New Post Format

When I was in school writing papers and such, I always found it was much easier to do things quickly if I drew up a formula to follow. Too, it makes things easier to peruse when you know just where to find the information you're looking for.  There will still be, of course, the occasional short essay like the posts I have made in the past, but I'd like to try and do something that makes this blog both easier to read and faster to write. To that end I'm going to try and make my posts about new games more formulaic.

I plan to post a few times in the near future using this formula and then I can decide how I want to change it. For now, I'm going to be writing about a paragraph or so discussing how a game satisfies the following categories and assigning to each an entirely subjective score out of 100 points:

Gameplay: Gameplay is the most important category. This is where I will talk about whether the game is fun to play, if the controls are intuitive, what games are similar to this one, how steep the learning curve is for new players and so on. This is the most general category, and will typically include the brunt of my thoughts on the game among its competitors.

Graphics: The aesthetic feel, the quality of the games effects, the colors, and so on will be critiqued here. Game graphics, in my opinion, tend to get more attention than they deserve, yet they still make up an essential element of what separates a video game from other mediums like movies and books. There are a lot of ways that graphics can add to the experience of a game beyond mere realism, and this section is where I intend to make that point should I feel the need to do so.

Sound: While graphics tend to receive too much emphasis, sound tends to receive too little. A game's sound effects, music, and voice-over work are important parts of making a good game. More than just the quality of the sounds themselves, sounds can provide useful cues to the player and using sound for more than just background noise is important to a really great game.

Playing Time: Some games are worth hours of your time, some others are worth days. Some games you play for a few minutes at a time, others can consume entire afternoons in the blink of an eye. Understanding how you are going to play a game can be a helpful tool in deciding whether to play it at all.

Value: There are a lot of games around vying for a slice of your disposable income, and here is where I'd like to talk about  how that money is going to be converted into entertainment value. I look at a lot of F2P games, where the expense is time rather than money, but value-for-time is just as important as value-for-money. This is also where I can discuss the value of the game in other ways, as an artistic work or as an innovator in the industry.

So, with all of that, I'll be getting to work on putting this formula into practice.