Digg This

I thought I’d see what happened if we added a “Digg” function to our posts.  Now if you really like something you can submit it to Digg.  We’ll see how it goes.

I’m still working on fixing up the look of the “Recent Comments” sidebar as well.  Thanks for your patience.

Comments Sidebar

Just an update that I’m playing around with getting “Recent Comments” into the sidebar so that it’s easier to see and respond to people when they comment on various things.  Right now, as you can see, it’s installed, but it looks bad.  I’m still working on it a bit to get it to mesh well with the rest of the site, so please bear with me while I work on it.

In the meantime, you can at least enjoy it’s functionality.  Thanks!

Not Dead Yet…

Well, I’m back from my trip - but I’ve just moved, have no internet till tonight, and am in orientation for a new position from 8 am until 11 pm every day.  Will be hopefully posting later.

Off To Belize

Well, I’m off to Belize for the next week - look to Jeff to pick up the slack.

Officially Back

OK, I am now officially back.  In case you were wondering, this would be the reason I’ve been MIA. 

Ditching You Suckers

I’ll be heading out on vacation starting tomorrow at 7 am… because nothing says vacation quite like getting up at 4 am to catch an international flight.  I should have occasional internet access, but I’ll leave it up to Jeff to keep up the posting while I’m gone.

Site Enhancements

As you can no doubt tell right now, we’re working on some changes to the site.  We hope that you like what we’ve done, and please feel free to give us feedback.

Thanks!

Give us your input: The Future of Pre-Reviews

Back in February, Geoff and I were talking about games that were coming out and essentially how we could pretty much tell what kind of reviews a game would get before it even released.  Thus sprang to life the idea for this website: Pre-Reviews, and part of the motivation for our website name.

We started with Sonic and the Secret Rings and came remarkably close to predicting its Gamerankings score, and moved onto just a few others, but just stopped working on them after awhile when it became apparent that most people who were finding the site didn’t seem to care about Pre-Reviews and instead were only commenting on our other posts. It was also a rather annoying process for us to write them, as even if we had a gut-feeling about what a game would garner, we would still try to research what it’s strengths and weaknesses would be before the game released and write them up.  And of course, it became extremely apparent to us, particularly after the 1up SSX Blur “scandal” that previews would often have absolutely no bearing on a final review.  As both Geoff and I have “real” jobs and have limited free time to post (let alone play the games that we like to post about), it just didn’t seem worth it to us to continue writing them.

Considering the original intent of the site, I’ve been trying to think of other ways that we may be able to re-introduce the feature that wouldn’t absorb so much of our time.  So, after many months of no pre-reviews, I’m inviting you, our readers, to post your opinions on whether you’d like to see us return to these features in some way.  Were they worthwhile reading?  Did you enjoy our lengthy write-ups on them, or would something much shorter, say, a pro and con list, be better?  Should we just abandon the concept entirely?  Now is your chance to help shape the future of our site.   What do you say?

Back with an EDGE

I’ve just come back from my European vacation and on my way out to my first vacation destination I happened to go through a London airport.  With a ton of time to kill before my next flight, I checked out some magazines and discovered “EDGE”.  I’d heard good things about EDGE before but never picked up a subscription because of a crazy subscription price ($75 for 13 issues). Despite the somewhat ridiculous newsstand price (nearly $9 USD), I decided to pick it up.

It is, by far, the best videogame magazine I’ve ever read.  It reminds me a bit of the old “Next Generation” magazine (and is published, I think, by the same company) before it sort of became like all the other crappy VG mags, but is probably even better than that ever was.  The articles are actually well written and don’t sound like they’ve been written by obsessed fanboys.  It’s actually remarkably levelheaded and intelligent writing.

Get this… the previews actually contain criticisms and real impressions on what works and what doesn’t.  Are we listening American media?  Why are the American print magazines so inferior?

I haven’t plunked down the $75 bucks yet for the subscription yet, but I’m now seriously considering it.  AnyAmerican print magazine want to show me why I’m wrong and save me some money?

Facelift Coming

For those of you unimpressed with our standard Wordpress layout, we’re working on some overhauls of the site that are currently being tested.  It may take a little while to get the kinks worked out, but it’s on its way.