Soul Calibur 2 (GameCube)

[TheRedEye]

Without giving my entry away, you gave the absolute best critique of a video game piece I've ever received. I learned much, and am already a better writer because of it. If you fucking pansies can't handle real criticism, you shouldn't be entering a writing contest.

[NoahsMyBro]

As I began to read this review, I thought to myself that the writer truly enjoyed the game, and was describing the game and details so passionately that I could ignore the flaws in the writing. I planned on replying that the review was so interesting that I was not very distracted by the Gamecube fan-boyism or the fact that the article is written as though it's a transcript of a high-school hallway chat.

Unfortunately, the piece is too long, and by the end the 2 flaws had grown annoying and tiresome. A written, published work should not be composed of the same words and phrases a person uses in informal speech. That was a huge strike. Additionally, the review should tell me about the game, and why I want to play or not play it. It shouldn't spend any time, and here a lot of time is spent, trying to persuade me that the Gamecube version is better than the PS2 version. There's no mature, rational reason to use the review as a platform to 'defend' the Gamecube console. It's a piece of hardware, not a persecuted 3rd world peasant; why does it require 'defending' ?

The screenshots were good, as was the fact that this review did include score rankings in each of the different areas. (Given the above though, I wonder if the rankings are possibly inflated.)

5/10.

[Drexel923]

There is a lot of good information in the review, however the personal parts get in the way. There is a lot of information in the review which is not related to the game, and some of info is incorrect or not backed up. The review needs a trimming and a little more research.

7/10

[Ascending Wordsmith]

Despite a few punctuation errors and such, this review was actually pretty informative. I'm glad to see that the reviewer placed a good deal of effort into this. However, there was quite a bit of information that didn't really need to be placed in the review, and sometimes I wondered where the review was taking me. Still, a good review.

7.5/10

[Captain Wrong]

First paragraph is long and almost completely irrelevant. I don't really need all the personal info, sorry you missed the Dreamcast train, but what's that got to do with anything except you didn't play the first Soul Calibur.

Reviewer says he doesn't like fighting games, but he likes this but then doesn't tell us what makes this different. Rambling, scattered, and how come despite no mention of Virtua Fighter 4 the entire review the last two sentences tell us we should choose this game over VF4. Why, dammit, why???

This review dips a foot into fanboy waters (espically during the controller rant and the last paragraph) and I don't like that.

Score: 6

[digitalpress]

I'll give this one a 6/10.

Though all of the detail I could ever ask for about the game is here, there's just something about the way this one flows that isn't working for me as a reader. The structure is shaky in a number of places, where I think if the person who wrote it read it back out loud they'd quickly re-do some of the sentences. Since I'm trying to focus on the review itself for the score, I'm giving it lots of points for the points that IT makes but it just has to lose a few more because of the distracting grammatical structure. Keep at it!