An Introduction to My Review Style

Back when I was 17, as part of my engineering curriculum at Northeastern University, I got a co-op job with Avid Technologies – the video-editing software company that you can see mentioned in the credits of many of today’s biggest movies – the summer after my freshman year.

There was, however, one slight problem – they were a software company and I was a freshman who had only taken one introductory course in C, so there really wasn’t much actual *work* they could find for me to do (not that they tried very hard, to be honest with you).

In actuality, the biggest task I ever completed there – and I am not exaggerating in the slightest – was organizing my manager’s copies of EE Times one day.

So, I essentially screwed around on the company’s dime for six months straight. I played NES games on an emulator, started writing my infamous fanfic (thanks, Demian), and messed around on the internet absorbing every bit of gaming news that I possibly could.

I posted on several different forums, got into all sorts of immature “Saturn vs. Playstation” flame wars, and went so far as to write random emails to game site editors.  (If you can’t tell, I was *really* bored!) 

Eventually, I struck up a sort of email friendship with Joe Fielder who was editing “VideoGameSpot.com” at the time, somehow ended up asking him if I could write a review for the site, and to my amazement, he said yes.  I ended up writing a review of a Saturn import shmup I’d picked up called Soukyugurentai, was paid $100 for it, and went merrily on my way.

To this day, that’s the last formal game review I’ve written.

And that’s my way of explaining to you, dear Bitmob readers, that I’m kinda out of practice on the review front (in the most roundabout way possible, of course).  But that also means that I don’t have any bad habits to break, and since this is Bitmob, I can write a review using any scoring system I want.

After giving it some thought, I’m going to use a scoring system inspired by the slightly odd Speechcraft mini-game in Oblivion, where you could pick four different ways of influencing your target and they would either Love it, Like it, Dislike it, or Hate it.

That just seems like a great way to describe our feelings about the games we play, doesn’t it?

We either Love a game, blinded to all its faults; Like it, enjoying it but wishing it could have been better; Dislike it, where the flaws frustratingly outpace things that were done right; or Hate it, where we spend the whole time wondering what the hell we’re doing wasting our time playing this trash and how anybody could have thought it was a good idea to have released it in the first place.

I like the simplicity of this system – there are no stars, happy faces, or ‘thumbs up’ to count (“Nine thumbs up?  What the hell is that?”) and no numbers to decipher.  Honestly, what in the world is the difference between a 8.2 and an 8.3, anyway?

Of course, there’s the standard disclaimer here that a review is just one person’s opinion, just because I like (or hate) something doesn’t mean that you will, so on and so forth.

I simply hope that by reading a review that I write, you’ll gain some sort of insight as to whether or not you’ll like it yourself; realize something about the game that you hadn’t quite been able to put into words; or, be further encouraged that your own opinion is the correct one and I’m just an idiot.  Whatever works for you.