The Weird Pixel

REVIEW POLICY

Hey there everyone!  We here at The Weird Pixel feel as though it’s about time for us to explain just how we review games.  Hopefully, after reading this you’ll have a clearer understanding of just what goes through our minds when we’re writing, giving you a better ability to judge what we say.

HOW DO WE REVIEW A GAME?

To tell you the truth, there’s no easy way around reviewing games other than playing the hell out of them.  Most of the time that’s not particularly a terrible task, and is in fact quite awesome.  I mean, playing games for a living can’t be that bad, right?  However, when you come across a truly horrible creation, it’s sometimes extremely challenging to carry on playing to completion, and you end up asking yourself is it worth it? In the end, we have to think of what’s best for you guys.  If we’re half way through a particularly average sand box action game and we just can not be bothered, what would happen if towards the end it got really awesome?  We wouldn’t have done our jobs properly… but then we’d have to consider is waiting around to get to that awesome portion of the game worth sitting through 10 hours of shovel ware?

DO WE HAVE A SPECIFIC CRITERIA?

Most review sites will have a sort of checklist of stuff to look out for within any game, such as graphics, sound, gameplay, etc, but at The Weird Pixel we do things a little differently.  We’ve sort of realized that in this day and age, every game doesn’t really focus on graphics, take the music rhythm genre.  Graphics aren’t as important as in, for example, racing games, so reviewing them to that same criteria is pretty unfair and a little dumb, if I say so myself!  Instead, at the top of our reviews we’ll include firstly some vital information on the game, for example:

Review: Prototype

Format: PS3, Xbox 360, PC

Release: US: 9th, UK: 12th June 2009

Rating: 18, Mature

Genre: Sandbox Action

Developer: Radical Entertainment

Publisher: Activision

Average – Rent it.

As you can see, we include the box art next to the information so that you know what you’re looking for when you go to pick it up in the shop, and most importantly, we include the game’s Score, in yellow.  The way that we score games works on a 5 point scale which you can see below:

Excellent – Buy it now!

Good – Pick it up!

Average – Rent it

Stale – Don’t bother

F**king Horrible – Hide from it!

As you can see, we differentiate ourselves from other reviewing publications by not relying on a number or letter point system.  The reason for this is pretty important, and means that our reviews will hopefully produce less “fan boy” anger from our audience.  Essentially, We really feel as though big decimal point systems where a game can receive a 7.8 and another game can get a 7.9 is a little bit petty, and creates divisions where they shouldn’t needn’t exist.  A lot of people will ask, well, hold on, how come this game got a 7.8 and this one got a 7.9 when they’re pretty similar in quality, and what warrants a 1% difference?  We want to eliminate all of that stuff and simply provide a friendly, clean criteria that serves its purpose in helping you guys decide what to buy.

Another important section of our reviews before the actual main bulk of text, is a second selection of bullet points, which you can see below:

Game Length

Replayability

Technical Aspects (Looks,Sounds,Controls)

Online Capabilities

Value For Money

When we got together to decide on what important factors people are looking for within a game, these are what we came up with. As you can see, traditional criteria such as graphics and sound have been placed together into one bullet point ‘Technical Aspects’ because one game may focus on graphics over sound and another may do the opposite, so we want to make sure we can focus on that particular aspect and not have to slate something that isn’t really important to a game. The other bullet points relate more to the game’s value. Does a game have multiplayer? Is it expansive? How long is the single player campaign? Does the strength of the multiplayer warrant the 5 hour single player? Those are the questions we want to help you eliminate with our reviews, so we place them right up top so that you can see straight away!

PERSONAL VERSES PROFESSIONAL OPINION

So, you’re read the score and whether or not we think it’s worth your money and now you want to know more. When you get to the main bulk of our text, you may be surprised with how much personal opinion we put into our reviews compared with other sites, and that’s because we don’t believe that we should separate what we personally enjoy from what makes a game good. Pretty much, if a game is good, we’ll enjoy it! Moreover, quite a lot of the time we’ll write our reviews in the first person, “I enjoyed this because…” etc, which other reviewing sites frown upon, but we believe that we as writers and gamers need to be on the same level as you, the reader. We’re not special, and our opinions are certainly not the be all and end all, as it were. So, that means that if you disagree with us you know that your opinion’s not wrong in any way, it’s just different. We hope that this subjectivity will help us to differentiate ourselves from other publications, and make our readers feel more on an equal level with our team.

Well, that’s it. Now that you know how we review games we hope that you’ll have a clearer understanding of what’s going through our heads when it comes to us sitting down and writing the things. All you need to remember is our core principals: Truthfulness, originality and subjectivity.