The Age of the Broken Arcade

Arcades surely seem to be dying, some say. Other, more cynical people, may even argue that the were already pretty much dead but no matter how we look at it, it doesn’t really seem like a good time to run an arcade, with several venues slowly being converted into just another gambling place.

I’m reminded of a local arcade, now closed, that until barely a year ago was located in one of Europe’s biggest shopping malls, a privileged space that had no problem in pulling more than a thousand guests a day. And it was no small place either, with around three hundred square meters, it could fit more machines that you would realistically play in one day.

But barely any tears were shed when it closed because it was a boring place. With the exception of one of two Naomi games, everything used a gun or steering wheel and even if you are really a fan of the genres, it’s not like you would have fun as there were never any repairs, leading to practically all machines being broken or otherwise not functioning properly no matter how easy they would be to repair.

And you know it’s not an insolated case. Everywhere around the world from France to the US and with the obvious exception of Japan, all arcades seem to be in a constant state of disrepair and lack of care with rhythm game fans are by now used to operators that will never fix what used to be their biggest money-making machine.

But it goes beyond disrepair. Even if everything worked perfectly, chances are that you wouldn’t really care. You can beat Time Crisis again and open your wallet to every single redemption machine, sure, but you will truly be lucky if you can get even thirty fun minutes out of it. Nowadays arcades are so unfun they can’t seem to get anyone to spend money on them other than for sheer boredom. Those two guys who spent an euro each just to smash the buttons of your shiny roulette won’t save you when you are just a five-minute distraction rather than a genuinely fun place.

Arcades simply don’t seem to offer any services anymore, they only have a trick, one that you have already seen at that. They want a fast buck and when that way of thinking already crashed the industry in it’s golden age how do they expect to do any better?

Is this really going to bring players into your arcade?

Operators can whine and rant about the newest console game, about the Wii and the still popular Angry Birds but, at the end of the day, they are the ones responsible for this age of the broken arcade.

And it doesn’t need to be. Even with what I would say are somewhat inefficient setups, places like Star Worlds arcade have been open since 1986 and until an inept local goverment got in the way of bussiness, Arcade Infinity kept everyone impressed with their imported musical games.

They couldn’t be any more different but both manage to be good arcades, and good bussiness as well. There’s no lie or trick, as any other good place they know that if they offer something good over and over again, players will return, bringing their full wallets with them.

Because, at the end of the day, that’s what matters, you will always need to give up something if you want to become of the succesful bussinessmen. Those who see a doomed market yet don’t even bother to fix the very own machines that give them their income have no one to blame their their very own themselves and their little economic sources are bound to simply cave-in.

Erik Twice

Review: Unsung Heroes : An Over Clocked ReMix Album

Unsung Heroes OC Remix’s latest album and one you should really check out if you want to good game music to listen to. You can read my review here, at the Yard Sale Gaming blog:

# Unsung Heroes, an OCR Album (External Link)

Analysis: Harley Quinn

For some reason many people love the idea of characters in a vacumn. They seem to think that characters aren’t precision tools, that you can mix and match them in a box and get good results.

That’s patently false, of course. Whithout a meaningful relation to the rest of the work the result can’t be anything but a mess and forced writting and muddy storytelling are the most obvious problems this way of thinking has.

What I like about Harley Quinn is how clear her functions are. Nothing about her is chance, she has been carefully constructed to fit into an already quite complex world and shed light into it without changing those things that attracted us to that universe in the first place.

Harley herself as in her original appeareance in Batman: The Animated series

Like all Batman villains her character starts with the Dark Knight himself. Batman is a pessimistic man. Living in a city of shadows he feels forced to take the act of a vigilante and create a grey morality of never ending sorrow. He doesn’t enjoy fighting crime, he thinks he ought to. Notably humorless and tormented he wishes for a better world where he wouldn’t be needed.

Harley is quite the inverse. She not only doesn’t have the difficult morality Batman has but she doesn’t seem to have any real morals at all. She is cheerful, easy-going and completely oblivious of the fact that there’s something to ponder at all. She is never portrayed as evil, misguided or insane, she is just naïve and doesn’t give anything enough thought.

That’s a particularly interesting trait for Batman. He is always prepared, always trying to know, always reconsidering what he has done. For someone like him ingenuity is baffling. How can someone not reach to any conclusion after seeing the world they live in? It doesn’t make sense, he can understand being right and wrong but not caring at all? He just can’t wrap his head around it.

But all those factors also separate her from the Joker. Harley is not crazy, she could understand, she could realize, unlike the Joker there’s plenty of hope for change. This is why they clash so often and he is dissapointed with her sense of humour, it’s not really funny for sane people. The relationship with her boss is a small mirror of the Joker’s quest to break Batman’s will while the fact that she loves what apparently is a complete monster reminds us of why Batman has never killed him.

In a sense, it could be argued she’s on some kind of middle ground between the two but that’s not really true. They think she is, but she actually moves on another axis and that’s why their attemps to bring her closer fail. Batman’s logical analysis scares her while the Joker’s anarchy and carelessness is wrongly understood as some obscure philosophy she ought to learn.

We have pure conflict here. With each side unwillingly pushing her towards his enemy, she grows more and more naïve and confused, creating a wonderful vicious circle in the narrative that allows all kinds of interesting things to happen.  With her around you can explore the remaining humanity of the Joker and the importance of Batman’s no killing vow, you can ponder about the importance of reason against love or just can just have her around because she’s fun, you can be sure she won’t ruin anything.

In many ways the reason of Harley’s success is pure design. An example of fun through function if there as ever one.

Erik Twice

 

Erik Twice in review – The first year

I’m kind of surprising myself when I see I have had a blog for a whole year.  Being the procrastinator I am I expected it to last no more than two months before lazyness kicked in and it got swallowed by the abyss that is the internet.

But alas it’s still there and I don’t expect to stop anytime soon now that I can get a computer working again. It’s time to see what the good and bad of this first year of blogging!

THE BLOG ITSELF

Of course, if there’s something bad about my blog it’s the lack of updates.  It seems I  only manage to keep a good update schedule from time to time, making several contributions one month and dissapearing the next two .

This is weird because I actually write a lot of stuff that never sees the day of the day. The reason is that I wanted to make “big” articles that deeply explore any given topic, which means all those little interesting things never get posted. It’s a false dichotomy and from now on I will try to do both, it should give better results while keeping a consistent schedule.

In comparison the other problems are minor but still quite annoying. I haven’t changed that generic WordPress banner and some of the pages are kind of a mess. I plan to solve this inmediatedly, even if it requires begging my friends due my own lack of drawing skills.

THE EMTPY TABS

This one hurts because it’s lazy. I haven’t put anything useful in my profile and there’s no page explaining the scoring system. This is a top priority and one I have gotten stuck on several times. Explaining the score system is harder than I thought because it’s easy to get wordy and give two dozen different examples when it should be clean and to the point since it’s more of a categorization system for quick reference than a key part of a review.

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UNFINISHED

Have to say, I’m quite happy with the articles I wrote. They are not amazing but I would dare to say some are good and evenif they weren’t I’m learning a lot by writting them.

So far I like the FLCL review a lot. It’s kind of bland when it comes to format but it’s well-written, concise and explains what the series is about without getting into details. Of the videogame reviews the best ones are my earliest efforts, OutRun 2006 and XCOM, which were written long before the blog was even on my mind.  The reason is that I focus on the mechanics, which is easier to write about than talking about how the game makes you feel. The Doom review was not as good because the quality of the game cannot be explained by the mechanics, it’s a game purely based on level design. I’m going to try again with a Castlevania review and see how can I review a game like that because I know better now.

On the bad side, probably Munchkin is the worst. While well-written I consider it the worst review I have written, even after The Girl Who Leap Through time, which was a huge missed chance.

There were many reasons why it was bad but trying to not sound overly negative and being unsure on the changes introduced in the new edition were key. It’s not evident in the articles I have written here but I’m very, very harsh when it comes to flaws and Muchkin has it’s fair share. I was also hold back because several of the biggest ones were “fixed” in the new edition but I didn’t really have enough experience to comment on that so I felt I couldn’t hammer it for something that has been resolved but I couldn’t treat it fairly for the fixes either. What a mess!

Monopoly deserves a special mention because I commited a terrible mistake, I explained why it was bad thinking trades are perfectly zero-sum, which isn’t truwe with more than two players. I got too wrapped around the idea of explaining trades in a simple manner that I simply did it wrong. Thankfully it was pointed to me and now I can be more careful.

The analysis have been well-received but the quality is mixed. The Fight Club analysis was good but the Team Fortress 2 Art one was cut short and promised far more than it delivered.  The rest are fine, tough kind of experimental.

I have to admit there are some articles I haven’t written yet and I very much should. “Why Dominion is nothing like MTG” is a big culprit here but I don’t seem to be able to write it without bloat, so it will take a complete rewrite. The Beginner’s Guide to Musical games is half complete with most games done and researched throughly.

Well that’s it! Feel free to comment on what you think made the blog good or bad, it’s always welcomed!

Erik Twice

Review: Steam “Portugal” expansion map (AA) (Boardgame)

Originally designed for Age of Steam, Portugal is a free expansion map for three to four players that not only works very well with Steam but also has the designer’s approval to do so. With an unique layout and accesible for newbies while interesting for experts it has become one of my group’s favourite maps and probably the second we play most.

Original version of Portugal

With only 83 hexes to build on the map’s narrowness is the main characteristic of this expansion. While mantaining a link to Lisbon, key city of the map, players strive to be the first to cross the map from north to south, taking all the bottlenecks before their opponents can build there.

But Portugal is not just a race. While extending fast is key, the Atlantic islands of Azores and Madeira provide for very lucrative opportunities that can’t be ignored.

Connected to the mainland through a ferry system, the islands get an extra cube every turn, making the idea of a compact network based on them very attractive but also difficult to pull off. The color distribution blocks a lot of shipments and in the end one cube per turn is not enough to sustain your game, you are forced to expand: Knowing how to balance the islands with your long term goals is the real challenge of the map.

Even tough the map works well with the designer’s original rules I recommend banning the use of Production on the islands. This makes the adaption from AoS o Steam closer in spirit and avoids players from turtling.

The map is very good for both three and four players but each playercount has it’s own weakness.

With three players the building is intense but the auction is pretty lacking in comparison. Urbanization, Engineer and First Build are all hot commodities and the abundance of towns make it easy to use Locomotive, making it flacid at times.

On the other hand, the four player game has a far more interesting auction but since they are more people connceting cities, running away is unlikely and thus, blocking is not quite important.

If you want to print the original design you can get it here or try a somewhat prettier reprint here but you will need to register into the webpage for the latter.

I give this map a score of AA

Erik Twice

Review: Rebelstar Tactical Command (B) (GBA)

While it could be argued that I’m some kind of PC gamer at heart and no less than three screens grace my computer’s desk, the truth is that I have always loved handhelds. Since that fateful day I got Nintendo’s gift to gaming in color form, I was hooked. Being able to play anywhere was a revelation and the pick and play focus perfectly completemented the heavyweight PC games I played back then.

But…what if we could have the best of both worlds?

The cover doesn't count

Rebelstar may not ring too many bells nowadays but it’s a series of impressive pedigree. With three different games released for Spectrum computers back in the 80s, it was the first steping stone in the career of Julian Gollop, the British designer who created in 1994 the PC classic XCOM: UFO Defense.

Rebelstar: Tactical Command is a tactical RPG game developed by the same team as XCOM that reinvents the Rebelstar series but isn’t a remake or sequel of it, having it’s own storyline but shared gameplay mechanics.

The game opens with a quite grim picture: A race of aliens named Arelians have enslaved the Earth with the help of their primitive, by strong, allies, the Zorg. Every human is forcefully implanted a control chip at birth, allowing the aliens to instantly locate them anywhere, anytime. And, when a human turns 30, the aliens take him away, never to be seen again.

However, not all is lost. Thanks to a high psionic resistance or surgery, some humans are capable of rejecting the implanted control chip and flee where they will never be found. hidden somewhere in what used to be Mexico, a number of those humans have gathered in resistence to defeat the invading alines once and for all. You, as the player, must lead them into victory along 20 duifferent battles, from the humble beginnings of the squad to the final attack ont he alien’s mothership.

In the end, while it may be a good premise, the plot is soon dragged down by bland writting that could very well fit into the most generic JRPG. A spiky-haired protagonist, a love interest that is kidnapped, the rival guy, the geeky science guy, and a heavy weapons guy that isn’t Russian and doesn’t like Sandviches. We have all seen this before and there’s even an alien that haunts the protagonist’s dreams to tell him about how he is the Chosen One.

Fortunatedly, even if the narrative falls flat, the combat system is really interesting. Like it’s predecesors, the root of the mechanics are “action points”. Each character has a determined number of AP per turn that are used to move, fire different kinds of shots or just actions in general.

As long as you have enough points, you can do actions in any order you want. you can duck out of cover, shoot and go back in again. You can throw a medikit to a teammate or you can decide it’s the best time to reload. It’s great and really makes the game feel tactical, unlike other tactical RPGs that feel more like a puzzle.

This strategic feel is also achieved thanks to a smart overwatch system. With enough points to spare, a unit can station himself in position and prepare itself to attack enemies that cross it’s line of sight. It’s very fun to advance your troops so they cover each other blind spots and the game let’s you do it in such a way that would make seasoned SWAT members proud.

While you have to beat some pretty boring missions first, soon you are granted access to the armory, where you can choose who to deploy and which weapons to use. It’s tempting at first to load each character with two backup rifles and enough explosives to level the entire map, weight is a major concern, as the more items you carry, the less action points you have per turn.

Even tough this kind of favours specialization and working as a team so a single guy doesn’t have to carry all the rockets himself, weapons aren’t too balanced and rifles and other automatic weapons overshadow everything else.

This is compounded by the flaws in the skill system. Each time a character levels up, you are given points to spend on different skills like “Rifle handling” or “Medicine”. This looks fine and even cool but the game severly limits how many points you can put on each skill, making most tactics waste points. If you are going to be forced into using “stealth”, the best option becomes giving everyone a rifle, not a noisy minigun.

While a careful level design would greatly help weapon balance, here it actually worsens it. You will spend most of the time shooting at aliens stationed behind windows, which is one of the most boring things imaginable. You can’t get close, since the moment you cross their line of sight they murder you with a volley of bullets. You can’t throw a grenade because they bounce back for some unexplained reason. And you can’t tear down the wall because it’s indestructible. The design forces the player to slooooowly snipe from far away, relying on superior accurancy to advance.

Some instances of the level designs are really frustrating. One map has an U-shaped building with only a destructible wall in the middle. There are dozens of windows with enemies behind them, waiting for you to cross. If you get too close, you take too much damage but if you try to pick them from afar, it’s probably you end missing a shot and the wounded enemy manages to escape. Which wouldn’t be so bad if they couldn’t come back later when you are trying to make a brech into the wall.

After an hour of sniping and careful movement you can finally destroy the wall, only to find an incredibly powerful monster there. It one-shots your guys and probably one or more of them can’t escape. And, if you are not killed by it, chances you are stuck because your shots can’t penetrate it’s armor and nobody told you to pack a dozen grenades for the mission.

To be fair, the game allows you to save once during any given battle and to restart the level from scracth so getting stuck is impossible. It makes for a good portable experience as you can turn the game off without losing your progress.

Graphically, the game doesn’t look bad for GBA standards but the art direction is a let down. There’s not much detail nor interesting sprite art and the scenery is non-descript. It’s easy to recognize what weapon each character is using but it’s just that, workable, tidy, functional…There’s no live to it and doesn’t add anything more to the game than just basic interface.

Those who had high hopes for a grim soundtrack with very few musical cues in the vein of XCOM will be dissapointed to find that Rebelstar’s music is bad as the level design. It’s so bland I have troubles remembering it right now and some people may even find it quite annoying. Fortunatedly, it can be turned off in the menu and it actually helps the performance of the game.

While the single player campaing is the heart of the game, there’s also a skirmish mode to unlock and a hot-seat multiplayer option. The maps and characters are directly lifted from the campaign mode and the overall experience is quite dissapointing because of it.

Those who can look beyond the deficiencies in level design and overall polish will greatly enjoy a marvelous combat system and will have a lot of fun for the roughly 20 hours the game lasts. The cartridge itself easy to find and a quick search on the usual corners of internet like ebay, shows that the game can be had sealed or complete in box for as little as four dollars.

In the end, those looking for an experience similar to XCOM battlescape mode are going to be more dissapointed. Rebelstar isn’t bad game but it can’t stand against his big brother or other GBA games like Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics, making it a niche option for those looking for a new game to play.

I give this game a C score.

Audience limitations: The combat system is the reason to play this game, those who don’t find it particularly interesting won’t find enjoyment in this game.

Erik Twice

Analysis: Dinky Park scenario from Rollercoaster Tycoon

The original Rollercoaster Tycoon and it’s expansions had wonderful scenario design that really taped into the potential of the game. With variety always in mind, they slowly taught the player more about the game so he could have more fun and experiment in more diverse ways. And it was not limited to a per-scenario basis, what you learnt in one made the remaining scenarios far more fun.

Dinky Park struck me as the perfect example of this. It’s one of the first parks you unlock in the game but it’s a pure curve ball. Unlike the starter maps which are among the biggest in the game you can barely fit your rides here!

Dinky Park in all it's (Small) glory

That’s a huge deal for the player. While you can buy some land at the other side of the road and expand towards a lake it’s going to be expensive. If you really want to succeed you must learn to use what you have, at least for a while.

This is an invaluable skill. While it’s temping to have an infinite sandbox you unleash your creativity, the truth is that building your rides around the constrained terrain is incredibly fun. It makes you think, it makes you care about everything you build and, in the end, produces more interesting gameplay than an inexperienced player can find in a sandbox.

But it’s not like scenarios and sandboxes are at odds with each other! Learning how to build around spatial limitations makes sandboxes fun, instead of the long string of rides with huge empty spaces between them your first attemps at sandboxing tend to be.

But there’s far more about Dinky Park than just space limitations: One very overlooked factor of the map is the shape of the terrain. Spatial limitations and a flat map produce boring gameplay, just make a square and fill the remanining space with rides. Here you are forced to tweak and place rides in a more interesting way and even terraform a bit because you are on top of a hill. You learn to place rides on terraces and to reserve terrain for food courts.

Terraces can make for a well-organized park.

Surprisingly enough, it’s also a good terrain to build rollercoasters on, much more than a mesa would. The slopes make easy to create drops and building over paths is a good idea here. Unlike other small maps, DinkyPark is wide enough to fit curves and helixes without any problems and being in a quite tall hill allows you to build underground so as to waste as little space as possible.

I built mine completely underground to save space. Junior rollercoasters are great, they are very compact, exciting enough for the hardcore guests and have good banking and helix options. Very underrated coasters in my opinion.

Overall it’s not just a very fun map but it also teaches you a bunch of stuff that will be useful later. What more can you ask for? Well, it’s availble to use in Roller Coastery Tycoon 2! Fans of the original game have ported all of the original maps and several of the expansions to the sequel so you can enjoy the best of both worlds. What are you waiting for?

Erik Twice.

Analysis: The world of Team Fortress 2

Concrete silos and the glory of the steel mill against the colossal American landscape. Buildings with perfect geometry along the seemingly infinite railroads. It’s the world of Team Fortress 2.

In an age where photorealism floods first person shooters and Japanese RPG developers keep milking the same concepts over and over again the art direction of TF2 sticks out as unique.

But it’s not just about pretty graphics and fitting the exigencies of the gameplay, there’s a narrative beneath the surface. On top of being a great game, TF2 is a story about futility, failed greatness and incompetence.

The glorious industrial world quickly deteriorates thanks to non-sensical architecture and crudely disguised bases one in front of eachother while the supposedly epic battle between two radically different ideologies is soon turned moot by no differences other than costume color and slighty different construction materials.

In fact, it’s all background. Players never know why that intelligence suitcase is important or what BLU achieves by pushing the bomb cart or why there is such a cart in the first place. To the player, all those high concepts are irrelevant, they are here to shoot virtual guns.

It’s not limited to the big picture either. Unsafe ledges, supercomputers in plain sight, pipes that exit a building only to enter it again…The disconnection between the geometrically perfect ideals of the industrial age and the incompetence of the general populace, who simply doesn’t care, acts as a mirror of the disconnection between a game’s plot and the actual goal of blowing stuff up and jumping on top of your enemies.

Whoever put those pipes didn't care much about geometrical perfection. Thanks to my good mate Quaro for the picture.

It’s funny because TF2′s theme is compeltely opposed to that of the artists that inspired it in the first place, which was magnificient and reeking honor.

Dean Cornwell's illustrations were one of the inspirations for TF2's art style, specially the strong silhouettes and shading. Note the completely opposite themes.

The great thing about TF2′s themes is how subtle they are. The game never points out the incompetence of the classes or how childish the founders of RED and BLU are. They just put it there, showing it without forcing anyone to watch.

This extends to the promotional comics, where we first see the face of the misterious announcer that controls both teams and we learn about Blutarch and Redmont, the ever fighting brothers who founded the teams of the game.

While the mercenaries themselves are incredibly flawed or down right insane like the Soldier, they feel incredibly humane in their portrayal. Naïveté, overconfidence, greed, alcoholism…They don’t come across as bad as the Mann brothers, whose only goal is to see his rival down in the mud.

As incompetent as the classes may be, we see them having more than flaws. We see the Soldier risking his life for friendship and the Scout just wants to prove himself. In comparison, the Mann borthers don’t want anything out of life other than beating each other, as his dying father put it they “have wasted their lives bickering over nothing” (See the comic “Loose Canon”).

It mirrors the players. They may dissapoint, cheat and ask for the impossible sometimes (See, the War update cheating fiasco) but they are also what brings life into what would otherwise be a bunch of bits, TF2′s theme is, in a certain way, a methapor of what a videogame is.

Valve has not only managed to handwave the silliness of jumping with a rocket without breaking the player’s inmersion but they have managed to satirize the entire concept of gaming and keep us asking for more.

Keep fragging, gentlemen.

Erik Twice

Review: Monopoly (D)

As much as we boardgame entusiasts rave about wooden cubes, bidding and creepy French kings on the cover of our favourite game, the truth is that just when you are about to talk about the latest Wallace or Kniza what is really in everyone’s mind is not your favourite wargame, but Monopoly.

First produced in the 1920s and with enough popularity so as to have dozens of rethemes every year since, it has made it into every household, with it’s cardboard box rearing its head from my sister’s room under the intense scrutiny of my sleeved cards and carboard chits.

But…

…is it a good game?

One of the Spanish editions of the game

The gameplay itself is pretty simple. You roll the dice and move, if you land in a property space you can but it so that everyone who lands there has to pay you some cash. If you have a full set of same color properties you can put houses in them to charge more. There are also some spaces that punish you if you land inthem and others force you to take a card that randomly helps or punishes you. The game ends when all players but one are bankrupt.

While trading is allowed in the game, a quick scan of the board reveals that the inherent placement of each space makes some properties better than others, meaning that two rational players will never trade, as one of them would be worse off by doing so. Giving someone the property they need to complete a set is suicidal and hoarding properties is much more valuable than any amount of money in hand.

Since trading is irrational, the only choice left in the game is whether or not to buy the property you just landed on. You start with huge piles of cash and buying stuff is the only way players can affect the gamestate, making the decision a no-brainer. No mind the quality of the propety, buying is always better than saving for a roll-based future.

To make matters worse, properties soon dry up and the game stalls. There’s nothing left to do but roll dice for hours until someone falls prety to the incesant cherry tapping of undeveloped properties.

And to prolong the suffering, each time you circle the board you get more money but not enough to actually avoid bankrupcy so you just spend more time rolling dice. Isn't it wonderful?

On top of the gameplay being itself greatly luck based, there’s a significant first player advantage, as later players have a quite reduced chance to buy properties and stopping a runaway leader is simply impossible in this game.

While it may have survived during almost an entire century and for most people it’s name is synonymous with board games, the fact is that it isn’t a good game. With practically no choices to be made, an overly long playing time and tedious dice-rolling Monopoly is barely an improved Candyland, the game basically plays itself since there’s no more input required from the players other than rolling and buying everything they land on.

I give this game a score of D.

Erik Twice.

What’s a review, Twice?

In this age where most reviews read like advertisments and a certain subset of critics are more worried about looking good than actually being so, it feels mandatory to cut the clichéd writting I’m using and actually explain what the hell I am doing here.

I write reviews. For whom? For anyone who wishes to read that. But that’s not the point, of course.

I write reviews to help, because if I’m going to write anyways I may as well do something useful. I’m not here to help you know if something is good, or if it isn’t or what have you. I’m here to help the reader know what something is, and that includes the above and much more.

There’s absolutedly no point in telling people “Hey you, look here…yes, yes, want some good stuff? Wannit?” as if I were some kind of agresive drug dealer. I’m here to tell you there’s a pizza parlor outside and you can get a nicely baken hawaian pizza there.

It’s not enough to say that a game is great. I have to explain why its’ great and how the game works. A review that is not informative is bullshit made words. If you absolutedly love grass-growing games I want you to know that, in fact, Game X is a grass-growing game, whether it stinks or not. You are the one who decides what you are going to spend your time on, you shouldn’t waste your time on something because some random guy on the internet told you to, you should spend it because that guy pointed you the stars and not his crudely drawn finger.

That’s a review for me: Information. No more, no less.