Writing reviews and game criticism

[Diego]

I've been having this itch for a while now, where I play a game and I really want to externalize my thoughts on it. I have been doing that on Steam but I don't like that environment at all, almost every review there is just as horribly written as it's upvoted as helpful. It's like Reddit for user reviews. The top most voted review is a one-liner joke and buried beneath hundreds of similarly unhelpful reviews you'll find something worth reading.

 

So I'm looking for other mediums (the original plural 'media' seems to be reserved for mass media now) to write about games. I do have a youtube channel! but it's more like a repository of videos than anything else and I think I'm too shy to speak. Then there's the language choice, do I use english or my native language, portuguese? I don't know who would be reading/watching, so it's hard to decide.

 

 

[Noordung]

Probably there arent many portugese reviewers so that may be good choice. I think you can put written text over youtube videos. So you dont need to speak. In this way you could have videos in English and Portuguese.

[Diego]

That's a good point. But, on the other hand, every gaming community I participate in speaks english, every review I ever read is in english, every critic, every video and, hell, even the vast majority of games I ever played, are in english. It feels like I would be talking to myself by making these reviews in any language other than english. Or I could discover the hidden community of portuguese speakers! that could happen too.

 

I'll probably stick with steam reviews

[Anderson]

You can do videos, but I would advise to take great care for montage and presentation.

Never be shy. As long as you enjoy what you do, you can only get better. You have nothing to lose.

[Morat]

You can do videos, but I would advise to take great care for montage and presentation.

Never be shy. As long as you enjoy what you do, you can only get better. You have nothing to lose.

What he said. There are many, many youtube channels that do game reviews with various styles so you could see how it's done. Some are pretty obnoxious (Razorfist, Angry Video Game Nerd) while others are more humorous (The Escapist). Or you could make your own style.

[demagogue]

GenGaming over at TTLG used to fill this role, but forums are a dying breed.

Of course the best fan game criticism is in blogs, or the quasi-institutional blogs like Sneaky Bastards or SouthQuarter (or what SQ aspired to be anyway).

[Obsttorte]

It is true that most of the stuff you find in the internet is in english, but as said in many other threads dealing with the matter of languages not everyone is speaking english. So even if you may address a broader audiance when speaking english, I could think of many people who would be happy to have reviews and the like in their mother tongue.

 

When I watch let's plays for example, I only watch german ones. It gets very tedious after a while if you listen to someone speaking in a foreign language, especially if they are speaking fast and use slang.

 

Just out of curiousity, isn't portugese relatively close to spanish? I mean, can a spanish speaking person (roghly) understand a portugese speaking one? In that case, your audience would be quite huge (I think spanish and portugese are the main languages spoken in south america, not to mention spain and portugal themselves).

 

I think you should do what you feel most comfortable with.

[Diego]

Portuguese is superficially similar to spanish. If I can make a spanish speaker to speak in slow motion (which is impossible) I can understand everything they say, but I can't speak spanish.

[Airship Ballet]

If I can make a spanish speaker to speak in slow motion (which is impossible)