CROWVIEWS REDUX

Is redux pronounced "re-doo" or "re-ducks"? If it's the latter, this thread title doesn't have the cadence I wanted it too. Oh well.

I dislike the number 3, and I am fairly in love with the numbers 12, 19, and 21. If you are wondering what the hell I'm blathering about, I noticed that I had written 11 reviews. I have nothing in particular against the number 11, I just like the number 12 so much better that I decided to review some games. I (obviously?) wouldn't have started this thread if I only intended to review one game, so I'm planning to do 8 more and land on 19 or do 10 more and land on 21.

As of the time of making this thread, I have written the following reviews, many of them while conspicuously drunk. Most of them could be considered pretty in-depth:

• Journey To Northpass
• Pandora
• Colors of Damnation ACE
• Owl's Nest
• Fantasy Journey
• Hyouhon Shoujo|Specimen Girl
• Ouroboros (DEMO)
• Schoolboi Pacaman of Love
• Villnoire
• To Crime Nirvana
  
• The Shore: Foreign Tides

Now I will explain my review philosophy and then my criteria for considering review requests. (While I will obviously be sad if I come back to this thread in a week and there are zero comments, "first come first served" is absolutely not the principle at work here, so there's no need to rush either.)

My Review Philosophy

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Like most people's reasons for doing most things, my desire to review games is in part altruistic and in part self-interested.

The altruistic part is simple enough: there are thousands of games on this site which have received little or no attention, feedback, or critique. No one should make a videogame and upload it here only to have it be mostly or completely ignored. While I obviously can't be the one to make sure every game gets reviewed, I can at least do my part in chipping away at those thousands. Also, games with starred reviews are often more likely to be downloaded and receive other forms of attention.

The self-interested part is that I raise my own public profile slightly with each review I make, and also, I like Makerscore and want it, even though it doesn't do much of anything (except give you more lockerspace).

Looking at these two components of my motivation, what is missing? Well, nowhere did I say that I actually want to play RPG Maker* games. Because honestly, the great majority of the time I don't particularly want to play RPG Maker games: if I want to play a videogame, I already have tons of them around made with actual budgets by large high-paid teams which I exchanged actual US Dollars for at some point; if I want to interact with RPG Maker, the locus of that interaction is going to be my own games in development, so even playing and reviewing games will eventually lead to "how has this inspired me to work on my own game?".

To prevent any possibility of misunderstanding: I don't mind playing RM games, I don't resent playing RM games, I'm not going to take off points or judge more harshly based on an RM game BEING an RM game, I have frequently enjoyed playing RM games a great deal, and so on. The only point I wanted to get across is that the experience of playing the game is not specifically what I'm volunteering for, I'm volunteering for the act of evaluating and reviewing the game. Reviewing games dilutes the enjoyment of playing them anyway: you have to constantly pause to take notes and screenshots. If there's an RM game you want to recommend to me to play for fun, not to review, I'd be happy to accept any such recommendations.

The number one priority in my reviews is to speak directly to the creator of the game and tell them what they did well (often very effusively, as I am still surprised by just how strong people are in my own areas of weakness), tell them what could be improved, and make suggestions on how to improve it. A close second is writing something that is entertaining for a general audience to read. Recommending/not recommending the game to players while desirable is a tertiary concern.

Finally, my time is extremely precious. I valued my time somewhat before I had to work a kinda sorta 9-5 job: now that I do have a job that I hate but am obligated to be at for many hours every week, my own valuation of my time has sky-rocketed, because my free time is now a dramatically smaller portion of my time.

This will inform the criteria and caveats discussed below, but the central thrust is that if I'm going to be reviewing games, I want to do so as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Criteria For Review Requests
If you have a complete game or a demo and would like me to review it and it adheres to the following criteria and I accept it for review, I cannot make any guarantee on the turnaround time of that review. It may be several days, several weeks, several months, or never--who knows, I might get hit by a bus!

First off, I want to review games that you think I might like. The reviews I've already written are not at all representative of my tastes in games, thus far they are a random jumble. My Play List here on RMN is much more indicative of my tastes.

• The game can be yours or someone else's; a friend's, a stranger's, it doesn't matter.
• I don't especially care about engine, in and of itself.
• I do care about genre. I want to review games that are at least kind of sort of RPGs. Elements of action games, strategy games, and visual novels are all fine. But an honest description of the game's genre should include "RPG" if you're going to submit it for review.
• Complete games and demos are both fine.
• I will review commercial or non-commercial games, as long as I don't need to pay money to play it. This means that I will review non-commercial games, commercial games with free demos, and (while I sincerely doubt this will come up, it is a thing so it doesn't hurt to mention it) commercial games that I get a complimentary copy of for review purposes.
• I prefer games that have never been reviewed and that have less than 100 downloads. I am not saying I will ONLY review games meeting this particular criteria, but the less reviews and the less downloads, the better. I want to uplift obscure games, not participate in the celebration of already popular games.**
  
• Don't ask me to review anything you know is bad. I don't get off on trashing games or hurting developers' feelings, that's not my bag. If a game I was expecting to like turns out to be a major disappointment, I may be pretty biting towards it in the review, but that's very different from hate-playing a game I know I'm not likely to enjoy or rate highly.
• The game must be at least 15 minutes long, and you should not expect me to play any more than three hours of it. In most cases, I will be playing about one hour of each game for review purposes. In part, this is because reviewing a game for an hour actually takes me closer to 3-6 hours of real time, divided between taking notes and screenshots whilst playing and actually writing and uploading a review.

This generally means a game that has failed to interest me in the first hour has failed to interest me, period. I'm not going to endure hours of doldrums because a game supposedly "gets good" later on. On the reverse side of this, playing a game for an hour is almost always enough time for me to get a handle on if I like the game, what I like about the game, and whatever might be done to fix the things I don't like. If after I've played a game for an hour that game is "on track" to get a 4-Star review, if I spend additional hours playing it, it's more likely I'll run into things that annoy me than it is I'll run into a new feature, character, asset, or whatever that makes me actually want to add stars.

Two exceptions here to the one hour time limit: one is any game I'm enjoying so much I feel hooked on playing it. I will keep putting hours into such a game until it ends or I stop enjoying it.

The other exception is complete games 10 hours or less in length that I enjoyed the first hour of at least somewhat. It's unfair to judge such a game based on its first hour: in the likely event that the rest of the game includes things that displease me, or the less likely event that the rest of the game includes things that make it EVEN BETTERER, either way that should be reflected in the review. But while 10 hours is a reasonable investment of my time, this exception does not extend to 30+ hour/100+ hour epic megagames of great huge bigness. But I don't seek out HUGE games, and I don't expect (m)any will be recommended to me.

Okay, cool. Recommend me some games, guys! If they meet the above criteria or are close enough, I will do my best to review them eventually!
~ Le Crow

* I am using this as an umbrella term for pretty much every engine used to build the games on this website, not just actual RPG maker engines.

** THAT BEING SAID I will occasionally want to add my two cents to a bigger "event" game like I did with Villnoire, especially if that game captures my interests as a player and I find that I have opinions about it that haven't already been voiced in existing reviews.