New Review

[Aku]

I reviewed Godfather. My first one in over 18 months. The format stinks, Summary/Strengths/Weaknesses. I didn't even know that's how it is organized now. So I just used the old categories and shoe-horned it in. The generic rating is also lame. They need to stop with the stock format and go back to the old way. How can you restore the old database when the reviews were organized differently than they are now? I don't think a simple merge is possible.

[BaneNWN]

Id try to read your review aku but seems i cant find it.I wish people would quit making promises about making the site easier to deal with instead there making the crap worse.

[Aku]

Ur back. Just do a search on Godfather. Yeah, it sucks cuz it's organized by game, with the review attached to the game. It's game-centric, not review-centric. There is no list of reviews, no genre categories like FPS, roleplaying, etc., that you can browse through, the way it used to be. It is not a friendly review site at all. HORRIBLE interface.

This will likely be the last review I write, unless they make serious changes to the site, and make it a real review site again. Right now it is just a product sales site. I hope you are listening to this, moderators.

[Aku]

Use this link to find reviews:

http://www.videogamereview.com/PRD_-99_0_1745745crx.aspx#reviews

This appears to be an archive of the old reviews from before the site change. I don't see the newer games like Godfather and Oblivion here. But this is what it should be for ALL the games, and this link should be front-and-center on the site.

Also, I can see my old reviews when looking up reviews under my profile.

[Lara]

Excellent review Aku, as usual. :)

I'm wondering if "review of the day" is computer picked, because the last one that shows on the home page (as of this post) sure doesn't qualify to me. It's not a bad review, but anyone could post a simple review like that. A better, more thought out review deserves the spot.

(A little nostalgia)
When I chose review of the day, and following that, the contest winner, I put a lot of time into finding the most deserving. Of course there were tons more reviews and it took hours of reading and anxiety on my part (lol) to choose what I believed to be the best of the lot. It really wasn't a simple task back then. More than one person at any given month could have been the winner. So choosing only one was really difficult, but still, it made me very happy to be able to reward people for their efforts.

Cheers guys,
Have a great weekend.

[Aku]

Thanks Lara! I know, you did put a lot of time and effort into that. Yes, I remember the days of stiff competition. I'll never forget the time I had victory in my grasp, then that sneaky bastard Hieremias slipped in a review on the last day of the contest and snatched it away from me. LOL!

[Lara]

Ha! I remember that. I was so torn, that I think I asked if we could have a tie (2 winners) that month. Obviously, that didn't go over very well. heh, I tried. :incazzato:

[Eric-the-Red]

I think Mochan stole victory from me twice!! Still, I won two or three times, so it's okay. Funnily enough, I hated each of the games I won from my reviews.

Back in the old days we all had a friendly competition when it comes to review writing, but now...ugghh...I haven't written a review in more than 2 years.

[moya]

Here's a direct link to the Godfather review page for PC:

http://www.videogamereview.com/sf-1/befid-54214/pid-23494044/nrr-20/productreviewscrx.aspx#

Nice review, Aku. I too hope they change the site design radically, and soon. Because as mentioned in the other thread, it is STILL looking atrocious.

One positive thing I will say about the new reviews system is that they tie your forum account and your review account to a single profile, so Aku's rated as "expert". I'm guessing that has something to do with the length of time you've been a member and the number of posts you've contributed. Which would make sense. That way you can see at a glance (potentially) how reliable a reviewer is. (Please don't tell me you just selected that option from a drop-down list or something, Aku!)

So, yeah, this site has the potential to become a really useful, interesting and innovative Web 2.0-style social-network review site, a la digg or reddit, but with people posting reviews instead of links to news stories. That's just one option of course, but going down that route would be one way of making the site more "review-centric" and less like an advertising site.

But we're a LONG way off anything like that yet.

[Aku]

Sorry to disappoint you Moya, but yeah, I think i picked "expert" from a drop down list. LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

I am now a self-appointed expert on this board!

The link to new reviews from you profile is broken. You can get to your old reviews (before they changed the review format) from your profile, but not the new ones.

[moya]

LOL, I might've known.

But you see what I mean, right? If they tied your review and forum accounts together they could use some sort of metric based on how many reviews you'd posted plus forum posts to calculate a kind of leet "gamer index".

Of course, to properly organize this site around a network of reviewers and reviews, rather than sales, would require a ground-up rewrite...

[Aku]

Since reviews done prior to their review format change in the past year are in the old format, they are effectively archived off. So, for example, if you click on the game Thief 3, you will see only DBS' review, which is the only one written since the change. All the other Thief 3 reviews out there (there are seven) are not accessible by clicking on the game link. There is no direct way to get to this archive either. You can get to a help page if you manually enter a bad link, and that page has a list of game genre categories which can get you to your archived game. But why would someone do that? Who would even know to do that?

I'd like to know why the review format was changed, considering that it resulted in the entire review database prior to this year being inaccessible from the game links. This is supposed to be videogameREVIEW.com. I'd like to know why they can't put in a simple alphabetized listing of games by genre. This doesn't calsh with the site format, and other consumer review sites have this, or similar.

I hate to say it, but this is far and away the worst videogame review site on the web, when it used to be one of the better ones. Just look at what's winning review of the day now. No one wants to take the time to write a real review on this site anymore.