Reviews of Final Fight One and Amazing Penguin... by me!

[Eric Dude]

I've begun to write reviews for a site called Good-Evil. It's sort of a potpourri of typical young males' interests run by a friend of mine. Lots of game reviews here, so I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring and start showcasing games that might not have gotten a lot of exposure, but are still very worth playing. The one thing that I really like about reviews on the site is the grading scale. No numbers, just "terrible, poor, okay, good, great, classic". I think that puts it in more easily-definable terms. A minor point, probably, but I prefer it. Alright, enough yammering, here are the links:

Amazing Penguin: http://good-evil.net/reviews/amazing-penguin

Final Fight One: http://good-evil.net/reviews/final-fight-one

If you read them, I'd love to hear some feedback on what I could do to make the articles more exciting to read, or more informative. Or, if you just want to yell at me for my opinions on the games, that's cool too!

Oh, and I think this was posted on the forums a while back, but for any who missed it, I also helped put together a Top Ten SNES Games of All Time article for Good-Evil. We took votes from forum members, and wrote up reviews for each game in the style of old EGM magazines:

http://good-evil.net/features/top-10-snes-games-part-1

[ccovell]

Both your reviews read very well to me. You hit all the main points in Amazing Penguin -- when I check out a Natsume game, whether on GameBoy, NES, or SNES, I always look forward to the groovy, upbeat music too.

I disagree with you about FF One's music. Although it's done well, it (like several of Capcom's GBA releases) suffers slightly from a lazy (incompetent?) conversion primarily to the GB's PSG channels, with accompaniment from the GBA's PCM channels on some instruments. A lot of the Japanese musicians of the GBA era didn't know anything about mixing sampled instruments like other developers (Euro guys Shin'en) did.

Oh, and in FF One, you talk mostly about how good or different the conversion is, without really explaining (to those who might not know) much about the original Final Fight. You know, genre, storyline, things that make it special.

Finally, watch out for your use of "it's". It's a common mistake we can see everywhere on the internet by lesser writers ;-) . "It's" is a contraction of "It is", so a sentence like "You can go for the slickness of the nearly arcade-perfect Sega CD version, with it’s arranged soundtrack and crisp graphics..." has a glaring (to some) error in it.

[Eric Dude]

Thank you sooooo much for the feedback! This is great!

Yeah, with my review, I decided to take for granted that people already had basic knowledge of Final Fight. That might possibly alienate some readers, true, so it might've been better to explain more about the original. As far as the improper use of "it's", that's something I've been very lazy about in my writing, so thanks for calling me on it.

Also, interesting point about the music. My knowledge in that area isn't particularly in-depth, so thanks for giving me a lesson in GBA music composition. :)