Review Updates
My review of the 360 version of Harry Potter and the OotP is online. Also, my review of Total Pro Golf 2 is up as well. I’m not ready to write up NCAA ‘08 yet. I still haven’t touched online, I’m not through a full Dynasty season, and I just signed a LOI in Legend mode. Still lots to test there. No clue when Dan’s PS3 reviews will be ready and Todd is doing APF2K8.
July 26th, 2007 at 9:27 am
As a person who browses through Gameshark occasionally my frustration with the site stems from having to wait three weeks from the release of the game before I get a review. I want to know “now” if I should get the game or not while my trigger finger is itchy. Just my two cents.
July 26th, 2007 at 9:36 am
It would be tough to know “now” simply because I know Bill takes great care when he reviews sports games. I’m also not sure that Bill and/or Gameshark receive any early review copies of games. Nor do I know if any of the writers have development systems or not to play pre-release games on.
For the site I used to work for there was rarely time where review copies were sent prior to release so a review could be up day of or soon after. I usually ended up either buying or renting the games I reviewed and tried to get them out quickly.
I can understand your frustration though. However if Todd gets an APF 2K8 review out soon it will have been only over a week since release. Sports game reviews honestly take longer because of the amount of time it takes to experience enough to make a valid review. Sites like Gamespot and IGN have the game weeks ahead of time and actually are doing their job when they play games whereas the guys here all have regular jobs and put gaming in during their free time.
Anyway, I probably said enough and probably rambled on a bit…
July 26th, 2007 at 9:56 am
That is my frustration with GameShark, too.
The lateness of the TPG review is my fault. The lateness with NCAA, well, I want to do it right and not play 5 games, tool around with recruiting and legend mode, and post a review.
The lateness of other games.. we get them late from publishers. GameShark is still not a tier 1 site whern it comes to PR companies. I’m trying to change that, and going to E3 helped a lot.
But PR is different compared to how it used to be several years ago when we all got early builds of games.
UbiSoft, for example, sends games early enough for reviews to be posted on day 1 to IGN, GSpy, GameSpot, Game Informer, and 1UP and maybe a few other major sites.
Sites like GameShark are down on the list. It’s all priority based.
They get say 10 review copies in to send out to sites — we’ll be in the 2nd shipment. It is what it is.
The funny thing — GameShark gets about 170-195K page views per DAY. It’s not a small site by any means. So we’re trying to turn it into more of a player, it’ll just take time.
From my perspective, I’m happy with the direction in which the site is heading. I was hired (contracted as a freelance editor) in April.
Since then, traffic is way up.
You can see the upward trend here:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=gameshark.com
So I’m happy that we’re moving on the uptick. If we can get more backing from the parent company (Mad Catz) we have the traffic and the personnell to turn that site into something pretty significant.
July 26th, 2007 at 10:06 am
I like what you are trying to do because a lot of reviews really seem like they are written by a high schooler for junior highers. A more accurate review for older audiences that don’t drool over additional sock colors is appreciated.
July 26th, 2007 at 11:47 am
does the Harry Potter OOTP game have head to head?
July 26th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
That’s funny. The Potter sim engine is crap.
July 26th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
Would you recommend TPG2 to someone that’s not a gold fan at all?
I really have no interest in the sport at all, but tend to like text based sims quite a bit even those from sports I’m not particvularly interested in.
Do you need a strong working knowledge of golf in order to play the game or can the help files bring someone along?
July 27th, 2007 at 6:45 am
That’a always a tough question, but I’d think you’d need to be a fan of the sport, personally.