What you'll find here is brutal honesty tempered by a love for games.

I've been a gamer for something like 25 years now. Good God that makes me feel old. I've seen them all: from the Commodore Vic 20 and Atari 2600 to the PS(1,2,3), (S)NES, DreamCast to the Xbox360 and the modern gaming PC. I remember when 3D-accelerator cards were an extravagance and computer memory was measured in kilobytes. So, having seen it all, I just don't have the patience for more suckitude.

The focus on my reviews will be on whether or not a game can keep my attention and why. I will not be putting up numbered reviews based on scoring criteria that have nothing to do with a game's fun level. There will be no scoring on graphics. There will be no scoring on sound quality. There will, in fact, be no scoring at all.

The only thing I care about is if a game is fun and interesting. Some of the most fun games out there have awful (by current standards) graphics (ie: any Mario game) and some of the worst (or at least, in my book, least playable) games have tremendous graphics (ie. X3: Reunion). Only if the graphics or sound have real bearing on the game's enjoyment, can you expect to read about it here.

Games Should Be Fun

I am not a hardcore gamer. I am not a numbers junkie. I am not a completionist. Even so, I would be considered by most to be hardcore about gaming simply due to the amount of time and money I spend on it. I love to play games. Especially the fun ones. The moment a game ceases being fun, though, I play something else. If a game fails to be fun or interesting for extended periods, I permanently shelve it and get started on that review. There are too many games out there to waste even 5 minutes playing a game that I'm not enjoying.

Unfortunately, fun is a subjective thing and that means that reviews really can't be objective. Not only do different people enjoy different things, the same people enjoy different things on a day to day basis. Some people enjoy cooking. Others, wood working. Some people enjoy watching sporting events. Others enjoy beekeeping. No game is going to be perfect (or even good) for everyone. For some, Pokemon represents the Alpha and Omega of video gaming. For others, it's Mortal Kombat. Or Horsez. While I like most types of video games because I like solving problems and I enjoy that artificially induced sense of accomplishment I get from beating the next level, there will always be some games that I hate no matter how good they are. And there are still others that I will enjoy despite the fact that they're really stupid.

So before you take my word on any game as gospel, read some of my reviews on games you have played. See if the points I make resonate with you. If they do, great, then maybe my reviews on games you haven't played will be useful to you. But if you hate a games that I think is the cat's jammies, you might want to move on, or at least ignore further reviews from me on games of that genre.

Speaking of Genre Bias:

I am definitely biased against certain genres. Sometimes it's system specific: RTS on the handheld. Sometimes it's pretty global: I just don't do sports games on any system. So, here's a list of a few genres, and how I feel about them.

Some notes on my attention span:

If you were to examine my gamescore (shown below) or look at the games-played listing on my 360's blog, you'd find that while I play a hell of a lot of games, I don't generally finish them. As of this writing, I have earned enough 360 achievements to garner a gamerscore of 7,953. That's out of the 56,910 gamerscore available in the games I've played since this site has started. That's a lowly 13%. If you pay much attention to achievements and gamerscore, then that's a pretty telling number. It basically means that I have the attention span of gnat and that I almost never finish games.

Sure, I finished Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect. Sure, I beat all of the Guitar Heroes and Rock Band on medium (but not easy and not hard, and certainly not expert). And while I loves me some racing games, I'm basically just not good enough to ever get to the end. Sure, I finished the COD4 single player campaign on easy, and I tried it on hard but that only got me 17/38 achievements and 380 points. Less than half of the available 1K. And while I will probably finish F.E.A.R. at some point, I know that I'll never get any of the multiplayer achievements (which in FEAR, is most of them) especially the one for competing in 1000 multiplayer matches. I'm still playing Pokemon Pearl on the DS (30 hours in, now), but I'll never collect them all. I've got like 40 of the little buggers and according this website, Diamond and Pearl have 493 pokemons between them.

While I don't give out numerical scores, I do summarize my feelings about each game. I'll let you know how long I've put up with it so far and if I ever plan on playing it again. While a "yes" in the "play again" box means I definitely liked it (at least a little bit) a "no" doesn't necessarily mean that I didn't like it. I loved The Darkness, but I'll never play it again.

< 1 hour: Any game that can't even entertain me for an hour: forget about it, unless you're a hardcore fan of the genre or the series. A game has to be pretty bad for me to give up on it in less than an hour.

1-2 hours: This usually means that I've played the game for a good single session (usually in the evening after work), and that I may have enjoyed it for a short time. But, I can't be bothered to play it again. It just didn't grab me.

3-5 hours: The game was fun, to a point. Usually one of two scenarios: a 3 to 5 hour marathon where i basically beat the game in one sitting (I'm looking at you GH: Rocking the 80s), or I played for a few days until the new-game-smell wore off. This is not necesarily a bad span, as I have the attention span of a gnat.

6-10 hours: A pretty good game. This means I kept coming back to it, until another game caught my fancy, or that play sessions are short, and I came back to it many times. To be honest, few games can keep my attention for this long with so much competition.

10+ hours: A game that can keep my attention for more than 10 hours is probably pretty good by most people's standards. This is especially true when you consider that so many games these days (excluding sports and racing games) are short, clocking in at a mere 10 to 15 hours of available gameplay. So, if I stick around for that long, that means I've enjoyed the majority of the game.

20+ hours: Any game that can keep my attention for more than 20 hours is fantastic. Or, it's a racing game. I'm a sucker for racing games, except for the really awful ones.

40+ hours: Any game that can keep my focus for more than 40 hours is a masterpiece.