AaKoo goes Game Journalism

As GameReactor, the biggest Nordic free game magazine came to Finland, I made the decision to work as a volunteer and trying to experience how it feels like to be “on the popularistic side” of game analysis.

So far, I have realized that it is a hard work to produce an opinion and also mediate it in Finnish. As we are used to play games in English, and I read and write about games at my work primarily in English, Finnish words feels awkward. Try for example translating “gameplay” into something else than “pelattavuus” (playability) with just one word…

So far I have made reviews of Endless Ocean, Bee Movie Game and The Sims 2 Castaway (as a review of High School Musical Making the Cut! for Nintendo DS is for a reason still under construction). I have to say that it is not always that pleasant to find out that the game is boring and yet you have to write a relatively interesting article about it. If only the game would be boring enough to make me feel worth expressing it…

I seem to have some kind of perversion to transfer my love for games into suffering and misery… Ok, fare enough: I enjoyed playing Castaway and to some extent that bee-thingy and ocean-thingy as they had their strengths despite their weird weaknesses. Certainly, I would not have played these games that much without the pressure of writing a review of them. However, only true mistake I made was with the Disney Channel licence game of High School Musical. As dedicated to my deeds, I actually even watched the movie thinking that my limit for tolerating teenager/children movies is much higher than for others. So wrong was I. But I made the commitment, so I suffered my time.

The game itself is nothing truely enjoyable and it is not really about being a DS game with low resolution. We all have seen really good DS games. Game just sucks. Sucking happens particular with some cognitive aspects (for example providing understandable feedback to the player about their actions: somebody needs those design heuristics big time) and as a fan product (heuristics of casual game experiences or instrumental value of play, here). Well, ok, you can remember the songs till the end of times after playing the game. Maybe you are then a happy happy fan with the best game ever. Hard to say – we come in so many shapes and colors. But more about it, hopefully soon, in a review at GameReactor…