When Reviews Go Bad, con't.
The Incoherent Review
These are the reviews that you can’t classify as unjustifiably
harsh or unbelievably gushing, because you can’t figure out what
on God’s green earth the writer is trying to say. Some sound as
if the writer had run the article through a poor language translation
program a few times. Some examples (all examples used are pulled
from actual published reviews, and were far too easy to find– no
names are used to protect the guilty:) 
"The player takes a role of a medieval Japanese ruler
on a mission to gain land, and in the process, make the conquered
territories hail his mighty rule through good management. Shogun
combines the Risk feature in such a way that it provides 3D, real-time
battles in place of dices and cards, but it also adds the elements
common to RTS games like, resources management and units development.
Our readers should realize that the mix of different elements represents
an unequal balance, since the gameplay accent lays mostly on turns
and battles… "
Here’s a hint: if a reader has to read your sentences two or three
times to understand what you’re trying to say, it might not be a
candidate for the Pulitzer. Another example:
"NHL 2001 is hockey the way hockey is meant. You can’t
see too much of graphics like these! At least I can’t! This isn’t
some air hockey game, just because it’s on a computer. No sir –
when you hit a person in NHL 2001, you’ll know it and if you shoot
a shot in NHL 2001 you will feel the power that you can’t get in
a computer game, not these days, and even the skating is like skating
on ice, if you know what I mean."
Um – no. I don’t know what you mean, and no one else does either.
I could fill pages with chunks of reviews that boast prose at least
this bad, and you can probably think of a myriad of reviews in which
you wondered how anyone could allow this crap to go public. And
frankly, even when you move away from the extremes that such drivel
represents, into the realm of the "average" review, the
writing is no great shakes. Why is the bar set so low in computer
game reviews? Why is it that so many game writers wear their dangling
participles like medals on their chest and wouldn’t know a gerund
from a gerbil?
The root cause is the proliferation of gaming sites (even as
many good gaming outlets are shutting their doors.) Do you want
to be a computer gaming writer? No problem, and precious few requirements.
If you are willing to write for free, there are web sites that would
love to publish your work (and if you can’t get anyone to accept
your writing, just start up your own web site!) And unlike the top
professional sites, the editors who run many of these outlets wouldn’t
know the Chicago Manual of Style if it fell on their keyboards.
Just as the expansion of pro baseball teams results in .500 pitchers
getting $10 million dollar contracts, so the multitude of places
that publish game reviews makes it easy for anyone, with writing
talent or not, to be a geen-u-ine game critic.
Does that mean that the level of writing professionalism is
directly proportional to the amount that an outlet pays its writers?
No sir. There are sites that pay low or nothing and maintain a high
degree of quality, and there are places that pay well that allow
the occasional stinkeroo. The real key is the people who run the
site and edit the articles, and there are some folks who are good
editors and good writers who run low paying sites. In general, however,
the major paying websites and magazines will rarely (note I didn’t
say never) be guilty of allowing incoherent reviews, with regard
to style and grammar, for a couple of basic reasons. One: the competition
amongst writers to capture a place in the writing stables of the
higher paying outlets is fierce enough that a writer with poor basic
writing skills just isn’t going to get in the door. Two: the editors
at the major sites and magazines are pros. While freelancers love
to gripe about editors changing their precious prose, the truth
is that a good editor makes your work better and a great editor
can make minor changes that turns a good article into a great one.
So, that means that you just need to stick with the high priced
web sites and the major mags and you’ll be treated to nothing but
high quality reviews, right? Heh heh… yeah, right. While the language
in the reviews may more closely resemble the Queen’s English, no
site or magazine is immune to the errors that result in crapola
reviews.
Why do some bad games get
good reviews?
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