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Editor's Challenge Preliminary 2 Comments February 27, 2007 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: Brandon, Jakub, and JCal are at it again, this time with critiques of entries for Preliminary 2!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 5 ) |
Brandon: In my opinion, your entry desperately needs a proper intro that introduces the product being reviewed. It would also be nice if you had headers for your paragraphs, so the header for your first paragraph would be something like “Chassis” and your next group of paragraphs “Display” etc. I also think you should provide your own benchmarks instead of relying on someone else’s. You could’ve used free programs like 3DMark, PCMark, and SiSoft Sandra for that purpose. A little more depth would have been good as well, for instance, you never listed the complete specs of the system being reviewed – components like the HDD and CPU were left out completely.
Overall it’s a decent user review or mblog post, but not up to the level of a professional review, more depth and a coat of polish is needed.
Space: The final frontier by cptcaveman
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Brandon: With comments like “There were many set backs such as having a black person and female at that as an officer, a Russian, an Asian pilot, an alien science officer, but despite all this he still kept going on and on” you really do come across as a caveman. The original Star Trek series was groundbreaking in this regard, it wasn’t a setback, and I think Gene Roddenbery would agree. I also don’t see how your entry will inspire game developers, as you don’t provide any feedback on how their games can be improved. For an excellent example of this, check out millroy’s post “Dear Star Trek Legacy”.
FPS Girl in an MMORPG World
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Jakub: I continually find myself surprised by this entry. Given that I’ve never seen anything you’ve written before, that may be an odd fact but it’s best explained by your inconsistency. You’re hit and miss on the humor, batting about .500. Lots of foul outs that amuse but don’t inspire a smile, a couple of strikes, and a couple of decent hits. Of more concern is your inability to look past “I”. Granted, this is a personal experience entry, but you really make it far too personal by constantly talking about yourself. Try talking through your character. Your grammar isn’t bad, but you do make some strange choices. One afternoon, at my local store, I picked up a copy of a computer journalism magazine known as “PC Gamer”. “PC Gamer”? Do we really need the quotes? Are you contemptuous of PC Gamer, or simply introducing it as a marvelous new oddity? You’re just going to make poor Vederman cry if you keep writing like that, he’s a sensitive guy you know.
Tomorrow Comes Today
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Jakub: I respect your writing in a technical sense and you do a good job in avoiding a rant, but I just can’t buy into your argument at all. Your logic is sketchy at best and you don’t support your statements with any kind of serious authority. Gaming is more expensive now than before? Are you certain about that? I remember my parents paying almost $5000 for a 486DX/33 with 8MB of RAM, a 15” CRT, a 1MB S3 video card and a whopping 120MB hard drive, just over a decade ago. You can get a Dell XPS 710 with a quad-core CPU/GPU setup for that kind of money now. Game prices have remained remarkably flat over the past fifteen years. The in-store cost of a PC game lags significantly behind inflation. In your paragraph about Gears of War, you effectively punch a huge hole in your argument yet never address it. I’ll give a B- for the writing but an F for logic.
| More reviews! | Page:: ( 2 / 5 ) |
Jakub: Wee Man is a short, angry, funny guy who gets hurt a lot in Jackass. Wii Man should be the title of your article – it’s short, angry, funny. Unfortunately, it’d be random enough in a blog or message board. It has no place as a feature on FiringSquad. Kudos on the humor though.
JCal: Way too short and, well, it didn't make any sense. This one is perhaps the oddest article yet to be entered in this competition. Pass.
The Law of Proportional Decline in Game Complexity
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Jakub: I’ll grant you that Lyle was out of line for scoring you a 1 for the typo in the subject, but this is the dryest article I’ve ever had the mispleasure of reading. Not to mention just plain wrong. The American education system makes this Canadian cry. A “law” is something that’s true in all cases, something that can be proved through logic as always true. Consequently, to agree with you, you’d have to demonstrate the superiority of Pong over Wing Commander, and Wing Commander (God bless that game) over Half-Life 2. Even if we don’t take “law” literally, I’d have to believe that Mario 64 is somehow more complex than the latest Zelda. Oh, and never number paragraphs. This isn’t the Treaty of Versailles.
Bigfoot Killer NIC review
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Jakub: OMG! Charts! Brandon’s gonna love you already. Question is, where did they come from? Did you make them yourself? Your tone is a bit casual, especially for a hardware review. Is (bleh, that just disgusts me so much. The things I do for you guys...) really necessary? You also make a factual error about CPU vs GPU limitations. The fact is that most users choose whether their systems are GPU or CPU limited by choosing what resolution and with what graphics options they play with. I’d like to see more work from you, just try to have a professional tone and explain where your benchmarks came from. If you made them yourself, provide a clear, point by point description of your system. This article, however, wouldn’t pass.
JCal: I would have liked to have seen a longer review but overall the author goes over the pros and cons of the Killer NIC card well. It's really hard to evaluate a product like this accurately but he manages to do so with a minimal of over-the-head technical jargon.
Make me a gamer again!
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Jakub: Interesting choice, editing your previous entry. I love the effort you went to in collecting the media, especially the ColecoVision commercial. You present a good point and are generally clear with it. Your casual tone makes sense given the context of the entire article. If I could recommend three things however:
For next round, try to tackle something of substance. You’ve proven you can do editorials, try to show you can do a review as well.
JCal: This article is a reworking of a previous entry but it has enough new items in it to make it an all new feature. I liked the author's way of presenting his arguments of the need to bring in more people to games and his use of illustrations was well handled.
| Yet more articles | Page:: ( 3 / 5 ) |
Jakub: I’m baffled by the low user ratings you’ve gotten. You’ve put in a ton of effort and it shows. You divide the article with headings, some of them amusing, some of them not. The only complaint I have is that you make the usual rookie mistakes: you write in first person, you talk at the reader, and for some reason you capitalized every letter of the Iron Man heading. Just one question. What in the world is a Reviewer Tilt? I’ve never understood that and I wonder if anyone else does either.
Brandon: This is a solid, very well-written review. You provided lots of depth with good examples, and your article was easy to read. I also enjoyed your screenshot captions. Don’t worry about the length of your review, I think you were right on there. I think the reason why your score is so low is because the other entrants realize just how good your entry is, as this is a very good article!
21st Century Computing with Victorian-Era Tech
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Jakub: I laughed. When you're engrossed in an RPG or enjoying Pink Floyd concert footage you don't want to hear a wind tunnel whooshing on your desk. Possibly my favorite sentence of the entire competition.
JCal: I wasn't sure exactly what this feature was going to be about at first but the author managed to write something that got me thinking a bit differently on PCs and that's no small task.
Review – Scurge: Hive (NDS)
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Jakub: Rather decent! A bit too short and you do rely on first-person commentary like all rookies, but if you stop talking I/you/we/me and go into a little more depth, you’d have the makings of a solid reviewer. I’m not expecting a 2500 word review, but even a handheld game usually merits about 900-1000. Better to be concise than full of filler, however.
The Ideal Motherboard for Power Users
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Jakub: You organize the article very well and make sensible points. The difficulty is that many people may not take you seriously because of your grammar. Take the paragraph that starts with “Assuming that you got no problems with filling up the ram slots”. It isn’t very clear what you’re getting at there and your tone is rather unprofessional. Here’s how I’d write it, assuming I’m understanding your point:
Even if you’re lucky enough to find a motherboard that can run with memory in all four RAM slots without issues, try filling up all the PCI plugs. Take a standard motherboard, pop in a SLI or Crossfire setup, a Creative X-Fi for sound, Adaptec SCSI card, a video editing/TV tuner, and a wireless 802.11G adapter. The average system simply will not work with all its PCI slots used, assuming you can actually physically fit the cards in. Whether you fiddle with the bus master, adjust PCI latency, manually assign IRQs, or even wipe your hard drive and do a clean installation with the most stable drivers, your stability will always be compromised.
Quite a difference, no?
Brandon: Your article contains numerous grammatical errors that need to be fixed ASAP in my opinion. I like your idea of the perfect motherboard though, a legacy-free motherboard with passive cooling would be nice, although I’d replace the clear CMOS switch you mention with a simple button instead. ASUS has also begun integrating flash memory onto some of their higher-end mobos as well, this is similar to Intel’s Robson technology.
| Even more | Page:: ( 4 / 5 ) |
Jakub: Other than “but the designer was bold enough to present many new stuff, and to combine a lot of old stuff”, nothing really stood out in this article. You make a common point about gameplay though you do concede we have seen progress. Perhaps your argument is more “is gameplay developing fast enough”, rather than why designers aren’t focusing on it? This a complex theme and I’m not sure you quite grasp that. Looking at games like Allegiance, Majesty, or Sacrifice, you can see that people are leery of something that’s too different. Show me you’ve got the chops to handle a tough subject or I’ll chew you up and spit you out in a debate.
The Indie 500 – Why Independent Games are Important to All Gamers
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Jakub: Solid, but you need to back your argument up with more examples of indie games and how they’ve affected me. It would also help to divide your article a bit with headings. Right now I get the “wall of text crits you for 237748 damage” feeling. Also, is Freedom Force really indie? I’m not sure.
JCal: Here's another article that presents his argument well, this time on the subject of independent game development. I would have liked to have seen more specific exampled of indie games presented in the piece but it's still worth reading
The RTS Myth and Its Effects on the Industry
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Jakub: Your actual point seems to be “Turn-based = good, real-time = bad!” but you cherry pick your examples. I understand you miss turn-based games, and so do I, but RTS games have their place and have evolved past many of their initial limitations. Dawn of War is an example of a RTS based off a turn-based game that works extremely well. Homeworld, Total Annihilation, and Sacrifice are games that would be extremely difficult to translate into turn-based format. Your article crosses the rant line several times. Rants aren’t always bad, but they need to be consistent.
The Most Influential Game of the Past 20 Years
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Jakub: A compelling and well-thought out argument in favor of Quake. Controversy never hurts in an editorial, and Quake’s enough of a contender to be taken seriously but not so obvious as to be controversial. However, your formatting is terrible. Try to keep your paragraphs shorter.
GPGPU and the High Performance Computing Arena
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Brandon: I liked the article, it was a well written intro the theory behind GPGPUs and why they are useful. Unfortunately though I have a feeling that this writeup may be too technical for its intended audience, and you use way too many acronyms without explaining them thoroughly enough. I would suggest you submit a second entry just to cover your bases. Clearly your technical knowledge is there, I’m just not sure if this entry will be enough to get you into the second round. As it stands now, you’d be in my top 15, but there are many entries that I’d rank higher than this one.
| Hardware Rainbow Six Cooling | Page:: ( 5 / 5 ) |
Brandon: While this article was a nice trip down memory lane, I’m not quite sure you made your point given your examples. I think you focused on the hardware side of the equation too much, without discussing the software that went along with the hardware. For instance, you could have given specific examples that applied to you. In my case, I could describe getting a math coprocessor for my 386 so I could run Falcon 3.0 with the highest realism settings, or a Sound Blaster for voices in Wing Commander. You’ve listed your hardware upgrades, but you didn’t explain what games you upgraded for and why. You then could have gone into detail explaining how much better the game was as a result of your upgrade. Finally, you’d fast forward to 2007 and how today’s latest upgrades don’t really affect gameplay, rather they tend to only improve performance and eye candy.
I just don’t see any of that kind of depth here, instead it’s more of a history of computer hardware. The article also needs to be cleaned up grammatically.
Review: Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six
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Brandon: You did a nice job with your Rainbox Six review. You’ve got a solid intro, good sentence structure and few grammatical errors. I don’t think you’ll have any problems getting into round 2.
The Culture of Cooling Heats Up
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JCal: Here is a feature article that combines personal anecdotes, clean and clear writing and humor to present a subject that normally wouldn't have any of these features; PC cooling tech. It was a pleasure to read something about a hardcore hardware topic that deviated from the standard.