Yoshi's Island is Really Messed Up: but only if You Think about It

Inevitably my quest to complete (or at least play) every single game on Edge's Top 100 Games to Play Today has this week brought me to Yoshi's Island, the follow-up to Super Mario World on the SNES. If summing it up briefly I'd probably praise and condemn its lower difficulty level than the other Mario games I've played, praise because the series has at points brought me to tears, and condemn for almost the same reason.

Any comments I make with my reviewers hat on however, are simply going to feel outdated and a little redundant at this point in time, so instead allow me to wax lyrical about some of the finer points of the game, namely how messed up the whole thing is.

From what I can gather, the art style has divided opinion since the game's release. For what it's worth I like it. The hand drawn colouring-book art style is appealing to me just because of how unique it is, and whilst I could do without having to listen to Mario bawl his eyes out whenever I lead Yoshi astray I think the idea of a baby Mario is – in itself – not a bad idea.

In places however, the art style raises very important philosophical questions that I feel need answers. Firstly, why did Yoshi's Island change so much whilst the Mario brothers were growing up? According to this game, there was a time when the whole thing looked like it had been drawn by a four year old (albeit a very competent one), what happened? Did Bowser or one of his maniacal crew turn up in Mario's absence and bully the island into growing up?
















If this was the case then why did Bowser leave? I can't believe that he would just redraw an entire state of dinosaurs and then bugger of from whence he came. Does this mean there is more than one saviour of Yoshi's Island? Is there some other blue-collar worker who works in tandem with Mario to keep the kingdom safe? Actually come to think of it, we don't know if the Island is a monarchy, or even if it's its own state. The Yoshiss clearly rule it judging by the name, but is there a head honcho who tells all the others what's what?

It could also be the case that Yoshi's Island is a living thing, and has over the years grown up exactly as Mario has. The mountains in the background have faces on several occasions, which frankly raises further questions. The fact that they have eyes I can deal with, but the mouths suggest two things, firstly that they can talk, and second that they can eat.

Now I don't know about you, but the concept of a mountain needing to eat is terrifying to me. Does it simply open its mouth and wait for unwitting hikers/Yoshis/Mario to fall in? Or is a more active roll necessary? Are there Yoshis who're tasked with the job of feeding these leviathans? What do they even eat? Are they carnivores? Also WHY ARE THEY SMILING? What could a mountain possibly have to be happy about?

I don't know about you, but the existence of narcotics in the Super Mario world simultaneously shocked me whilst confirming within me suspicions I've held about the games for quite some time now. You know the levels I'm talking about; the ones where if you touch the huge floating dandelion seeds the screen starts to pulse, and Yoshi finds it hard to control himself whilst his stomach bulges comically. Now I'm no politician Nintendo, but is comedy really something you want to derive from casual drug use?

Unquestionably the most messed up thing about Yoshi's Island is your ability to suck up enemies and then immediately turn them into eggs. I can only think of two ways Yoshi may be able to achieve this. The first involves him pushing the creature through his system at phenomenal speeds, and propelling him into an egg waiting happily in Yoshi's colon (another interesting point, is every Yoshi called Yoshi? Or is there one dinosaur called Yoshi, with all the others belonging to the same unnamed race?). The second, more disturbing explanation is that eating animals provides Yoshi with the energy needed to produce an egg. If this is true, it means that Yoshi's throwing his own eggs at enemies in order for baby Mario to pass safely. That's commitment, it really is.

Actually it could be the fact that this game reveals the existence of more than one Yoshi that bothers me so much. In retrospect it was crazy to think that every Yoshi you encountered in Super Mario World was the same guy, but why is he always the same colour? Was there some sort of plague that wiped out all the non-green Yoshis? Perhaps more disturbing is the thought that maybe the Yoshis had some sort of racial uprising in the time between Yoshi's Island and Super Mario World in which all the non-green creatures were removed from the island.

In any case I'll freely admit to having next to no knowledge of Mario lore, or at least not as much as someone who's prepared to write a 900 word article should do. If anyone has any answers to my questions, please do post them below. Admit it though, this game is really weird.

Jet Set Radio Future: A Review

Note: I never owned an original Xbox, and as such never played JSRF as it was meant to be played. This review is one of the game played with the 360's less than perfect backwards compatibility. I'm fully aware some of the issues I experienced weren't present in the original, but I've only got my personal experience to go on when it comes to this. Taking such matters into account simply isn't possible.

If any game were to sum up the 'almost-retro' fashion stylings of the early double-0s, it would be Jet Set Radio Future. The florescent art style, the 'street' lingo characters use, and the omni-present radio DJ all point towards a style that was verging on the ridiculous even when it had a following. Perhaps then this distance from the culture it apes is a good thing, adding a layer of tongue in cheek to a game that would otherwise see its setting plunge into cheese so deep so as not even to be ironically enjoyable.

As it is however, the setting is pleasant, almost whimsical. In a not-to-distant Tokyo a fascist dictator has come into power, intent on making every citizen a slave to his unimaginative, generic take on what art should be. As a result of this several graffiti gangs – all of which sporting inline skates, a fact that's never really explained – pop up, intent on covering the city in paint and restoring its urban beauty.

Whilst the story does pave the way for many encounters with a very Nazi-esque police force later in the game, initially it tends towards the tedious, and sometimes even the frustrating. A very common task you'll be presented with is to enter a new area and cover predesignated spots with graffiti. The act of squeezing off paint cans and seeing predefined pieces of artwork pepper the walls is enjoyable enough by itself, but when you're asked to repeat this task several times over there's more than a little sense of the grind setting in.


Actually spraying the graffiti is only half the battle though, the other half being just getting to the place. Here, billboards and railings are your best friends, the former providing a means to wall ride and propel yourself around corners, and the latter allowing you to scale sets of stairs. Largely these actions are automated, so it's just a case of lining yourself up with whatever it is you need to hit, and this removes an awful amount of the frustration-factor, but can also add a host of other difficulties when you'd rather your skates land on the floor than be stuck in a difficult to exit grind.

An automatically adjusting camera causes problems for exactly the same reason. For the most part you can leave the camera alone, safe in the knowledge that it will center itself behind you once you start moving, but in cases when you're standing still, lining yourself up for a particularly taxing jump, it feels like it takes far too long to get the camera looking where you want it to. These problems pale in comparison to the 'set-piece' camera however, when the game feels it necessary to take camera control away from you. In one case (when you're skating around a cylindrical grind rail) the camera actually pans backwards, making the jump out of the grind much more taxing than it should otherwise be.

Minor annoyances simply cannot mar your entire experience with Jet Set Radio Future when the core skating component feels so right so consistently however. It feels good merely skating along the flat pavements Tokyo has to offer, and the fact that there's a basic trick system in there (along with a button that allows you to skate backwards) when high scores play next to no part in this game adds to this sense of innocent fun the whole game exudes. Ultimately there isn't a point to much of the stuff you'll end up doing in Jet Set Radio Future, but you have fun doing it anyway.

5 Films that Deserve Game Tie-Ins (but will never get them)

Movie game tie-ins suck, there's no two ways about it. Development teams are given mere months to bring a project to completion, their control over the IP is minimal at best, and they have to suffer all the trials and tribulations of film editing, which at times can eradicate, weeks of work. A message will be passed down from upper management, “Hey,” they'll say, “Remember that water level you spend days programming, modeling, texturing and testing? Well they cut that scene from the movie.” This development environment is so hostile one designer who's had to work on such projects remarked that the best game developers are completely unknown to gamers, because these are the people that manage to pull an average game out of a project that should be utter garbage.

So let it be known that I'm under no illusions here. If these films were given games to their name, if some studio went out of its way to buy up the rights, and then put something out, it would almost definitely be awful, and would likely sour your memories of the original.

Don't let this deter you though. No one ever let reality interfere with their 'What if?'s before. Just think about it, if these games were made in the way we'd want them to be made, they'd be awesome.

Blade Runner

I'll admit right off the bat here that I'm not a huge fan of the original. I blame coming to it too late, having watched the reams of imitations over the years which have taken everything from the original, modernised, and then repackaged it. By the time I reached the original, the Blade Runner film itself, I wasn't watching the real movie, I was watching a flashback, something I'd almost seen before through the eyes of all the film makers who've since taken inspiration from it.

So the film for me personally, not so much.

But the world.

Oh the world is stunning. A bustling metropolis as tall as it is wide, unexplainable fashions, and crimes so fantastical you can't help be amazed. Of course I want to be a blade runner, I want to have my own flying cop car, landing anywhere I damn well please. I will not be Harrison Ford, I will not spend my days investigating a single set of clones that are running amok, but I will see him, I will be in his group, his precinct. I will do the everyday detective stuff that is only hinted at in the movie, and then I will become corrupt.

Yes I will become corrupt. I will engage with the criminal underworld, ferrying clone parts around the city in my cop car which will – did I mention this before? - fly. I want to solve crimes, not by shooting everyone in the room, but by chasing people, by running across impossibly high rooftops, leaping into my flying cop car (yes my FLYING cop car!) and chasing them through skyscrapers filled with more people wearing stupid, but undeniably cool outfits.

It's hard enough making an open world game with two axis of exploration. Alex Ward of Criterion Games summed the problem up perfectly when he said that for a standard game you have to build an engine that can render 'x' amount of environment, but in an open world game you need one which can render 'x-squared' amount of data. The player can change direction at any time, and the game needs to be ready to cope with this. Following on from this logic 'x-cubed' amount of environment would mean a huge amount more work, and make no mistake about it, if I'm going to play a Blade Runner game with my flying car, I want there to be as much to explore upwards as there is to explore across.

So the world will be too difficult to do justice, and once you're willing to compromise on the world, why are you even bothering to make a Blade Runner game at all? There's also the problem that after all this time there might not even be a sufficient audience for such a game, but then I wouldn't really be in the target demographic anyway so who cares what I think?

Serenity/ Firefly

Let's forget for a moment that an MMO based on the cripplingly short lived television series turned sci-fi flick has already been announced. That was over five years ago, and it's the future now, and us cool future people are having too much fun with our hover trousers to care about anything those dotcom fat-cats might have said all those years ago.

Much like Blade Runner, any aspirations to play a Firefly-based game revolve around one thing. We all want to be Captain Mal. Let's face it, he's ruggedly handsome, doesn't take crap from anyone, and even has time to own his own space-ship. He's Nathan Drake before Nathan Drake existed, but cooler, because yaknow...spaceship?

Other things about the series add to the awesome video game vibe of course. The ship Serenity is a magnificent beast, and the crew members Mal flies with are so conflicting and memorable that you can't wait to sit through hours upon hours of dialogue trees to find out all about them.

Discounting 'Serenity' the fact that the plot of Firefly was episodic in nature would make the transition to level-based gameplay much less jarring. Many episodes even come tantalisingly close to showing what a video game could make of the universe, with train heists, robberies, and spaceship chases that should have every gamer salivating.

It will never happen of course. It seems studios have learnt their lesson with Firefly, the TV show never got the ratings it needed to stay afloat and the film barely covered its relatively small budget. Putting the quality of the products to one side it's hard to see why a publisher would look at the franchise and think a big budget release would be a good idea.

Oh and let's not forget that Uncharted 2 has already been made.

Stay tuned for Part 2.
The posting of positive comments may or may not hurry the posting of the second part.

Today's Forecast: Heavy Rain with a Chance of Sunny Spells

Much to my surprise, last week saw the release of the much anticipated - by this humble Bitmobber at least - demo for Quantum Dream's 'Heavy Rain'. It contained two scenes taken from the game's full release.

David Cage would be proud. I laughed, I cried, and I came away from the experience confident that THIS is the game developers need to ape if they want to tell great stories within their medium.

Or maybe not...

Forward: This will only make sense to you if you've played the Heavy Rain demo. If you haven't, I suggest all you PS3 owners out there go and download it from the PSN store, and all you 360 owners watch GiantBomb's fantastic quick look.

I'll admit I may have already been a bit harsh on the game. The demo is, after all, only a fraction of the total experience, and as such is never going to have the impact of the full title. Thus, it's important for you to realize I'm making these statements based upon the demo alon. There's a valid argument that says any opinion I hold is worthless until I've seen the full game; If you hold this view I can see where you're coming from, but I suggest you stop reading now.

Are they gone yet? Good. I hate those arseholes.

The demo's first faux pas is in its construction of the player's agency. Essentially this boils down to a question of motivation.

You see, in a movie, the set up of a detective arriving to interview someone about a crime we don't know has happened, works. It works because as a passive observer to the action, we as an audience can be perfectly content working out the purpose of the scene as it goes along, safe in the knowledge that by the end of the scene it should all make sense.

A game is different though. As an active participant in proceedings, it's important to understand just why you're doing what you're doing. Otherwise your only motivation for playing on is completing the game. This might come down to a matter of opinion, but personally I think that's a pretty bad motivation to have.

That might just be my opinion, but it's a fact that because you have no idea what it is you're doing, you're essentially just looking for anything in the level to interact with. Is this detective work, or just time wasting?

Take the second scene as an example. I had no idea why I was in this apartment block, so when a button prompt appeared, I pressed it, without any idea of the response the action would have.

So let's summarize. I had no idea why I was there. I had no idea what the effect my button pushes would have. I had no choice as to what button pushes to make.

Bearing all that in mind, ask yourself this, 'Why does this experience need to be a game?'

Pushing these doubts to the back of my mind I moved on to my next interaction. Aside from another couple of instances of not knowing what I was doing when pushing buttons, I thought this section of the demo was its strongest part.

Finally, during the interview, I had a choice. I could see the options I had open to me, and their descriptions were clear enough so as to allow me to make a clear choice. It made perfect sense for the scene to be interactive.

I also liked the fact that during the dialogue I had complete freedom to move around. Call me inconsistent, but I actually rather enjoyed being able to lean casually against the dresser or sit on the bed next to my interviewee. It may have been completely pointless, but I felt it added some character to a scene that would have otherwise been very dialogue heavy.

More mystery button prompts followed. Apparently that one made me leave my calling card on the table. That's handy. I didn't know I could do that. Would have been a bit of a bummer if I'd missed that one right?

Unusually for me, I've got nothing to complain about with regards to the next section. The fight, which sees you essentially engaging in an extended quick-time event, was tense, well choreographed, and especially well animated. The characters have just that, character, and the button prompts are arranged in a way which makes sure you've always got your eyes on the action.

Most of all, I liked this sequence because the game finally admitted that it was, of course, a game, and you know what? It was fun.

The next scene is likewise enjoyable. You assume the role of another detective, and turn up at the scene of a murder, in order to find clues to aid your investigation.

Weirdly however, you investigate the scene by putting on a pair of sci-fi sunglasses, which point out clues and DNA samples for you to inspect. It's not that I think these are a bad addition to the game - in actual fact I think they're what make the level work - but that their presence in such a serious game is jarring. Everything about this game is so realistic and mature, and now you're using sunglasses at night to help you solve crimes. It just doesn't fit together quite right.

This fact really sums up my thought on the Heavy Rain demo. Any 'realistic' game needs to make allowances for the fact that it's a video game. The harder they try to avoid making these allowances, the more out of place they seem when the game inevitably has to make use of them.

That's really the crux of it. Heavy Rain, from what I've played of it, seems like a good game, there's no doubt about it. What it's most certainly not however, is the future of video game storytelling. It should never have been billed as this, and I'm doubtful and critic will share this view.

Of course, I'm open to the possibility of the full game changing my mind.

Why Comparing Games to Movies is Doing Everone a Disservice

You may have noticed, but I've been a bit absent from Bitmob of late. Work ramped up, exams closed in, and suddenly I just didn't have the time or energy to write articles that people would actually want to read (some would argue no amount of time and energy can change that, but that's a debate for another day).

A little bit of distance never hurt anyone though, especially with the amount of time I've had recently to devote to just playing games. This extended break has reinforced some old ideas, twisted others, and has completely eliminated any desire I once had to read one particular tired old argument, about gaming and a certain film whose name I won't care to mention here (though for the sake of those who may not have read the argument before, let's just say it concerns a man by the name of KANE, who was a CITIZEN of the United States.)

So I've been thinking, analysing, and gaming for these past few months, and have come to the following conclusion.

Comparing games to movies is going to get us nowhere.

So perhaps at this point I should rephrase. It's not the comparison between games and movies I resent - far from it, I think there's much games can learn visually from such a medium – but the way this comparison is innately attached to the whole 'Games as Art' thing. Whenever anyone brings up the fact that games can, and should aim for artistic merit, someone else will inevitably come along and claim games can never match up to movies as art.

Of course games could never match the artistic prowess of movies, in the same way that books could never 'match' sculpture, and paintings can never 'match' music. They're two very different mediums, both with their own strengths, and ideas about what they can accomplish.

So the idea of saying 'Games can never be art because movies will always be better at telling a story' is stupid, because games don't need to tell a story to be artistic.

I suppose the reason why this argument is so tired to me, is that a much better medium already exists for comparing with games, music.

I like the idea of music, because you don't listen to it in order to hear a story. It might tell a story, through its lyrics (similar to the way a game might tell a story through its cutscenes) or through the tune itself, harsh sounds creating the impression of violence, whilst subtler melodies conveying the emotions of love or happiness (or in video games, 'gameplay').

The point is that you never pick a song out of iTunes primarily because you want to hear the story the artist wants to tell. You might be interested in any story of course, in the same way that a big reason why I played MGS4 was to see the end of Snake's story, but if the sound isn't enjoyable to listen to, or if the gameplay isn't fun to experience, then you're never going to listen to an album, or play a game, in the first place.

Games should never try 'just' to be fun, but at the same time trying to imitate film is just embarressing. Most of this rant was brought on by playing through the recently released demo of 'Heavy Rain', which tries so hard to be a movie, and in many ways fails so badly. From what I can tell, it's not a bad game, but claiming that this is the future of interactive entertainment is pure self indulgance.

I like films, and I like games, but anyone that tries to mesh the two together is doing both a disservice. Games can have incredible depth, and can illicit raw emotion, but anyone trying to achieve this in the same way as film is going about it in a very wrong way.

Where Would we be Without Gears of War?

It's easy to look back on Gears of War now and wonder what all the fuss was about. The story's fragmented at best, all the lead characters have the combined depth of a puddle, and in at times the movement was so clunky so as to be almost tank-like. At the time however, the game was as close to revolutionary as the game industry gets, and without it we'd be playing games very differently today.

For one, we'd still be playing most of our shooters in first person.

It's weird to think that in the space of a couple of years, most of the biggest games released now use an over-the-shoulder camera viewpoint as opposed to the first person. It would of course be insane of me to claim that every game has made this leap when this is clearly not the case, but on reflection, the biggest fps games released today, use this perspective because of a history with it.

Games like Call of Duty, and Killzone, have their gameplay systems so focussed around the close viewpoint afforded by the first person, that to change this for a sequel would alter the game so much so as to make it completely unrecognisable. Modern Warfare is, for better or for worse, always going to be a first person game, and Gears of War will likewise – in several years time when first person inevitably comes back into fashion – remain in third person.

So why did this shift occur? You could point towards the increased graphical fidelity afforded by this generation of consoles, and claim that developers have always wanted to work with an over-the-shoulder camera, they just couldn't make it look good enough until now. A cynic might argue that this change has only taken place so that marketing executives can cash in on the wave of appreciation for Epic's seminal shooter, and there's probably quite a bit of truth to their claims.

Of course, there's another argument that would claim the only reason you'd go for such a camera angle is to be able to jump on another bandwagon.

Cover systems

Again, it would be crazy to claim that cover systems hadn't existed before Gears of War. How many times playing Timesplitters have players crouched behind a waist-high object, only to stand up briefly to unload a couple of shots before crouching once more. Cover systems have existed for years in the minds and strategies of gamers, but it was Gears of War that took what we've always done with complicated strafing and crouching techniques, and mapped it to the 'A' button.

It was, needless to say, genius. Gone were the stalemates that often punctuated mid-level encounters, (and I'm sorry to say, still existed in Resistance 2) as were the – in retrospect – insane bouts of circle strafing that would feature against tougher enemies. The solution was simple, elegant, and – dare I say it – cool. Who doesn't love frantically sprinting for cover, only to be ousted by a well placed grenade at the last minute? It's almost ironic that an innovation revolving around hiding has the effect of making you feel like such a badass.

Subtle guidance

It's a small point, something that to my knowledge didn't exist before this game's release, but having a button you can hold to point out items of interest is a genius move on the part of Epic. Some might argue that having such a button is an admission of failure by the developer, that a level should be designed in such a way so as to make it obvious what you should be looking at, but not every studio has Valve's ability in this regard.

Even the best games have moment's where I'm lost as to where to look, and this problem only increases when large set pieces occur outside of cutscenes. It takes a huge amount of confidence to take camera control away from the player entirely, as as such the 'hold a button' method is the perfect half way house in such a situation.

The traditional health bar is empty.

Like many of the things Gears did, thinking about the way things used to be often illicit a response akin to, 'How the hell did we ever get by without it?' from me. Having a bar filled with colour to denote your life is such an arcane way of doing things that it's a wonder there are games that still use it today, especially now that recharging health is almost standard across games.

It's not that having the screen go all faded and bloody is any more realistic than having a bar denoting hit points remaining, but when everything's going to pot, enemies are closing in on your position, and you're close to death, don't you want the entire screen screaming at you with this information? Call me overly progressive, but I'm glad health bars have died out.

Now if we could just simplify ammo counters in a way that doesn't involve my gun having ugly numbers on it's hilt, I'd be one happy bunny.

Hello I'm the Unreal Engine, soon I'll be powering everything.

It's something of a given that the future always looks far shinier than the present. Looking at Crysis 2 shots today is like giving my eyeballs a bubble bath, but I just know that when it finally comes out, there'll be something even better on the horizon.

It's weird then that Gears of War managed to both show off the best of the present, whilst hinting at the great things that were to come over the next few years. Of course we had no way of knowing that the engine was going to go on to power damn near every other game released this generation, but when Gears loaded up on our shiny new HDTVs for the first time, there combined thought that reverberated around the world, 'Oh,' we said to ourselves, 'so THIS is what games look like now then.'

It would be impossible to try and list the games that have taken inspiration from GoW, so I won't even bother trying. Suffice to say that the gaming landscape would be very different today without it, even if chainsaws on guns didn't quite bring about such a plethora of imitators.

–

Oh, just so you know, I'm not dead.

But you already guessed that right?

The Developer Journalist - The Developist

The role of games journalists has for a while now been a hotly debated topic amongst bloggers and commenters. Some argue that they're role is nothing more than to present a buyers guide to their readers, whilst others believe they should try to be more, pointing gamers to more innovative titles that may be lacking in areas important to more superficial gamers.

Recently Dan Marshall of Zombie Cow productions and PCZone threw his comments into the debate. Marshall is in something of a unique position amongst game journalists, in that whilst writing his reviews he's also worked on his own games, such as Been There Dan That and Gibbage. He believes this is a practise that's helped him immeasurably, “I think all games journos should be forced to make a game somehow, see how they get on. It gives you a more rounded perspective."

Whilst I agree that there's a large amount of journalists out there who are wholly ignorant as to just how much work goes into the games we play, I don't think forcing them into the other side of the games business is going to make them any better at their job.

When examining the issue, we first need to lock down exactly what the role of the games journalist is. From the first preview of an early alpha build, right up until the review of the final product, the writer exists as a means to convey to the reader exactly how fun a game is to play, and by extension whether it's worth your money. In a perfect world reviews would consist of either three or four words; either 'Buy this game,' or possibly, 'Do not buy this game.'

Obviously this world isn't perfect, and a reviewer's taste isn't necessarily going to be exactly the same as their readers. It thus becomes necessary to justify your opinion on what makes the game fun, readers can identify whether they agree that these things make an experience enjoyable, and can come away from the review knowing more or less whether this game is for them.

Even with the best and most objective reviewers out there, personal opinion is likely to creep in to any piece of writing. How do we ensure that this doesn't affect the effectiveness of a review as a buyer's guide?

We try and make the views of the reviewer as close as possible to any of their readers.

If I'm reading a review by Destructoid's Anthony Burch, or former 1Upper Nick Suttner, and personal bias creeps into their review, it doesn't matter, because that personal bias is something we share.

If game journalists are all game developers in their spare time, then this creates a barrier between them and their readers. A game developist (developer-journalist, keep up!) is going to notice things about a game's design which affects their view on the game either positively or negatively, but these intricacies are going to be lost on me, the reader.

Maybe the design of a certain mission is particularly intricate in a way that only a developer would notice. Perhaps the developist notices this, and it influences him to write a more positive review. Does this equate to a more positive experience on my part? Of course not.

There's already so much distance between how a reviewer plays a game and how the consumer will play it, anything more and they might as well be playing different games. Reviewers have to complete games in an obscenely short period of time, have their games paid for, and often play in an office environment; in other words their experience with the game is already very different from ours.


Game reviewing is a tough job at the best of times. You have to deal with fallout from fans, fallout from developers, and if you add to this a requirement to be a developer as well as a proficient writer you're not going to find many people capable of advising the gaming public on their buying choices.