My Experiences as a Videogame Reviewer: Month 4

Optional title this time would be: The jump online.
Now, unfortunately for those who read these little blogs on my Reviewer and writer career, most of the stuff I produce has been in German and not available online. Well, good news! At least you can see my stuff online now, so you can actually have a look and read it, if you're able to understand German. I'll put the links to the articles available online into the titles of the reviews.

This being said, how was this fourth month? Overall, I would say it was quite hard. December did not have a lot of high-profile releases, so it was actually quite a pain to look out for what games to review. Of course, some planning ahead is always helpful, but at the end of the day, you are kind of at the mercy of videogame publishers to deliver a big title. On the other hand, you can get some much needed time to cover the 'smaller' games, mostly indie games and/or games on download platforms or for mobile devices. They might come off as filler at times, but they are different from those big releases and thus sometimes more fun to write about.

I won't include Pictures this time, since the reviews online always have two with them.

Alright, here are the games for the month of December:

Epic Mickey (Wii)

This has been quite hard to review. I am a huge fan of most of the things Warren Spector does, so my own, personal expectations for this game were huge. Needless to say, that I was disappointed by a solid, but not revolutionary experience. Still, I couldn't give the game a negative review, since my readers are mostly inexperienced people when it comes to videogames, meaning, they don't have those expectations. So, I told them about the obvious problems the game had, and how much fun one can have with it.

Still, the review was fun to write, because I had the chance to introduce the readers to Warren Spector and his design philosophy. It's always my personal aim to give some background intel about who created the game and what their position is in the industry. These are information that exceed the minimum of what a review has to be about, but I always thought it was the most fun to write part. It's also part of what I would call the added value of a review.

Crazy Taxi (XBLA)

Very interesting review to write, because arcade games are so much easier to explain and so much more fun to write about. The wackier the game, the funnier becomes your review. Since arcade game concepts are fairly easy to describe and there is no narrative to speak of, these reviews tend to be very straight forward affairs.

I had some experience with Crazy Taxi before it hit the download platforms, so I did not have to invest a whole lot of time into playing this one. I was thus able to invest more time into the review and actually managed to make it funnier and more pleasant to read. One of the few reviews I am really happy with!

Donkey Kong Country Returns

This was pretty much the only review that has been easy to write. The game was quite hard, so I gave myself two weeks time to play it properly and had a lot of fun with it. I have always been happy with the Donkey Kong Country games, so here I had a little bit more of a trouble really describing how this game works, or rather, why it actually works. It's also one of my reviews that are the most fun to read and a lot of people really liked it.

Bit.Trip Fate

I have been urging to write a review about this one. First of all, I love the stuff the people at Gaijin Games do, and I was very happy to give them quite a lot of room in the newspaper. I had to describe a lot of concepts surrounding their Retro-concepts and how they are re-evaluated in their games, which was actually really complicated to pull off in an understandable way. However, it worked out just fine and I even had some time to talk about older Bit.Trip games in the process. I'm very happy with this one.

Infinity Blade

I started out writing this review feeling in a very positive way about this game, but when the review was done, it was way more negative as I initially had expected it to be. As I described the story of the game, I noticed so many little bad things about it, that it kind of ruined the game for me. The review was very fun to read through and it was a really interesting experience, because I normally know why I like or dislike a game. Here, I suddenly found out that I did not like the game as much as I first thought I would. This is also different from my Medal of Honor review, where I first did not know why I disliked the game so much. My guess is, the added introspection told me what I actually thought about it.


Well, this is it for the fourth month! I hope you enjoyed this, and if you have any questions, leave them at the comment section, I'll answer them. If you want to follow me on twitter, @Subenu is the place where you can find me.

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