Contemplating a Review

I am thinking about doing a review of LOTFP as kind of an intellectual exercise.

I have thought for a long time about how hard it is to get lots of deep criticism on game design. From anyone. Alpha reviewers. Beta reviewers. Other bloggers. Friends. Family. People give you tips and short commentary, but very very few people really go deep this this stuff. Looking over the Viz's review that I just linked in my last post (and this is not a criticism of the Viz in any way, he is very much like other people on this issue), the depth of review is fairly small.

The degree to which most people really break down the game and put it back together with the degree to which that is done by the game designer is a huge difference (see my own defense of Errant for an example of the degree to which a game designer goes in their thoughts and that is just a taste). This is a consequence of 1 person spending very little time reading something vs someone spending months and months working on it, thinking about it at all times, etc. And everyone else working hard every day and not wanting to dedicate a long period of time to deep contemplation.

So I was thinking about writing a pretty comprehensive review of a game. Raggi has, for both good and ill, been a fairly strong influence on me. Reviews of beloved games of yore would probably cause more bad blood than anything else. I think it would be a good test case for what I am talking about in terms of contrast. And I have already read the whole game and thought about it deeply.

I want to kind of do what Red Letter Media has done for Star Wars Prequels in terms of depth, but definitely not in terms of tone. Just really detailed breakdown in an attempt to really set a standard for critique. If we are going to call ourselves a serious hobby, we need to have standards. Don't you think?