I don't happen to agree that it's terrible, but I can see where it wouldn't be to everyone's taste. Case in point: I went to a Picasso exhibit in the fall. I thought it was hideous, far worse than this. And yet I obviously understand that he's one of the most influential artists of all time.
Nah, if someone was calling decent 3D artwork terrible as well, I'd still pipe up. IMO, art is art (heh, I guess that's more of a fact...) - doesn't matter what the medium is.
The art is great. You kids probably don't know about the Planescape Blood Wars CCG. The art in Ascension is similar. Not every fantasy theme needs to resemble World of Warcraft.
Right - in this case, by saying "I thought", you've made the statement very clearly an opinion. If instead you had said simply "his art is hideous", that statement is more open to interpretation - some may see it as a statement of fact or a shared opinion. I'm not saying a person can't say it that way or use whatever words he wants - he just needs to be ready for the different responses he may receive.
As I said before, it's considered poor writing etiquette to refer to yourself when writing an opinion article. He's the one writing the review, of course it's what "he thinks", there's no reason he needs to spell it out further. If people are so dense as to take a subjective review as "fact", then that problem lies with them and not the reviewer. Ah, nothing ever wipes any sort of credibility from someone's opinion quicker than assuming people are just stupid kids. Nice.
Still, whether the people who complained about something within a review is right or wrong, the reviewer has to expect it. Eli came in here arguing for hours with us. Whether anyone was right or wrong, Eli simply couldn't take the criticizing. Let's face it. Internet arguments are virtually endless. No way to disprove that. It's my fault for my rage, it's his fault for feeding me, whether I had good intentions or not. No one said he had to be like most professional reviewers are, nor should anyone envision what one is. He provoked people, intentional or not, and he came in here thinking it will clear up no matter what he says. Now it's reigning more hell. Although I admit it was probably me that started it, a lot of you are contributors. We might as well go back to talking about the game as peacefully as it did before if that's possible.
Sorry, but as long as we've ventured completely off-track here and have arrived at the Land of Inanity, I feel okay in adding a quick sidebar: Who is it, exactly, that made up this rule? Because, in my 23 years in the publishing business (newspapers, magazines, web, you name it), I've never heard of it. It might be (generally speaking) considered poor or sloppy writing, but I've never heard "etiquette" enter the discussion. In fact, I've edited plenty of opinion pieces/reviews in which the writer did insert himself into the piece, usually in a humorous fashion. Although it's not my favorite thing in the world, a good enough writer can pull it off. So, again: who made up the rule? And where can I find it?
Well then apparently both Eli and I (I've written game reviews as well) have bad writing etiquette - Eli refers to himself throughout his article. Sorry, but I disagree - if you're writing an opinionated article, I think it's not only ok but a good idea to use I/me. If you're doing a completely objective review/description, then yes, first person references are inappropriate.
The issue is ... Is he judging the port of the game and how old is the original game art? In any case, the article comes out as his opinion and he states why he finds it terrible. This is the correct way of doing, state an opinion and why. It gives a chance to agree or not. I personally like this type of art, but I hate Picasso
Did you know you can't equip more than 8 constructs at once? Yeah, it's pretty crazy that I have 8 constructs in play at once, but somehow, this game, I've got 8 on. Hedron Link Device + Grand Design + Reactor Monk = Get any construct
Amusing discussion. While everything is "opinion" to some extent, certain opinions are simply more educated than others. While anybody at all is perfectly within their rights to say "I don't like Picasso," very few individuals would be able to say "Picasso's art is no good" and be taken with any degree of seriousness. "All art is subjective" is a fallacy. Perpetuated by individuals who (among other things) require a way to justify bad poetry on the internet. There are indeed many factors which can be used to objectively label any piece of art (in any field) as good or bad to some extent: in certain cases the distinction isn't as simply black or white. Some people are qualified to make those distinctions. The vast majority are not. If you want to open a real can of worms ask the question what makes someone qualified.
I thought I'd heard of someone with nine ... at BGG or someplace else. But I could be misremembering it. Either way, it's weird that the game caps it. There's absolutely nothing about a limit in the rulebook. What did the game do? Just not let you add another construct? Did you get an error message?
Well I didn't actually play it. I acquired a Tablet of Time's Dawn with Rocket Courier and Hedron Link Device equipped, which would usually put the card straight into my construct pile, but instead, it went to my discard pile.
Thanks to this we have qualified parasites called critics. Technique can be judged but the art as expression of a self or a group not. At least in other forms af self expression, like cooking, there are some absolute (that is what makes everybody puke)
I think you're taking my use of the word etiquette in a different way than I intended. Maybe it was the wrong word, I don't know. I don't have 23 years in the professional publishing business. Anyway, all I'm saying is that it sounds ridiculous to start every sentence in a review with "In my opinion" or some other self-referential disclosure that what is about to be said is in fact the feelings of the person writing. Well duh, of course it is. It's unnecessary, you even said it sounds poor and sloppy yourself. I just feel like Hodapp was getting unfairly picked on about his choice of words in the review. You say that as a reviewer you have to be able to take criticism, but on the flip side, as fans of the game you guys have to be able to accept criticism of the game too. Nobody would be jumping down his throat had he said "the art is ridiculously good" even though he doesn't preface it with "In my opinion". You mistakenly think that he intentionally said that to stir up everybody, but in reality he was just writing his thoughts. I can guarantee he didn't give a second thought to that statement other than it accurately said what he wanted to say about the visuals. I don't think it's bad to reference yourself, I've totally done it too. I just think it's ridiculous to expect that every single opinion of a review should be prefaced with something like that. Was it SOOOO confusing to people that it was just Eli's opinion that he didn't like the art? Did somebody mistakenly think he was listing a bullet point from the game's description? I mean there is a video and screens for people to make up their own minds about that, so really talking about how a game looks is almost a moot point in a review since it's all out there for anyone to see anyway. I've already wasted WAY too much time talking about this and cluttering up this thread. I apologize and I'll bow out now. If you REALLY feel like Eli commited crimes against humanity by his use of an adjective then so be it, no amount of debate or reasoning will change your minds.
As somebody else currently involved in publishing and journalism (high-five, comrade), the amount of amateur analysis in this thread recently has been disheartening, if not entirely unexpected. To clarify a few things: The first rule of professional journalistic writing isn't "don't reference yourself", it's closer to "don't state as fact anything that is actually opinion". The concept that "everything in a review is opinion by default and should be taken as such" simply isn't how it works in the world of professional writing. They don't need a disclaimer before every statement they make, but a professional reviewer/journalist should never require you to filter out their preferences and biases to get to the true nature of the thing they're writing about. Insert American "Fox News" joke here. The fact is that a review shouldn't be all the reviewer's opinion; that's called an opinion piece, unsurprisingly, not a review. Contrary to something posted earlier, it is also not part of a reviewer's job to be subjective; quite the opposite is the case, in fact. A review will have an inherent degree of subjectivity by the very fact that it is written by one person, with a necessarily limited viewpoint, but that's not the same as setting out to write "wot I fink". The audience for a review potentially numbers in the millions, all with different preferences, so unless I have already established that I like and dislike the exact same things as you and can make assumptions based on that, those kinds of statements in a review are worthless. It is amusing and ironic that the false dichotomy was brought up as to whether somebody wanted a review or a product description, because an effective professional review will actually have more in common with a technical description than an emotive interpretation (I should state that it is even more ironic that the review actually meets that standard, when it was the reviewer himself who made the comment). If you want a look at the extreme end of subjective "reviews", take a look at Zero Punctuation. As a bastion of hyperbolic opinion pieces that blatantly kick the arse of any remotely objective viewpoint, and are highly amusing as a result, these reviews usually bear little in common with the actual nature of the product being written about. With regard to the issue of game art, take Cavorite as an example. Writing that the graphics would have fit perfectly in a game from the SNES era would be fine, but writing that they are "outdated and ugly" would be imposing value judgements, and enters the realm of worthless subjectivity. Similarly, writing that the card art for Ascension is "laughably terrible", as in the TA review, would be worthless by itself. However, in this instance the reviewer's personal viewpoint has justification, which is better, but it is still entirely unnecessary. As can be seen on BGG and in this very thread, many people disagree with this opinion of the art; a better route would have been to explain that the art is polarising, with some people appreciating it as stylistic and unified, while others see it as amateurish doodling, and simply providing screenshots. I can make up my own mind from pictures of the cards; I don't need a reviewer wasting time and energy making value judgements for me when dealing with an entirely subjective matter that I can literally see and evaluate for myself. Additionally, if upon observation a reader disagrees with the opinion that the art is "terrible", that immediately makes the reviewer "wrong", and the reader is then more likely to have doubts about the legitimacy of the rest of the review. The rest of the review in question is handled well, although from my own experience with the game I take issue with the idea that tactical nature of the game necessarily earns it a place in the "bad" column by default, although that is likely more because of the reviewer's expectations coming from an MTG background. Likewise, I've found that the idea that the deck you're creating can be rendered entirely useless is rarely the case; if you insist on trying to follow a single strategy regardless of how things change, that's definitely going to happen, but the game was designed with the concept of change taken into account, and adapting isn't that hard to do. That said, when playing with more than two players, the nature of the game does change fundamentally; while you can often foresee your opponent's moves and lock them out in two-player, when playing with more the middle row changes too frequently and completely for that to be feasible. I'm hoping that the official 2v2(v2) teamplay rules are brought into the game to assist with this. Honestly, I read through these posts before reading the review, and was expecting something outrageously badly-written, which turned out not to be the case. Apart from the poorly-chosen personal commentary on the artwork, the review was pretty detailed and objective about the nature of the game and its mechanics, and would give most people a good idea of what to expect.
I hope we can now close this useless blabla with the great post of Appletini and talk game again. I would live to experience a game of 4 as that is something very different from 1on1. But possibly not async, since it would be boring (and honestly I hate async on 1on1 also as I forget and loose ). Who is up to it (please remember I am GMT+1)
