therefore once the magazine is done its straight onto the next . After reading a few articles that were written in a new games journalism style I wasn’t really engaged by them because it seemed more of a story than a review, if its meant to be a review that is. which sort of leads to my point that I was unsure of what the purpose of the article was. The article however isn’t terrible it’s jus not my  personal preference style of review because one article I read about a game called planetside sets the scene with the basic premise of the game and then goes on to describe how a the writer and a group of friends work together to reclaim areas of land in the game. This sort of commentary style is then interspersed with some information about the game such as types of characters and their attributes and different vehicle’s, I’m not massive fan of this type of games journalism/review as I would rather prefer the maybe cliché type of review split into different categories such as game play, graphics etc and then a description of each aspect and then an overall summary of the game, this may not be as interesting as the other review I described but I would rather have all the information I want written concisely than having to read through if somewhat irrelevant things to then pick out what information im looking for. Im not trying to slate this type of new games journalism, and a lot of people seem to like it very much judging from comments below the article saying things like


“Excellent piece of writing! I’ve been interested in this game for quite some time but never got around to buying it.”


To me new games journalism seems very subjective and based around personal experience whereas when other types of review like for example one I read about modern warfare 3 on the xbox official magazine website where it didn’t talk about a word for word run through of an online match but more about the developer and comparing the new game to the older ones than anything else, it’s a very short but sweet review and I’m sure there was a lot more coverage in the actual magazine than on their website and would probably resemble the style of review I was talking about earlier with regards to breaking up the games elements into categories and describing them and ending with a overall game rating be it percentage or an out of 10 score although I haven’t read a games magazine in a while.