http://www.tbstactics.com/
Instead of talking about it, I'll simply copy-paste here the correspondence I've been having with the owner over the past month or so:
Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 4:22 PM
I wrote:I just came across your site today and it's a goddamn dream come true for me. It's basically impossible finding any commentary on SRPGs and generally Japanese tactical games that aren't written by mentally-challenged weeaboos! Your Tactics Ogre review was exactly what I think a review should be, and you can check a couple of my own SRPG reviews if you have the time to see how much on the same page we are (some of them contain PHP errors because my old site's broken and I haven't transferred them over to the new one yet, but they are perfectly readable):
http://insomnia.ac/reviews/playstationportable/twelve/
http://insomnia.ac/reviews/ds/itsuwarinorondo/
http://insomnia.ac/reviews/ds/archaicsealedheat/
http://insomnia.ac/reviews/ds/finalfant ... nantwings/
You may also have been linked at some point to my two RPG essays, the first of which contains a fair bit of analysis on the SRPG genre:
http://insomnia.ac/commentary/on_role-playing_games/
http://insomnia.ac/commentary/the_rpg_conundrum/
They are essentially statements of intent on how I intend to approach these genres, and if I may say so myself are the most widely linked and influential essays on the topic.
The reason I am doing all this boasting is to increase the chances of you accepting the offer I am about to make to you, as I figure you'll be more likely to say yes if you realize I am an authority on the subject and not some random blogger. And the offer is basically that I would love to feature your reviews and articles on my frontpage if you will give me permission. There's also a bit of payment involved if you agree to make the articles exclusive to my site, otherwise there will be a link at the top of each article I feature linking back to your frontpage. The payment is nothing much -- just 10 euros per article/review at the moment, because that is all my site's current subscriber base of around 150 people will allow, but new users are signing up all the time, so I hope to increase the fee (also retrospectively, for content already published...) in the near future. My goal is to eventually be able to pay several hundred euros per article/review, which would make my site the only professional videogame criticism site that's not supported by ads. But we'll see how that goes...
In the meantime let me know what you think about all this. Your stuff's too good to remain in a specialist blog buried under enormous amounts of ephemeral news posts, and Jesus Christ "extremegamer.ca"? What were you thinking?
Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 6:16 PM
mjemirzian wrote:Hi Alex, your reviews are very concise and well written. It's good to know there are other writers out there that like to focus on mechanics and design. Your RPG essays are also very engaging and I'll be sure to read them fully.
You can repost anything from tbstactics.com with credit. I'm not concerned about payment. You might find some of my older writing isn't as good or agreeable to you, so feel free to use whatever you think is acceptable.
The reason I write for extremegamer.ca is because they are listed on metacritic. You probably don't like metacritic, but I like having my name and writing listed on it.
Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 11:52 PM
I wrote:That's great to hear! I'll get down to posting the first one soon. No idea which it will be -- there are plenty of candidates and it'll be a tough choice :)
As for Metacritic... I don't think it's a bad site at all: on the contrary it's a great destination for people who want to find a lot of diverging critical voices in one place (for the other artforms, that is, because pretty much everyone writing about games is saying the same things lol :). It's just that it's not generally useful to me because I've already settled on the critics I follow.
Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 10:34 PM
mjemirzian wrote:Hi Alex, how are you? I thought you might want to take a look at my review for X-Com Enemy Unknown. Of course, it’s not the usual 9/10 or 10/10 breathless praise like most reviews on metacritic.
http://www.extremegamer.ca/multi/reviews/xcomEU.php
Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 7:16 PM
I wrote:Thanks for the heads-up! I enjoyed reading the review, and it's certainly better than all the rest, but it's far from being your best one. The main problem with it is that you do not appear to have played the original game(s), or if you have you show no indication of it in the review, and hence do not make the slightest attempt to compare them. But this is the number 1 question that anyone would expect to see answered in a review of this game: Is this game better than the original or not? And if so in what ways, etc. etc.
Apart from that you have the inexplicable habit of calling a turn-based tactics game a "cover shooter", as if Gears of War and XCOM have anything in common; you spend two paragraphs castigating the game for problems it doesn't even have, and even dock it points in the end, as if a review of Street Fighter IV should take into consideration the fact that the iPhone port is unplayable zomg; and finally, you lament the "turtling" engendered by the hardcore mode but make no attempt to tell us which mode you deem superior, or how, in your view, the game could be modified to avoid this turtling you don't like. If it really is a fault, then surely there must be a solution for it, no? Otherwise I don't see how it is a fault. Obviously, no saving engenders a more cautious approach from the player in any kind of game, but that is no argument against not saving, unless you have specific proposals on how the issue could be mitigated.
But the main problem is the fact that you haven't played the first game -- all the rest can be fixed with a couple of minutes of editing. In that state the review would be acceptable (i.e. I would consider it at a standard appropriate for publication on my site), but would not be the last word on the game. The last word would have to come from someone with deep knowledge of the entire series, and the analytical skills to properly compare them (because there are plenty of aspies online who have played all the installments but who can't analyze worth a shit).
So let me just repeat my offer to you. You are a good reviewer, but you could become a great one with my help. We have a staff forum on my site where staff members post drafts of their reviews for comments by the rest of us before the review is published. I have helped a lot of people in there over the years, and I can help you too. You'd get a free lifetime subscription to the site, all the books published by Insomnia for free, and a little bit of money for every review, to help with purchases of new games, if nothing else. And you'll be able to do your news reporting alongside me and the other guys, in tidy threads created specifically for each game, instead of this haphazard collection of links and comments, intermingled randomly in unconnected blog posts across a site that's a chore to navigate. It's not your fault -- it's the blog format's, but your site is much less pleasant to read and navigate because of it. On my site, I have solved all these problems, and we could have a lot of fun posting there together and talking about these games as they are announced and released.
So I made my case one more time in detail, and won't bother you with it again. It is a damn shame to see half-finished reviews of such potential go to such a shitty, ugly site like "extremegamer.ca" or whatever, just because you like to see your name on a review aggregator for christsake. Just think about it.
So let's wait and see what he says. He'd be a real asset to the site if he agreed to join it.
