MixingIt Up

As long as they are entertaining reads like most everything you post, I don't give a rat's ass what it is your reviewing. I will read them and chortle like I usually do.

Yes, I chortle...what of it?

Stop trying to be English and get into training.....

Congratulations on you epiphany. It took you six to figure out what I did in 2. It's not worth it. Getting free games that you don't really want to send them to people on your dime to be "altruistic" gets way fucking old. Not to mention the piles of games that you really want to play sit while games that you are OBLIGED to play get pushed to the forefront. All I want to do is play Strange Aeons over and over. I don't want to review the next iteration of Dungeon Command. I want to play the hundred games I have.

It's really not worth it. Write about what you want, man, you're great at it. Write more about your Dallas cab driver in 2142. That's some shit I'd even PAY to read.

Well I for one will be looking forward to some lego reviews.

The next review he did on his site after this one was a LEGO review. :)

Good stuff Matt. There are way too many well-reviewed, good or excellent games in existence already. I'm looking forward to your non-boardgame reviews.

I definitely feel you (figuratively) on the fatigue issue. I'm pretty fucking sick, actually, of reading rules and learning new games. Especially when it's for maybe three games before it's never touched again. This is why I don't really review, play, or write about more complex wargames. It's not worth my time anymore. And I'm not really that interested in the commitment. I'm pretty much over games that have to be re-learned every time they're tabled too...if I feel like we'd have to completely re-learn a game to play it again...I'm ready to sell.

But I do still like covering new games and I still feel like there's an audience that wants to read my reviews of new games. So I still do it, but I definitely feel less obliged to since the Gameshark money wagon crashed and burned.

All of this is part of why I do not give two shits and a backflip about this whole Kickstarter movement. There's already plenty of games being released by professional companies and established designers, why waste time, money, and effort on random print-to-order crap? There have been a couple of good Kickstarter titles, but by and large I just do not care about the sheer glut of mediocre, unpolished games that whole movement is generating.

Watching Oz will permanently change how you feel about spooning.

So then let's see that Barnes Best: 00s edition! Not that there's not value in reading you savaging bad games or "meh"-ing mediocre games, but I started reading you because of your passion for the games you loved (that, at the time, didn't have as many supporters). I can feel the fatigue in your latest game reviews; the passion I'm seeing is when you finish an amazing issue of Doom Patrol or Black Hole. So take a break from the new and mediocre and talk about the "old" games you're passionate about, and what makes them stand out amongst the wide sea of "good" games!

Feeling the same vibe too. I wrote about it less humorously a few weeks back:

http://fortressat.com/articles-rants-a-raves/3408-the-cult-of-the-old

Funny how it's doing the rounds at the moment. I wonder if it's coincidence or whether it's age/recession related. Or even, god forbid, that the cult of the new has finally started to piss everyone off.

I've definitely struggled with it this year as well. At the start of the year during my "Best 5 Games of 2011",I blogged the following

"At any rate, I have noticed though that I spend a lot of my valuable gaming time "getting review stuff to the table" rather than playing my old favorites. Usually when I get a game for review, I try to get it played as quickly as possible; few companies want to send you stuff so that you will review it a year later. If it's a good game, it will generally hit the table several times rapidly over the span of a few weeks.

But then, sadly, even if a game is really, really good it gets shelved in order to make room to do the next set of reviews.

It's also lead me to something of a personal dilemma in terms of reviewing. I know that we as reviewers are to be offering an opinion that boils down to, "Is this worth buying?" Now, I have a walk-in closet completely FULL of games already. From that perspective, a game would not only have to be good, buy extraordinary to take the place of one of my all-time favorites.

Not all game buyers are in the same boat as I am, though. I've seen more than a few new faces on our forums, and these are folks who are just diving into the hobby, just starting to form collections, just starting to find the good stuff that they're going to enjoy. To them, a "buy" question has a much lower threshold than someone who already owns a few hundred of them.

When I review games, I distance myself somewhat from my "you already own a hell of a lot of games" perspective, and try to come at it as someone who maybe doesn't have a particular niche filled in their collection. From that standpoint, then I ask, "is this worth buying?"

I also know we have a lot of die-hards on our site who own as many games as I do, if not a hell of a lot more. I want my reviews to be useful to that crowd as well, but that's a much tougher set of criteria. How do I bridge that gap?

I do know that if I can keep the fresher perspective, I can avoid the jaded string of mediocre reviews that ultimately help no one."

I agree. The 'euros I love' geeklist is one I still re-read. I'd much rather read a review from someone telling me about their favorite game than a review simply because it's a new release.

A few months back, I shed any game I didn't think I could pull off the shelf and play without re-reading the rules or having another 'learning' game. It's been very liberating. The games now feel like a collection of old friends or comfortably worn clothes. No longer do any of them feel like work.