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.”

Meeting with Microsoft in Seattle today to go through the latest build of Space Ark. The team have been busting a gut to get a whole bunch of features working so the game was really starting to look good. Then, as of a week ago they came up with an extra new combo feature, which make the game way more addictive. I am really looking forward to sitting down with our Account Manager and going through the new stuff with him.

We should have a new game play video showing the latest progress any day now.

In addition to meeting with Microsoft I am visit an old friend Colin Gordon, who runs Valcon Games (ever so slightly smaller than Microsoft) in Redmond, Washington.

When it’s on the iPhone App Store. Apples original app rating/reveiew system was rather flawed in its implementation. It only prompted a user to rate an application when they were removing it and, by default, had the user rating set to one star. Users who weren’t really interested in rating an app would automatically accept the default rating, leading to apps with a large number of one star reviews – and a lot of unhappy developers.

Of  course some of these users may have actually wanted to assign one star – after all they are uninstalling the app so it probably isn’t their favorite game of all time. Hoever many were almost certainly just hitting a button to accept the default as the quickest way to get through the process. Now, according to reports the version 3.0 update has the default set to no stars and the user must select a rating from one to five stars.

Users are still being prompted to rate the game while uninstalling it, which is far from ideal. It would be much better to prompt for a review after they have played the game 5 or ten times – or to not prompt at all. Leaving it to people who feel strongly about a to go and rate it. Still at least now there is a better chance that users will pause for thought and select a more meaningful rating instead of just accepting the default one star.

Gamasutra posted a story about forthcoming changes to Xbox Live Community Games and (importantly for us) Xbox Live Arcade.

“…..Microsoft also revealed that, in response to user feedback, it would add user ratings to both community games and much of the Xbox Live marketplace content, including Xbox Live Arcade and game add-ons. Ultimately, the company will add the ability for users to sort content by rating.”

A more in-depth filtering and recommendation system would be a big plus but user ratings are at least a step in the right direction.

The full piece is at http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=24008