Game Review or Game Experience?

I began today's article and after a few paragraphs, I stopped.  I looked up at the "Post title" box and read, and re-read the "Game Review" title I had and felt that what I was writing was not so much a conventional review, as it was my own experience playing the game.

A Game Review article, I feel is something that is looking critically at a product, how that product plays, looks, sounds, with the intention of convincing people that the game is either worth purchasing/renting/playing or not worth anyone's time.  Often, a score is also associated with said product.  

Compare that to an article where we talk about how we played the game, possibly even a game that we may not have played very well.  And that is kind of the point especially regarding games on PC, which is what I use when I play video games about 67% of the time[citation needed].  Unless two people play the exact same game on the exact same settings on the exact same machine, those two experiences may be different.

Moving away from rig specs, sometimes one of us here might play a game differently than either the developers had planned, or by someone else out there in the Interspherenet.  For instance, in Dead Space, I used primarily the Plasma Cutter and the Pulse Rifle, although I didn't use the secondary function on the Pulse Rifle because I misunderstood what its function actually did.  Therefore, my experience would be different from someone who experimented a lot more with the other various weapons in the game.  In Resident Evil 5 (Game Experience/Review article to be on either Friday or a week from today) I did not play co-op at all even though that game felt like it was specifically designed to be played with another real person.  Each time I started I turned off online co-op

The ultimate point here being that because I have a real world job and am beholden to no one, I do not have the amount of time I would like to put in for game review articles that would normally grace the binary encoded pages of sites such as Gamespot, IGN, or Polygon.  What I can do is talk about my own individual experiences playing video games in the way that I find both enjoyable and easiest for me.  And that is my plan as of the moment.

Now, this does not mean that we are going to completely stop writing Game Review articles as was in the past, and as far as I am concerned, this half-assed declaration will only pertain to myself as I cannot put words in Dr. Potts' mouth or make such a sweeping change to the way we do things here, it is just something that I was thinking about while typing out my words for what will be Friday's article.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

I Am There Where Everything Starts Anew

P.S.  Something else that I typically think about every time I write what we have been calling Game Review articles, is that I am either forgetting something about the story/game play/music/etc. that I feel I need to apologize just in case I did in fact forget something that another player would view as integral to their own gaming experience.  Such as, I typically do not play multiplayer functions of games so that whole side of a game is not going be covered because that is how I choose to play a game.

P.P.S.  I am still not 100% set on using the title "Game Experience" in place of "Game Review" for articles where I talk about games after I have "beaten" them.  I have also thought about "Game XP," "Game EXP," or some other as yet to be determined title that may or may not be similar.  The need to come up with something witty and appropriate is strong.  We will just have to wait until Friday, or Monday, or a week from Thursday, or Sunday, Monday, Friday, Tuesday, Saturday, or Monday.