TychoCelchuuu

A credits page has been created but won't go online until there are reviews to credit to others. In much more important news I updated the /wizard page to be more impressive. It also no longer automatically redirects - you must click the image. I may change that.

A website wrote an article about the site! The guy even interviewed me. Warning: site is in Spanish.

I'm definitely having fun with the alt text on each site. Sites that do fun things with alt text excite me, despite the fact that all three browsers I use don't seem to have a good way to let me check it easily, the way I used to be able to check it by hovering over an image.

It's not sentimentality, it's basic human decency! If people are working for free they at least deserve exposure! Since people seem to disagree with me, though, I'm strongly considering Ben's suggestion of a separate credits page.

That's a good idea, although I think with the way the site design works, it won't really mess with the hive mind feel too much to include the author's credits directly on the review. I'll think about it.

Although I can understand thinking that the reviews are funnier with no name, and although I'll give contributors the option of contributing anonymously or just adding credits in alt text on the page (so that it doesn't show up), there's no way I would ever ask someone to write for a website with ads on it then tell them they can't put their name on the copy. I already feel bad having people write for free.

Well yeah, if you know the keywords.

I had an Amazon.com package sent through two day shipping and it "arrived" after two days. If I typed in the tracking number on the FedEx website it says it was delivered. There was no package. About 3 days later FedEx dropped it off at my front door. So I don't really know what happened there, but I'm glad I got my stuff - for a while I just assumed it had been stolen.

As noted slightly above I pasted the contents of that document into this thread, so disregard the 404.

Hah yes, I saw that and was going to post about it here but I forgot. Porpentine favorited the tweet about the review of her game, I think, so she's definitely seen the site.

Weird that the Dropbox link is down. I'll just post the text (WARNING THE FOLLOWING IS TOP SECRET DO NOT DISTRIBUTE HER MAJESTY'S EYES ONLY): A NOTE: What follows are three things. First, a style guide that lays out the house style. Second, a combined formatting and content guide around which to structure your review - I recommend copying an dpasting section two right into a word processor. Third, I include a few tips that talk about what I've found helpful in terms of writing these reviews. ------------------------------- STYLE GUIDE: The reviews should actually be objective (aside from the score). Describe the player as "the player" and as "they." If the player controls someone, refer to that person/thing as "the player's character" or by that thing's name (eg. "Shepard" for Mass Effect). Use the word "eponymous" if at all possible. Aim for an "objective" sounding tone. Write simply and straightforwardly but employ occasional complicated diction and/or erudite vocabulary in order to imply superiority and intelligence. You want to give the impression that this is an exact science. Jokes are good, particularly for games that aren't very serious or that are overly serious. I've found three kinds of jokes work well: non-sequiturs, like out of nowhere listing a feature of the game (see, for instance, the Thirty Flights of Loving review.); stark presentations of narrative tension or ludo-narrative dissonance (see, for instance, the Mass Effect 3 review); straight-faced presentation of something ludicrously naive (see, for instance, the Battlefield 4 China Rising review [the part about unlocking guns for use in the game]). Obviously if you find other ways to tell a joke, tell a joke. Exceeding 500 words is ill-advised. Exceeding 750 words is almost unthinkable. Scoring: no 7s are allowed. Objective Game Reviews follows the deplorable industry standard "7 is average" way of doing things, but we refuse to give out any actual 7s. Aside from that just pick the number between 1 and 10 (in intervals of .5) that you think best represents how good the game is. Obviously this is subjective and mostly dumb, like any number rating for a game, but them's the breaks. If feeling unsure, skew towards Metacritic and skew a little high, in that order. Provide a screenshot that is (ideally) 1037x576 pixels or larger. If you can't get a screenshot, let me know. Good screenshots are either representative shots of the game (they show gameplay, ideally in a pretty location) or funny/weird in some way. ------------------------------- FORMAT GUIDE AND CONTENT GUIDE: Genre | [Go by the genres listed at the top of the website - if a genre you need is not listed, let me know] Developer | [duh] Platforms | [go by the platforms listed at the left of the website - if there is platform you need that is not listed, let me know] First paragraph: sum the game up in a few sentences in a simultaneously bland and poignant manner. Capture the true essence of the game without sounding like you are doing anything other than summarizing it. The goal is to be brutal or beautiful by virtue of being so concise. Strike right at the heart of what makes this game the game that it is, or get as close to this as you can in one paragraph. [insert Jump] Second paragraph: list boring objective information: what perspective is the game played from (first person, third person, isometric, whatever), how many guns are there, how many levels are there, what are the character classes, how many spells are there, how many party members can you sleep with, whatever. Numbers for numbers' sake. This is a good place for jokes. FAQs and unofficial Wikis can be helpful if the game's manual is not forthcoming. Third paragraph: this is a good place to introduce or elaborate on a mechanic or multiple mechanics that make the game interesting or unique or fun or terrible. Whatever makes you think the way you think about the game, write that thing here. Alternatively address the narrative or the setting or something similar, if the game is more about than than the mechanics. Fourth paragraph: describe the music, graphics, the sound, setting, etc. Try to make this sound interesting if possible. Fifth paragraph: maybe about something weird or unique or fun the game does that seems somewhat out of place in an objective review - describe something touching or disturbing without mentioning that it is touching or disturbing, for instance. Alternatively do something like what you did in the third paragraph, this time about a different mechanic or story point or something. Ending on a non-sequitur here is sometimes good for a joke. ------------------------------ TIPS AND TRICKS FROM MOUNTAIN DEW CODE RED The way I think about it is this. First, imagine what review you would write if you were writing a real review. What makes you excited about this game? What does this game do that's new or interesting or fun or innovative? Where does this game fail in ways that need criticism? Why bother playing this game, or not playing this game? Then, once you've got that in your head, figure out what things in the game caused you to feel this way, as in, what bare-bones objective features of the game were responsible for making you conceive of the review you conceived of? Take those features and write them down. You're effectively thinking up a whole review and writing down half of it. Finally, pad it out with a list of objective stuff, like how many levels and guns are in the game and so on. Make it as entertaining to read as you can, or at the very least, make it a good piece of criticism absent the part where you say what you think (that is, proviont). A good way of putting it is this: Here is the Rock Paper Shotgun article on Actual Sunlight. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/02/11/thoughts-on-actual-sunlight/ Here is the objective review. http://www.objectivegamereviews.com/actual-sunlight-review/ Both mention that the game contains a note to the player telling them not to kill themselves after having played the game. The Rock Paper Shotgun article makes a big deal about this, includes contact information for suicide hotlines at the bottom, and so forth. The objective review just notes that the game is serious about this. They're both making the same point: this game is moving enough to make people literally consider suicide. The difference is that RPS out and out says it and then talks about how this is an example of how great the game is, whereas the objctive review can only imply that this is actually an impressive thing about the game. I'm better at telling people how I think they should be writing these things than writing them myself, but this means the archives of the site are full of reviews that work and reviews that don't, so my last tip is to suggest reading some of the reviews to get a feel for it.

I don't hang out in this thread much, and I just saw this at (sigh...) reddit - has it been posted here?

Where did the slo mo come from if not the pillsnbooze?

The more talk the better! If it were mentioned on the podcast that would be the coolest thing. More publicity is good publicity and I don't care that people know an Idle Thumbs reader made the site any more than PC Gamer should care if people know that Evan Lahti hangs out with the Thumbs sometimes. I didn't mean I would shove codes in peoples' faces - I meant it more in terms of saying "hey, I have some review codes here, does anyone want one?" I guess since people are asking questions I'll go ahead and formalize it: Welcome, Idle Thumbs reader! If you're the kind of person who saw www.objectivegamereviews.com and said "hah, that's funny," and also you can write, and also you said "maybe I could write an objective game review for Objective Game Reviews" then have I got a deal for you! You can combine all three of those previous things into one package! Step 1: Check out the review guidelines to see if they're something you feel like conforming to. THIS GUIDE IS TOP SECRET DO NOT I REPEAT DO NOT SHARE IT. Step 2: If that sounds good, you can write a review and send it to me (either via email - reviews@objectivegamereviews.com or just post it here or PM me or whatever who cares). Otherwise if you have questions/concerns/want to break free from the fascistic guidelines I impose, do the same thing - email me or post here or whatever. Step 3: If you skipped step 2 and want a review code for a game, find some other way to convince me that you know how to write and I'll tell you what we've got on offer. Step 4: Anyone who ends up writing a review will go through a process where I set you up with an account on the site so that you can post with a byline and everything but that comes later. Step 5: If you can write a Minecraft review that would be pretty cool. I've never played Minecraft but the kids fucking love it, you know what I mean? Step 6: I forgot to mention but you can review any game you want aside from ones I've reviewed already. Reviews I have planned which I could definitely write myself (in case you don't want to duplicate efforts) include: Anne Hathaway's Erotic Mouthscape, Audiosurf, Become a Great Artist in Just 10 Seconds, BioShock 2, Minerva's Den, BioShock Infinite, Brogue, Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective, Cart Life, Dear Esther, Deus Ex, Gun Godz, InFlux, King of Dragon Pass, Mass Effect 3 Citadel DLC, Mass Effect 3 Omega DLC, Miasmata, Mirror's Edge, Portal, Qrth-phyl, Receiver, Renegade Ops, Room of 1000 Snakes, Tachyon The Fringe, The Last Express, Thief, XCOM Enemy Unknown. But like I said if you really wanted to you could write a review for one of those.

Sign me up for an AAA Amnesia clone with a sweet license. Apparently they've re-recorded the original Alien soundtrack with an all new orchestra in high quality so in my mind this game has already done a good thing.

I have been holding off on this because the earlier version came out for PC and hasn't been updated yet with the new 868-HACK iOS stuff. I've heard great things though. It's nominated for the Excellence in Design award in the 16th annual IGF awards

I wasn't planning on uncredited work - the stuff I write is uncredited but I can always go back and change the name of the authors on the post from "Objective Game Reviews" to something else in the system, which will autoupdate all the existing reviews. New authors would get their own account on the site and their name would be attached to their reviews. I would want people to know who had written each review - whether it was the mysterious editor in chief or someone else.

Games that won't let me turn mouse acceleration off make me feel like I'm playing a drunkard.

I'm glad I made someone laugh. Actually that brings me to what I wanted to post about, in a roundabout way. You see, I try to work humor the reviews, or at least into the reviews that aren't worse for having jokes (I'm not sure the Actual Sunlight review is a proper place for jokes, for instance - there's just not enough contextualization in so stark a review to also joke around). That's a lot easier when I have more time to work on reviews. But I also want to review a lot of games. And I'm a busy dude. So time is hard to come by. Which brings me to what I wanted to post about: it's getting close to a week after launching the site and I think I'm more or less getting a handle on how I want the site to work and so on, which means I'm thinking about starting to bring people in who want to be brought in. The good things about this would be more content, it would give a chance for people who want to write these things to write these things and post them, and also maybe let me farm out some of these review codes since I'm already slightly overwhelmed and although I could review everything, it would be more considerate to the devs if their games were reviewed sooner rather than later and I can't do them all. The bad things about this would be the two things that have kept me from bringing people on so far: I want to make sure I know (and contributors know) what the site is and how it works before I bring other people on (in the sense that I want to know what an "objective" review is and what the best practices are when writing objective reviews) and that's tough data to collect when the site hasn't been going for a while, plus I feel weird about asking people to write for free for a website that has ads. (That latter worry has been largely ameliorated having re-read Walker's articles, where he clarifies that he only means for people not to work for free for profitable sites, but still...) So, since this is sort of a Thumbs endeavor as much as it is anything else, I figured I'd ask for advice. What do you all think? Do the people here who want to try their hand at objective reviews want to try their hand NOW? Also I think I'd want to be kind of picky/a jerk about writing quality and so forth, so this might lead to hurt feelings in the event that anyone wants to write without having the writing chops to do so (which is not a knock against anyone who can't write - writing is hard!).

My bad! I edited some stuff just now - as a one man job by someone short on time it can be tough to proofread. In any case the twitter account is alive again - praise Lord Twitter! - so I'm going to try to go back to posting more reviews more often.

I could put goatse on that page for all it matters, nobody's ever really going to see it.

Close - I googled a bit and I figured it out - I need a default.html file in the subdirectory named after the URL I want. So, now that's done. I have a temporary /wizard page up. Go check it out if you want. I'll update it later with something fancy.

Ugh you're right. I'll have to rectify that soon. Except I can't figure out how to add a page just at "/wizard" - so far I can only get "/wizard.html" to work.

"C'est un excellent troll. J'adore."