Right so New Games Journalism, this new(ish) fangled way of writing where it’s no typical review and your told pro’s and con’s, usually summed up into a “10/10” system. That’s what we’re mostly use to, and to some extent I think it works, ill come to this a bit later though, but this New Game Journalism completely throws that out the window.
Okay I’ll admit it took me a while to grasp the whole idea of this style, and at first I really did not like it, and I can honestly say after reading through a few different articles, I still don’t like it. The main problem I think I have with it is I am so use to your typical review style, now maybe I’m missing the point of these as they are not reviews as such, but more just a story told from a gamers perspective.
Now I use to always read NGamer (right back to when it was called N64 Magazine), so I’ve always been fairly happy with the way these types of reviews/previews work. And yeah Mike was telling us the marks out of ten systems doesnt really tell use anything, which I do agree, I mean if one game gets 9/10 for graphics, and the other 9.5/10, but there two complete different styles, which is the better game. But I think that’s taking it too literally, I think it’s more of a guide line to what to expect a game to be like, I mean if a game gets 3/10, and another gets 9/10, chances are that game that got three isn’t going to have the greatest graphics in the world, same for the other types of scores (gameplay, Lifespan etc.). Just to add to that a bit I do still tend to read review on n-europe, but don’t let the review influence me to decide weather a game is good enough or not. Mostly reviews are written by someone who is getting paid, and so if they write a inaccurate review it doesn’t matter much to them as they still get pretty penny for it, but some reviews that are written by everyday sorts of people are more likely to more reliable, and I find forums are the best place to find out about a game as they are just talking about It for the sake of talking about it, not for the money or anything else.
Anyway back to these NGJ writings. One of the one’s I actually did enjoy a bit more is “Bow, Nigger”. Staring to read it I thought to myself I really don’t like this style, and I kind of did that thing where you read but think about something else thus not really taking in what you’re reading. But then it starting to get interesting, he started telling an epic like story that caught my interest (possible because it was about a star wars game I particularly like). But still while he was telling this it went off course a few times and didn’t read too well, but by the end of the article I was thinking that it was actually pretty good to read, had a good narrative that told the tale well, but as a review was awful. This is mainly because it didn’t explain any part of the game. Now while I’ve been writing this I’ve been thinking more and more I completely do not understanding this and will end up not getting to any point, so I looked up NGJ on wiki. It does say that NGJ is not necessarily a review but more of a narrative piece that describes an experience or journey of a game, now in that sense then “Bow, Nigger” is pretty good (if you cut out about half of it)
Now to do the typical top gear review style, as much I dislike this style of writing, and how it drags on sometimes, goes into some other random dribblings, has that style by where I will be reading it but also be thinking about something else so I don’t actually take in about what I’ve read, despite all of those things it’s actually not that bad. For the style that it uses to convey the experiences in games, like with the “Bow, Nigger” article even know that could of done with half of it cut out, it actually works pretty well sometimes, but I still highly doubt I will ever read one of these NGJ articles again, I think I’ll just stick to my useless “marks out of ten” style.
No comments:
Post a Comment