Quote:
Originally Posted by morgonstjarnan
This seemed more like a forum post with the [My Life with Master] tag than a review. As someone not familiar with that game, your review didn't really offer me anything, sorry to say. :-/
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Well, the review tells you to read a previous (and more "straight" and complete) one, by Steve Darlington, though Matthijs could have set a HTML link to it. And you can see it as a playtest review omitting the capsule part.
Actually, I can very much understand Matthijs's sentiments. I occasionally read a review and go "yes, but...". The review or reviews are reasonably complete but lack some aspect I would have found interesting or which would have influenced my decision to buy the game. Mind you, this is not aimed at the reviewers, they may have simply overlooked that aspect or have perfectly good reasons to omit it. Basically, I see five ways to solve the problem, but they are all flawed, IMHO.
(1) Go ahead and write another (full) review. The bad thing about it is that it costs (at least for me) so much time to write a complete review which will mostly reproduce what others have done already (and, in my case as a secondary language person, better).
(2) Write a review like Matthijs's. But this doesn't give basic coverage of the game and its readers must read the other reviews (which they should do anyway, IMHO, but nevertheless). However, this "sparse" review shows up in the review database. On the other hand, the RPGnet staff wouldn't want to their very helpful database of information-rich "full" reviews buried under an avalanche of "yes, but..." ones which only describe part of the game. While I don't think Matthijs's review would be a typical "yes, but..." one (because of the "playtest without capsule" thingy), you, Morgonstjarnan, have fingered the problem.
(3) Post to the previous review's discussion. This is, I think, the worst alternative. First, not everybody reads the discussions. Second, which review do you comment on if there is more than one? Third, a review's discussion thread is about the review, not about the game, IMHO, so it's not the proper place to add a comment (about a certain aspect of a game) whose only connection with the review discussed is that it doesn't mention that aspect.
(4) Write a (tagged) forum post. This is what I have done for Archangel's
Heaven and Earth and, in a way, for
Spaceship Zero. The problem with this method is that, as a forum post, it quickly vanishes in the background noise. True, people might google for it, but it doesn't show up in the reviews list.
(5) Ditto, but pack a link to it into the game's RPGnet Index page. This drags the thread out of oblivion, but the comments still don't end up on the game's reviews list.
Now in my ideal world, there would be three categories of reviews, "capsule", "playtest" and "supplementary" or "other opinion" (like in
White Wolf Magazine's feature reviews). This way, the comments show up on the reviews list but are clearly marked as incomplete and (depending on whether they are sorted by category) don't crowd out the "full" reviews. I can't tell how easily the forum software could be altered for this, so I won't advocate it.