SDHawk wrote:There was some call to disqualify Charbile's okedoke review. Between the review itself and the supplemental log there are more than 3 paragraphs directly relating to the game, even if most of it is spent trying to understand (and inquire about) the appeal it has to other people. Part of the inquiries are comments about how he sees the work himself. So it remains qualified.
I won't dispute this since it's your contest and you certainly can decide what qualifies and what doesn't. I definitely agree that combining that initial post with the rabid discussion that's followed (something that more games need, in all honesty) gives players more than a snapshot of what Okedoke is, so perhaps the non-review nature of his post serves a greater purpose than the snippets of review that he gives.
But, I can dispute something...
Focusing mainly on what you say about authors having context, tone, etc. beyond simple design mechanics, these are very important things to talk about, and no one here, especially I, will tell you you shouldn't mention them in a review. Absolutely you should, especially if you think you've figured out what the tone, context, etc. are. My problem with your review, and why I don't think it should count (even though SDHawk has already ruled that it does, so it doesn't matter what I actually say in that regard, other than to comment on this post in particular) is that you don't actually review anything. You just ask a bunch of questions related to another person's review and expect other reviewers to answer it for you. You're basically the project manager of a review project, where you delegate the topics for others to investigate.Charbile wrote:Hawk, to even humor disqualifying talking about what a game is, is getting pretty silly. We're not reviewing tabletop or cards, where it's all numbers and probability with some flavor pics and text. Not all the games are Wizard Blocks or Slimeomancy.
I think a lot of reviewers and commenters are too busy looking at their feet (or waist down) wanting only to focus on game mechanics or pretty pictures or grammar mistakes, choosing to ignore the big picture (the face/mind). Quite literally in an engine where most everyone is restricted in the same ways. You stand out with context, tone, the promise of your own imagination--it's getting stupid to pretend like that kind of stuff isn't design, or doesn't have its own mechanics, or somehow isn't the one and only thing that really matters.
Maybe next contest, I'll just make a template with checkboxes so I can copy and paste the same boring ohr related design mistakes review after review, and ignore all the spicy meatballs of topics that people feel like they have to defend because it's real punches with real weight to it. To me it's just talking about games. I know my tone seems harsh, but try to picture the grin plastered on my face if it helps.
The irony of saying the point of the community is not to live in bubbles or wanting to know what others think is not lost either, i hope.
Nothing in your initial post on Okedoke suggests you have an opinion on the game yourself. In fact, nothing in that review, other than maybe the screenshots, suggests that you've even played Okedoke. Now, I'm sure you have. But if so, what did you think about it?
Because you talk about pop culture in your review, I'm supposed to assume that you have played it. But my review, which you so generously base your arguments and questions on, also talks about that stuff. How do I know that your entire argument isn't just based on what I've written rather than what you've played?
Just to be clear, the 2014 in Review thread is, to my understand, a review contest about the games you've played, not the reviews you've read.
You should've answered those questions yourself instead of relying on me (a guy who has already devoted more than enough time to reviewing this game and really has nothing else to add on his own) to answer them for you. The point of analysis is to come up with your own conclusions.Charbile in his Okedoke review wrote:What is the social commentary?
What is the humor?
I'd have rather you'd spent your "review" telling us what you think the social commentary or the humor is, or, if you think it has none of either, then I'd rather you'd spent your review explaining why that's a false claim. I have no problem with you disputing my review or proving me wrong about something I've written if you can do so using your own opinions and analyses based on your own playthrough of the entire game. I'm okay with being called out on mistaken thinking. I think Spoonweaver already did that in his follow-up comment, which I'll reference here in a moment. But you don't do that. You just ask questions in hopes that I will clarify something that you make no opinion about yourself. (I say "I" instead of "other reviewers" on account that you focused primarily on my review, but I think this issue could extend to any review you might've read and questioned.)
No one but the author of the game cares how harsh you get on this one. Really. I'm not even sure why you're addressing it. What matters is that you review honestly. If you wanted to start a discussion (OHR Book Club style) with those questions, or even with my ridiculously lengthy review as the basis (yes, I admit it's unnecessarily long, but it's what I chose to do for one of the OHR's rare completed epic games), then you should've opened a new thread and generated those questions there. That would've been cool, actually. And I wouldn't have minded that you basically used my review as a basis for your own. If there's a reason to call out my faulty logic, however much of it you might find, then that would've been the forum to do it in. Not this one.
As it stands, I don't think you did your job as a reviewer here. Not initially, at any rate. I think that adding to the discussion helps your case, and with the supplemental responses, I think you've maybe got enough to justify your viewpoint of the game. But that was not evident in the first post, and that's where it should've been the most evident.
As I said, Spoonweaver makes a great arguable point that probably contradicts what I've said about Okedoke's gameplay and presentation. Personally, I think this is more the opinion of a particular user than the community as a whole, just because I'm part of the community, and I prefer exploration to straight-shot navigation (hence the reason why the maps in my games are so large and dense). But I imagine that most players feel this way, and that alone would make me fit into the minority, and that would make elements of my own review or opinion faulty as representative of why the community should like this game. At any rate, it's a smart deduction of why most players might respond the way they do, and I'm glad Spoonweaver brought it up. Analysis makes arguments better.Spoonweaver wrote:My main complaint, and I wasn't going to say this originally because I don't think it will help the developer, is that the game expects too much of the player. You're thrown into a massive town FULL of nooks and crannys and have to basically explore the whole thing to move on. The level of complexity in the towns is higher than a lot of commercial games. This seems like a good thing, but it's actually not. Towns are generally boring and players want to venture out into the wilderness. There's also the battles, they're long, sometimes, epic length. There's also the resource management, it cuts things kinda tight.
Normally these are the sorts of things you'd want in a game, but it's not the case here. We're not the audience for that. Indie game players tend to give a game about 10-15 minutes of their time. Which, considering the nature of most indie games, is very generous. OkeDoke is a game that in my opinion isn't able to interest a player past that first 10-15 minutes thus the fact that it's long and drawn out work against it. Also, this type of town complexity, as well as the drawn out battles and resource management, don't match the nature of the game at all. Which is why the comments of the game's crassness come front and center.
Good job, Spoon, by the way.