Game review blog feedback

[Mr. E]

LFVNR-Lemmasoft Forums Visual Novel Reviews

Ok, I think that after 20 game synopses and reviews it's high time to get some feedback on what we're doing. For the last four months reviwers have posted reviews and synopses of different games in a certain weblog, which can be seen here:http://visualnovelreviews.blogspot.com/
The number of reviews has grown fairly steadily ( although since the most active member of the group has temporarily distanced himself in order to complete some very important matters in real life, the blog pace has slowed down lately ) and although we're still a bit distant from the day when we'll see reviews on all the existing games in the archive, hopefully we're not too far behind either.
But the question is... Why? Why does the blog exist? What is it's purpose? And is it accomplishing what it's meant to be? And here, we hit a major question.

Because, quite frankly, I don't know this anymore. Feedback has been sparse, at best, and I feel lost when writting my reviews, which end up wandering further and further from the main topic.

I'd apreciatte if people responded to the poll question with a post, explaining their thoughts and opinions better, but if not then even a quick vote is already worthwhile. I'm just trying to understand what is the true purpose of the blog, and if we should change our current style to better serve this purpose.

[monele]

At first I read it because I knew the games and wanted to see another opinion for those I liked (just to bask again in the good feeling of knowing it's a nice game).
And now, sometimes, I'll read them to know if a game that doesn't immediately appeal to me might still be worth it.

[Vatina]

I agree with monele, it's about the same for me. I think the blog is a good idea, since it gives some info about the games that you can't find from just looking at the entries in the renai archive.

[DaFool]

Sometimes, when I like the game

This also goes to whether I'm also the creator of the game in question.

Usually, I know my tastes beforehand, and will play something independent of prior reviews. Reading reviews is only to confirm things. But I usually end up playing most visual novels in English, since it is my primary niche within the anime fandom.

It seems that this extracts more effort from you guys than is really necessary. My suggestion is to slow down and take your time.

What is the purpose of these reviews? It is to make people aware of original english language visual novels! Since it is hosted on blogspot and not renai.us or renpy.org nor visualnews.net, it is yet another artillery for exposure. When someone looks for visual novels in Google, they will hit upon your reviews. Then they will download the game and find the community reviews in Lemmasoft.

[monele]

I'd suggest inserting the words "anime" and "game" somewhere on the main page to ensure these keywords get picked up too (if it's not already done of course!). Just me thinking people searching for Visual Novels might be already "converted".

[DaFool]

Look what I found that reviews the Jp side:

http://blickwinkelsan.blogspot.com/

How about changing the background to something non-plain-white, as well as inserting imageshack tags to spice things up a little?

The reviews themselves show they took a lot of thought to write, but I can't help but notice there isn't much 'Visual' to them.

Just a couple of screenshots from the RAA should be enough.

[JQuartz]

Hmm... No "Sometimes, when I like a game but have no time to play/download it" option...

This is just my personal opinion but sometimes I feel the reviews aren't very credible because it's written by community members. It's something like a Nintendo employee's review on Nintendo Wii will hold little weight.

[chronoluminaire]

I sadly don't have time to play all the OELVNs that are released. But I'll tend to judge by the games' threads on this forum whether I'm going to like them or not. I read the reviews blog not really to decide which games to play, but because it's fun reading about OELVNs generally, whether I've played them or not, although for those that I think I'm likely to play I'll avoid reading the spoilers.

This is just my personal opinion but sometimes I feel the reviews aren't very credible because it's written by community members. It's something like a Nintendo employee's review on Nintendo Wii will hold little weight.

I tend to agree with this. None of the games get reviewed negatively - which is very understandable, and I'm not sure I could give a negative review to an OELVN either. But it does mean that the positive comments count for less.

[Mr. E]

This is just my personal opinion but sometimes I feel the reviews aren't very credible because it's written by community members. It's something like a Nintendo employee's review on Nintendo Wii will hold little weight

How about changing the background to something non-plain-white, as well as inserting imageshack tags to spice things up a little?

Both of these are valid points, but they really depend on the objective of the blog, which is the big question mark in the first case.
Should we judge the games more severely, giving grades and saying all the negative things as well as the positive ones? That would only make sense if the purpose of the blog was to rank the games and give a fairly impartial view of them (admittedly, none of us ever had this objective while writting the reviews).
Should we try to make the forum more atractive to outsiders? Download links, pictures and maybe even an separate article for beginners about OELVNs and Lemmasoft Forums... All these could be possible, it just depends on two questions: Is this what we want? And if it is, how can we make it better?
To be frank, as my reviews progressed my objective grew fuzzier and fuzzier. I mean... At the beginning, the blog was just going to be a place where I could put my game reviews. Just that. It wasn't MEANT to be anything else.
I enjoy writting reviews because I tend to think more about the game, and I also like to think that, in a small way, I may be helping the author to get a little better. People that read my reviews in the actual game threads (if such beings exist) will know that I always try to put a negative comment, even when I can't find one (in which case I usually nitpick something or dig deeper trying to find some flaw) just so that I may point something that the author, being too close to the game, did not notice.
I try not to be hard, since my purpose in these "post reviews" (not to be confused with the blog reviews) is to encourage the creator and help him/her get a little better (of course... My comments are fairly personal, and may be wrong).
But the weblog reviews have a different purpose, at least for me... Right now the direction of the reviews are going somewhat in the "I want to point out the good things in the OELVNs and want to talk about the whole game creation scenario...". I like seeing the best things of certain games and thinking "Heck, we could learn something with that." And I also like writting about some things that I think should be dicussed, or at least pointed out.
In the Black Pencil review I mentioned marginally about the differences between games then and games now, and that there may be some things from the old games we could learn about. In my River Trap review I mentioned about the value and importance of reviews, something which I actually decided to expand into a forum post here.
To put it shortly: I use the reviews to talk about a certain more general subject, and usually the game inspires that subject. So the review is about the game and at the same time it's about other things. I haven't done that too much either because, as I have already mentioned, I don't know if that's what I should be doing.
Hmm... Sorry for the long post, I just wanted to explain my position a little better. Thanks for discussing this and giving your honest opinions everybody.

EDIT-This paragraph was edited so it could be read more easily.

[monele]

Sh... shorter... p... paragraphs... please @_@...

I will add that I really like how there is a synopsis part and the actual possibly spoilerish review. It's never amusing to read something while fearing the spoiler at every corner... so being able to get an idea of what the game is about in a bit more depth while not spoiling the experience is great.

[JQuartz]

Maybe the review should be aimed at promoting instead since it kind of have that promoting rather than a assessing feel to it. Furthermore like chronoluminaire said, I don't think any of us can review a game negatively and subsequently, credibly.

[musical74]

I gotta agree with Monele.....that's a LONG paragraph!

When I review a game, I try to give a detailed analysis of what I liked and disliked about it. I find this to be much more helpful to the gamemakers that a simple *This is great!!!* or *This bites the big one!!!* By giving a detailed analysis, the authors know what I thought about it based on a series of points. Did the story make sense? Were the characters beievable? Was there music, and if so, was it compelling? What about spelling mistakes? Was the writing well done or was there a lot of filler text?

I like to think monele had a good idea on what I liked about MB

the writing, the characters, the idea...pretty much everything

and what I didn't like

saving the captain's men, hard

because I gave a detailed account of it...I try and do that with all the games here, what I like and dislike about the games...that way they have an idea of whether I'll like the game or not

[Ignosco]

Apologies for taking so long to reply to this:

I agree that the reviews mainly focus on the positives, and aren't particularly objective. A objective, critical review wouldn't be much fun to write for a free game - especially when most game makers probably know what things are lacking/are unpolished etc in their creations. Other sorts of reviews, like the satirical SA hentai ones would be difficult to write well, and wouldn't give a good assessment of the game either.

I haven't really thought about why I write these reviews - I guess my reasons for doing this are probably the same as Mr. E's. It's also a opportunity for me to improve my relatively poor writing skills .

If there is enough interest to keep the blog going, then I'll keep writing reviews for it. I hope I'm managing to understand where the creator was coming from in my reviews - I did feel a bit out of my depth with a few games, as it took me at least two playthroughs to feel that I was getting a sense of what the game was about. There are a few VNs that I'd like to review (eg Poisoned), that I don't think I could really do justice to, (as I've never read/seen DN).

[usul]

I never knew of this blog, but browsing it just now made me want to try out the games that are reviewed. It might be a good idea to link to the games in the reviews. This might increase the comments

[Ignosco]

I thought the links were in the synopsis section for all the reviews, but it looks like they've been omitted in the most recent ones. I'll fix that up when I post the next synopsis/review (hopefully sometime tonight).