Who Needs Long Reviews Anyway?

by on 6 August, 2008 - 11:38

Ian Bogost, who usually has interesting posts, writes about the advergame accompanying Universal Pictures' new Mummy movie. As the post is rather short, I'll put it all here, since I found it hilarious.

Ian writes:

To promote Universal Pictures' new film The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, the studio created an advergame, Chariot Chase Down Game. Go ahead and play it. It's almost as good as the film, which garnered an impressive 9% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Leaving the funny aside, that's the exact number of lines you need for an advergame review. What's it for, what is it called and how good (or bad) is it. The rest is semantics.

And, if you've done an advergame and are snooping around for reviews, that's exactly what you should expect. Go to any casual games portal and check the comments for any game. I bet you won't find any 3 pages reviews. Which is not to say your game doesn't deserve more. It simply doesn't need more. Besides, we're busy people here. There are thousands of casual games coming out daily, you can't expect us to write extensive reviews, can you now? We'd have no time left to play the games (which, as ways of avoiding office work go, is much more fun that writing reviews, you'll agree). In fact, you should be happy that your game managed to get enough attention to be deemed worthy of a review at all. Unless, you know, you're a big brand and just came up with a horrible game (see above), in which case we'd be more than happy to trash you.

Flowing along to a different topic, I get a reasonable amount of press releases and such in my mailbox each day/week. They're usually related to games, although I do occasionally get pitches for products completely unrelated to this blog's focus (those are puzzling). I never post about most of them. Why? It's simple. Because most PR people never actually bother to follow emails through. So - you send me an email saying "Hey Alex, I'm writing to inform you about X which is done by Y and here's the rest of the press release saying we're more awesome than Santa". To which I reply with a few further questions about the game. And when I get the answers, I'll post them in here with a short review of the game and whatnot. The problem is, 99% of the time, I never get those answers. And then I don't review the game at all.