With this blog I'm going to try to harness the power of Tags, and writing out different "sections" of updates instead. Assuming that the "Cloud Tag" widget works the way it should, you'll start seeing it to the right of this blog. Here's a quick rundown of the tags and what they should be about:
- "Gaming Past" is a category detailing my previous gaming history. Personally I think it's a fairly important topic that anyone who talks about games should think about. What we've played in our past greatly contributes to the things we see in games. If I grew up on nothing but platformers, my appreciation for the latest Mario game will be much different than someone who's only played FPS games.
- "Quick Impressions" should be a short, quick writeup of a game I've started playing (I'll say no more than 4-5 hours). While true discussions of games should never be coloured by quick impressions, it's human nature that we all judge books by their covers. Sometimes, analyzing the first few moments of a game can show interesting things on how people perceive new ideas and mechanics.
- "Post Play Analysis" is the opposite of a quick impression. I'll still stay away from full-on reviews, and I'll try to analyze the game with a focus on gameplay discussion in mind. I'll probably avoid panning a game no matter how bad it is (unless it's exceptionally bad), as there's always something to learn from a bad game. Unlike Quick Impressions, this one is going to be spoiler heavy, so if you want to avoid spoiling the game, don't read these post unless you've beaten the game.
- "Let's talk Achievements" is all about achievements: What works? What doesn't? Why were things done that way? What if we were to make achievements for games didn't have any, how would those work? This section will be similar to Post Play Analysis in that some of the discussion will potential spoil the game, so read at your own discretion.
- "In The News" and "On My Mind" are probably the fluffiest articles I'll write here. They're the most blog like in that they're more opinionated pieces directed at either a)something current or b) something I've run into that warrants me writing about it.
- "Design Teardown" is in a way similar to post play analysis, but instead of reviewing a game, I'm going to dig deep into a certain feature or mechanic and examine it. The short form of this discussion might as well be "What if?": Given what the developers did, "what if they did something else?". Looking at other games as examples, creating and analyzing the outcomes of such decision.
Sometimes I may mash two or more sections together if it makes sense. Hopefully it won't be that confusing.
