Often times it takes a bad game to show a journalist’s true literary skills. Great games tend to write their own reviews, they command you to write about the same excellent features that everyone else is writing about. Bad games on the other hand allow journalists the freedom to exercise their creativity. It takes real skill to slice hundreds of wafer thin strips of flesh from the still living (and writhing) body of a game without killing it. The deserved victim should suffer until the very end of the review if the reader is to understand the full depth of its awfulness. As a prime example I give you Quintin Smith’s review of WET http://videosgames.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/wet-review/

“All told, Wet is a man who vomits on you on the bus and doesn’t even say sorry.”

Obviously as a developer I feel for the guys who worked to make the game. I know only too well how many factors outside of the developers control can result in a game failing to meet its design goals. Having said that, gamers do need to know and if you are going to put yourself/your game out there you need to take the resulting knocks.

I don’t think I have enjoyed a review quite as much since the 1992 release of Domark’s AV8B Harrier Assault for Amiga (developed by Simis). After all these years most of it is long forgotten but the line in the review which bemoaned the slow frame rate is forever burned into my mind…

“If i chopped my legs off and nailed the stumps to the floor, I could still run round the block faster than this game.”