Ramble Involving Personal Journalist Ethics & Other Random Stuff

...Well, so much for "This blog will not be updated after my next article"!

So yeah, some of you reading this may be wondering where the free video game review for this week is.

Honest truth? I looked over Steam on Sunday, having just got my internet back, and all I saw were a bunch of MMO style games that required a multiplayer audience. And, I’m not going to lie, I felt sick of it. I get why these games exist, but I’m sick of constantly having to hunt down free games, saying the same thing over and over again while the vast majority of developers just keep doing the same things again and again. With music, it doesn’t feel like a chore for me (I love learning about new bands and hearing new stuff, so I’m not going to burn out doing that any time soon!), but, with video games, I just feel like I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel. You could fairly put this down to exasperation that there was no quick and easy game to cover after a week that mostly comprised me furiously trying to do what I want to do, but, well...there’s more to this story.

I’ve talked several times in the past about my former editor for the site The Unheard Voices (I will not reveal her name out of respect to her privacy, especially considering she has left the internet over the course of the last week) and, while I’ve gone in a direction that I imagine she might not approve of due to me focusing on receiving promos over the last few months while she has always focused on independent reviewing, I have always kept to the spirit of the journalistic ethics that she taught me about: do the research from respectable sources which can be verified, do not accept gifts in exchange for review copies or to change a review, show respect to those being covered, interviewed or worked alongside regardless of gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, ethnic background, etc. and stuff like that. One could argue that receiving promo copies of albums is arguably bending the rules a bit, considering my role on the site is not purely administrative or PR focused, and I would concede that a fair point is being made if such a point is raised, but I would also counter that being an independent reviewer means that you have to blur the lines between being a reviewer, PR person, administrative figure and editor. You have to be a one man company and you have to be able to operate with the professionalism one would expect from such a definition, so it is not entirely fair to run on the logic that being an independent reviewer means you cannot also receive promo copies of albums.

Some may notice that I deliberately refer to myself as a reviewer as opposed to being a journalist. This is not to say that I do not find non-review content enjoyable to do or could not do it: I just feel that my bread and butter are reviews, as they do not require much beyond a laptop with writing software and music playing software on them and, if you’re researching the band being covered, access to the internet. You could fairly argue that I am basically a journalist, but I personally feel the distinction to be an important and valuable one, as “reviewer” implies that the core of my writing is reviews (which it is) while “journalist” implies that the core of my writing is information based pieces (which I have done in the past, but they do not comprise the majority of what I write by any measure, unless you decide to be a bit nitpicky and say that a review is technically an information based piece in that I’m informing a reader about an album and my personal thoughts on it).

However, I digress.

Part of the reason I opted to write this article rather than force myself to play yet another multiplayer game I had no interest in is due to something my former editor posted on her website (which is unlikely to ever be updated from now on due to the wording of it making it fairly clear that she has no intention of returning to writing, but I’m still going to keep the link to the article to myself out of respect for her privacy). To make a long story short, she stated that she has grown tired of how the still-ongoing GamerGate controversy has brought out some of the worst aspects of journalists today. To quote from a section of her post:

Gaming journalism, at it’s core, isn’t a bad thing, but it is lost and rotten. It needed to start fresh and new.

So far this year I’ve had my name slandered, I’ve been doxxed, I’ve been stalked, I’ve had to get the police involved in my life, I’ve been nearly driven to suicide, and at the end of it what did I find?

That as long as someone panders to the reader they’ll get the ad revenue they need. They’ll get the money they need. They’ll get the popularity they need. It doesn’t matter what side of the aisle they’re on. Sadly, from this journalist’s perspective, it’s all the same. Just one side yelling at another, and it’s exhausted me.

...I find myself hating it again. Hating the writing. Hating trying to change things. Hating wanting things to be better and finding that if I’m not slinging shit, then I’m considered an unethical journalist somehow. That I must be on the side of the “liberal media” because I refuse to take a side when it comes to reporting the truth.

The long and short of it is: I remember now why I got out of writing in the first place. Because it creates the worst kind of hollow place inside of me to watch something I love become some monster that I don’t recognise.

How much of that you’ll agree with, if any, will boil down to how much you’ve been paying attention to the gaming scene in the last two years. I have already made it very obvious where I stand on GamerGate in the past (I hate the unpleasant behaviour on both sides, but both sides are raising valid points that I feel are unfair to ignore entirely), but the thing that I feel is worrying is that it’s been two years since the GamerGate controversy started to dominate Twitter (for gamers, at least) and yet it hasn’t burnt itself out. It’s still violently ongoing now, and it’s very easy to sit here and wonder whether there is ANYONE in the gaming media who has even an ounce of common sense or journalistic integrity. While there are good independent voices out there who refuse to take a side on the matter, the majority of games journalist sites seem just happy to have a regular source of content with which to exploit for financial gain (if not in the articles, then in the sheer number of people returning to the site to keep the angry arguments about the debate going and counting as page clicks for ad revenue as a result).

Speaking as someone who has done his best to avoid taking a side (one could probably argue that I lean more being anti-GamerGate due to my habit of mistrusting GamerGate as a result of unpleasant incidents related to them, but the journalistic ethic points they raise are ones I find myself in agreement with, so you could equally argue that I lean towards being pro-GamerGate), I feel that this is absolutely deplorable behaviour, and I find myself feeling that the games media and gamers themselves should be doing more to finally put this ongoing controversy to rest. The games media, if necessary, should have a hardline “no GG discussions” rule, not to prevent the discussions from happening, but to avoid profiting off of a controversy that does not need to have practically become a financial lifeline for some places, and gamers should stop screaming at each other and take a few seconds to go “What are they ACTUALLY saying and is it actually important, regardless of the source of it?” instead of going “You’re not on my side, so shut the fuck up!” and continuing the argument all because they go for the knee jerk reaction that is so immature and childish.

Is that too much to ask? Well, I don’t see anyone trying to meet the other side in the middle or saying “You know what? I am not on your side, but you’re right!”, so draw your own conclusions from that.

That, however, is not what the core of this article is about. While this was certainly a factor in my disgust at how the games media has descended into childish mud slinging and has made me VERY strongly inclined to drop doing video game reviews entirely out of protest at being part of a gaming scene like this one (I won’t do that, but this week’s lack of a review will NOT be caught up upon, as I feel speaking my mind is more important on this one than the review would have been), it also made me stop and think on the album promos I get and made me ask myself what my ethics are for journalism.

At the end of the day, I do the music reviews I do because I love music. It isn’t exactly a job for me (I don’t get paid to do the reviews I do), but it is fair to say that I blur the lines a bit between enthusiastic amateur reviewer and unpaid professional reviewer. Part of this is actually somewhat justified, as I would really like to be a professional music reviewer, but I also like the flexibility that independence offers which I wouldn’t get if I was working for, say, Metal Hammer: I don’t have to worry too much about ad revenue being pulled if I say I dislike an album that the magazine has been hyping up or being fired for saying an album didn’t do anything for me, I can allow myself opportunities to explore other genres of music which I wouldn’t normally be allowed to talk about if I worked for a genre specific site (I still like folk and country music when I’m not listening to metal and I can quite enjoy funk and disco when I hear them) and it gives me the ability to separate my writing from my personal life in a way which being a member of Metal Hammer’s review staff probably wouldn’t if I find it gets overwhelming or that I need a break.

The important thing, for me, is my ethics. While it is easy to take the viewpoint that being independent means that I have no rules to tie me down, I’d argue that being an independent journalist requires you to actually be able to follow the same rules that you would if you were in a professional environment, but without the supervision that the professional environment has built into it. So what I’m going to do is spell out my ethics, if only so that people know what rules I operate under. 

• I do not make cheap shots that have deliberate malice behind them. I will occasionally make digs towards artists, but they’re either easy targets who I have no personal dislike against (usually, they’re just not to my taste, but nothing I actively dislike) or they’re actually artists who I like and felt the dig against would be amusing to those who actually know me.
• I do not deliberately make political or religious comments unless they are relevant to what I am covering. I have no interest in politics and religion and, as such, it is not my place to force my viewpoints on them onto other people. I am a music critic, not a political/religious commentator, and to talk about them as if I was without it being relevant to what I am reviewing would be wrong.
• I respect those who disagree with me on my assessment of something, providing they show me the same respect. I am not an endless fountain of knowledge, do make mistakes and have my own personal likes and dislikes, so, if I post something which is flawed due to not showing awareness of a detail which is vital to shaping an opinion on something, post something which is based on errors or post something where my personal likes and dislikes have unfairly tainted my opinion on something, you are allowed to respectfully explain what you think I’ve done wrong and I will consider whether to adjust the article in light of the new evidence.
• I do not share details which I feel are confidential or will be used to justify hatred towards someone, nor do I talk about private details related to someone without making sure that their right to privacy is respected.
• If I cover anything which I received a promo copy of, I disclose this and reveal the source of the copy.
• I treat those who provide promo copies with respect, even if I don’t necessarily show it in my emails. This could be argued as being a business move in some viewpoints, but I know that PR companies and the like have to work hard to get the albums they do and work hard to provide them to critics and yet the vast majority of them receive no recognition for their work among most people. To me, though, their work is part of the glue that holds the music industry together and I will never take their work for granted.
• I treat promo copies with the strictest of confidentiality and do not disclose what I have received as a promo to anyone who is not a member of the site until the review goes up.
• If I perceive a conflict of interest in relation an article that I am working on, I will cease work on the article and pass it along to someone else. If I have to do the article, I will disclose the conflict of interest.
• I do not accept bribes. Not even if the bribe is asking me to do something I was going to do anyway.
• I will never accept a promo if a condition is attached to it that will influence my review UNLESS that condition matches what I was expecting to say anyway and is not one that is open for abuse (so, I may accept a promo requesting I give a 6/10 minimum for early publication if the later deadline is still more than a week before the album’s release, the material provided indicates that I will really like the record anyway and the band is one which I have not been disappointed by in the past). Even then, I will disclose the conditions attached to the promo and urge readers to wait for the later reviews to be sure that my voice is not a part of the minority of critics.
• I NEVER treat a poor record as an excuse to hate an artist, nor do I regard popularity as a factor in the expected quality of a record. 

That’s basically all the rules I follow regarding my journalist stuff boiled down in a nutshell. Some people may be asking “Why have those rules?”

Quite simply, because I know what a professional critic has to be like and I want to be like them. I also want to be better than the critics who use their reviews to spout their own opinions on completely unrelated topics at the expense of the actual review (...no, that’s not a dig against Moviebob, why do you ask?) or fill their reviews with vitriol purely because what they’re hearing isn’t a flawless masterpiece of virtuoso, genre defying performances (generic just means that what is being played follows the expected rules of the genre, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing: one can be completely unoriginal and still highly enjoyable, after all!).

I also hold those rules because I want to be taken seriously. Let’s face it, in the internet age, anyone can claim to be a reviewer and anyone can do so through playing up everything wrong with a product. But pointing out what a product does right and wrong and how to improve it for its target audience is actually more in line with what a real critic is, as a critic doesn’t go into something wanting to hunt down flaws or poke fun at it: they want to see how it holds up for what it is, pointing out what it does well and what it doesn’t do well. To point out an obvious bit of internet stuff for people: the Angry Video Game Nerd and the Nostalgia Critic are NOT what a serious critic should be (in fact, both of their creators, James Rolfe and Doug Walker, have outright said that they’re not meant to be serious critics, with the former even being a parody of gamers who complain about everything with games).

So yeah, hopefully this ramble will have proven a few things.

...Don’t worry, I will be doing the Free Video Game Review for next week, regardless of what I have to cover for it. I just needed to get this out of my system!

Free Video Game Reviews: Electric Highways

Note to blog readers: this article is a catch up of an article that was meant to go up on my site, https://nerdcircleonline.wordpress.com/. If you wish to continue reading articles by me, you might want to move over to reading the site, as the likeliness is that this blog isn't going to be updated after this article. With that said, I will NOT be taking the blog down and I will make sure it stays online should I be informed that it is due to be taken down, so you do not have to move over to the site if you don't want to.

Before I start this review, I must state that this game falls somewhat under the interactive experience banner of gaming: there’s nothing that you have to fight or kill and, for the most part, the only interactivity in the game is you moving around the game world. Because of this, it is surprisingly hard to critique this game fairly: the controls aren’t important, the difficulty isn’t important...heck, there isn’t even a story to speak of, really. All that really comprises the story is that a developer of a programme decides to give it one last go before it goes out live and...that’s about it.

Yeah, basically, all I can talk about with this game is the art style, my personal thoughts on the experience and mention a few minor issues I had with it. So this isn’t going to be a traditional review per se, more a recounting of my experience with the game. Take this for what it’s worth and consider that before you judge whether this game will be for you or not.

So, when I opened this game, I was expecting a somewhat surreal experience based more than a bit on Minecraft’s style of play (so, first person gaming with a focus on an pixel style) and...well, I definitely got the Minecraft bit, but the surreal part, if possible, went beyond what I was expecting. Part of it is the art style, which goes for a futuristic look that can, on occasion, result in some surprisingly impressive design work that goes beyond what you would expect from something that looks like something you’d expect to see in Minecraft. It’s also interesting because it goes for a 3D style, but in the Doom vein of things as opposed to, well, full on 3D. It’s really quite interesting to look at and I think that it’s pulled off surprisingly well.

The overall experience I had with this game can be best summed up as “...If this is what I’m seeing while sober, I hate to think what this would look like while you’re high”, as the whole experience of playing through the game had so many moments where I was wondering what I was looking at and finding the whole thing surprisingly intense. The standout section in this regard is easily the section where you’re in a dungeon, as it FELT like something out of an indie horror game, and even had a small moment where I went “...Well, THAT’S not creepy in the slightest!”

There are a few minor issues I did notice with the game, though. There are occasions where I was able to walk through stuff that I’m fairly sure was meant to be a solid object, the frame rate slowed down a little bit during the second to last section of the game (although I am playing on a fairly unimpressive laptop, so this is probably my laptop’s fault as opposed to a problem with the game) and it’s not a very long experience (around half an hour or so). However, none of those really detracted from the game much. Sure, I found them to be issues, but, overall, they didn’t damage the experience of the game at all. I don’t see the game having a lot of replayability, but, considering I am still wondering what I saw when this is going up, I think the impact it leaves more than makes up for it!

Overall, this is a very interesting game to experience. If you have a spare hour or so, download this game and give it a go. I can’t say it’ll win any game of the year awards, but it’s something you kind of have to see.

Free Video Game Review: Narcissu 1st & 2nd

Note to blog readers: this article is a catch up of an article that was meant to go up on my site, https://nerdcircleonline.wordpress.com/. If you wish to continue reading articles by me, you might want to move over to reading the site, as the likeliness is that this blog isn't going to be updated after I've published the catch up articles over the next month. With that said, I will NOT be taking the blog down and I will make sure it stays online should I be informed that it is due to be taken down, so you do not have to move over to the site if you don't want to.

...I never thought I’d do a short review that seems like a “get out of jail free” comment, but this visual novel...damn it, this visual novel nearly made me cry my eyes out. It’s just...god, it’s so heartbreaking and yet so touching that I don’t feel I can say much about it without getting choked up about it.

OK, to boil this visual novel down to the basics, it is basically two visual novels crammed into one. The first part is the story of two hospital patients who escape from what can be basically summed up as a death ward (you go to it if you have illnesses which can’t be treated, but which aren’t contagious, and you are basically there to die) and traveling across Japan. And it is easily one of the saddest things you will ever read, as you really get connected to the two characters over the course of their adventure and the moment when one of them chooses to simply walk into the ocean and die due to her medication having run out and her being certain of dying as a result is hands down one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen in a visual novel, even putting the painful ending of Emily is Away to shame in terms of nearly triggering the waterworks (I’m tough to make cry, but this almost managed it!).

The second part of the story is basically a prequel (although, bizarrely, it also includes a prologue within the prequel, focusing on another character entirely for 2 chapters...) focusing on the female patient from the first story remembering her time hanging out with a patient on the death ward. I think this story suffers a bit from deliberately trying to answer questions in the first part of the story in ways which don’t really make a lot of sense when you think about them hard enough, but, on the whole, it’s, again, a really touching story.

The only main problem I have with the story is that it doesn’t really have any interactivity, but I can see why that wasn’t done, as there’s not a lot of ways to add to the story and spin it off in other directions. There isn’t a lot of art in the visual novel, but what is there is excellently done, and the music and sound direction is just perfect.

It’s also an interesting visual novel in that you can play it with voice acting or without it. I deliberately didn’t access it, but I heard snippets in passing and I can attest that the voice acting is actually not that bad! Nothing exceptional, but it gets the job done nicely.

Really, there’s not a lot I can say about this visual novel that is negative. I think it suffers from a lack of replayability, but the story is so strong that I can’t even call that a problem: I really would play this visual novel a lot if it weren’t for the fact that I probably wouldn’t be able to read it more than once without crying. This is truly a gem among the visual novel scene, and I highly recommend it!

When Is It Fair To Criticise A Free Game?

OK, this is a bit later than I expected, but I finally have remembered to come back to this.

Some of you who read the site might remember in my review of Lamia Must Die that I mentioned that there is a very valid question of when it becomes fair to say a free game is a bad game and what to expect from a free game. After all, it’s a game you get for free, so you obviously can’t expect it to be on the same level of development as, say, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate and, because most free games are often by developers who are starting out on their games development careers, it is very easy to take the viewpoint that a free game should not be judged by a critic.

My viewpoint? Well, I critique free games, so you can tell that I disagree with the last viewpoint. However, I feel I should take the time to try to explain my own personal stance on this debate, if only so my thoughts are as clear as they can be. After all, what I’m about to say might actually prove of interest.

Making a game at all is a process that is difficult to do well. This is something anyone who has worked on a single game before now would be able to tell you immediately, but, to give you a quick idea of what goes into making a game, you need to decide on an art direction, you need to code the game, you need to do bug fixing, you need to do playtesting, you need to consider the font and layout of everything inside the game itself, you need to get the game to run on a different combination of graphics cards, sound cards, operating systems...and that’s before you consider stuff like whether you’re going to have voice acting in the game, what the story of the game is (if you’re doing something which needs a story) and sourcing sound clips. Games development is a VERY difficult sector of work to get into, and gamers generally expect a lot from the final product due to how expensive the high profile games are. While sites like Good Old Games and stuff like Steam sales do make gaming a lot cheaper, it doesn't excuse the fact that a new game in the triple-A gaming scene can still cost around £50, and that's just for standard editions of games.

Needless to say, this is why most gamers tend to stick with the indie scene or video game sales, as spending that much on a game is not something most people can do unless they have a lot of disposable income or are a professional video game critic (in which case, they usually don’t need their money to buy a game unless they’ve been boycotted by a publisher, so the point is somewhat moot). You’d have thought the triple-A sector of gaming would have picked up on this by now, but, well, I can remember when a new high profile game cost about £30 back in the early 2000s, and the global economy was a heck of a lot better back then than it is now, so...yeah, clearly not!

Anyway, moving back a bit, free games are nothing new: even in my middle school (which was a bit behind the times because...well, this is Northumberland we’re talking about, which might as well be called The Land Which Parliament Forgot for all the attention that seems to be paid to it…), it wasn’t usual to see people playing games like Icy Tower and a tank battle game on the Internet for free and sites like Cheeky Monkey Games were somewhat common knowledge among the students. With the benefit of hindsight, most of the games on the sites were nothing special: they were fun time wasters and worked well, but, compared to what is going on in the independent gaming scene today, they were fairly primitive games. Some games were excellent, though: in particular, one free game I remember with fondness was a game which had remade Super Mario to allow you to play it with characters from other Nintendo franchises, like Contra, The Legend of Zelda and Mega Man. These free games were almost certainly made by people making their first games and putting them out there on the Internet and, in the vast majority of cases, with no major intent of turning them into a business.

Man, I sound like an old man at the moment…

Jumping forward to today, you can still see that same passion and desire in aspiring games developers today, it’s just easier to make games today (you can get game engines for a fairly small price or even special software to allow you to make an RPG like the Final Fantasy games or a visual novel) and it’s easier to be found (Steam is a good place to put a free game on due to it being among the most popular online distributors of video games, if not THE most popular). And that, ironically, is why I personally see no problem with critiquing free games now: with all of these resources now available to make games development so easy and so much information around the Internet to help you whenever you run into trouble with developing a game, there is really no excuse for a video game to be badly designed any more.

I do not say by this that one should treat a free game on the same level as a triple-A game: such an expectation would be flat out unfair! Instead, I say that a free game which is badly designed, uses unmodified assets from stores or stuff like that should be called out for it, albeit not in a malicious way. It is hard to put it properly, but think of it this way: the point of criticising these issues is to encourage an aspiring developer to put effort into doing it right in the future, not to scare them from games development forever. True, you will get those like Digital Homicide who will refuse to listen no matter what you say to them, but most indie developers will look at the feedback they get and take it on board (or, at least, won’t make a public fuss over someone critiquing their games). If you’re starting out with developing a game, it is very tempting to use pre-made assets to get the job done quickly, since it means you don’t have to worry so much about coding errors and whatnot and can focus on trying to make the game fun. However, the point of them (as any serious games developer will tell you) is to use them as the starting blocks for the game: effectively, they’re what you use in the game’s alpha (beta at the absolute latest) stage to check the game is properly running, then you put your own assets in to replace the pre-made ones. They’re kind of like rehearsals for a play: you usually show up to rehearsals wearing what you’re wearing and (at least in early rehearsals) carrying the script with you in one hand to read your lines from while following your role’s blocking, but you wouldn’t put that on a stage and call it a finished production. While the exact nature of the play depends on which school of theatre the play is being done under, a typical play (so, one you’ll usually see in a theatre and not stuff like Brechtian Theatre or Theatre of Cruelty...Google is your friend, dear reader!) will usually be noticeably different from a first rehearsal of a play because the actors will have their blocking, will have memorised their lines and will have costumes, props and sets to help enhance their performances.

Yeah, suddenly the theatre comparison doesn’t look so insane, does it?

However, all of this is still sort of dancing around the key question: when is it fair to criticise a free game?

Well, I feel that a free game should not be given a free pass for being a bad game just because it is free. What I would expect from a free game is a game that I will be happy to play for a few hours, has original assets (or, at the very least, that the assets used mix well together) and has the replayability necessary to prevent the game from being a “play once and forget about it” type of game. I also expect the game to actually be finished (which is why I don’t touch Early Access games unless they’re free...and, even then, I will probably not play it unless I really am out of options or the premise is one that I find interesting enough to justify playing it): if I’m playing a free game that isn’t finished, I will still call it out for not being finished. The ONLY exception is with episodic gaming, and even that will only work if I feel there has been enough of a story in each individual episode to make each episode a satisfying game in and of itself.

Obviously, you guys don’t have to be as strict as I am being. I have those standards because I critique free games and demand a lot out of them, but there’s nothing to stop you from enjoying a free game which doesn’t fall under that category. In fact, I would go further than that and ENCOURAGE you to play the free games I critique just so you can let me know if you feel I’ve been unfair to them.

In any case, a free game, to me, should not be given a free pass for being awful because it costs nothing. At the end of the day, a game which costs nothing is still a game: the cost of the game isn’t really a factor to the quality of the game, although it will affect your expectations from it. However, a quality release is still a quality release: I might not want to pay £60 to get Eternal Senia, but I would take that over Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 any day of the week, which I wouldn’t want to play even if I got it for free. Would love to see a digital release of the original game if that’s not happened, though…

No, seriously: I played the first Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game while growing up. It was awesome and had a pretty great soundtrack as well! Might do a brief look at all of the artists who released songs on the soundtrack for that album in the New Year, now I think on it…

Anyway, digression and rambles aside, what I want from a free game is something which is at least going to keep me busy for a few hours and/or has enough replayability to keep me coming back to it. I will have to cite a game which isn’t free to explain what I want from a game, but the sort of game I look for is like Dawn of War: it isn’t necessarily impressive to look at graphically (the original game is over ten years old by this point!), but it has a lot to offer to it that will make you want to play it again and again, it has enough to make replaying it worthwhile (specifically applies to Dawn of War: Winter Assault onwards, as there’s no branching storylines in the original game’s story mode, although I guess the multiplayer makes up for that) and it bundles that all up in a high quality game that is fun enough to play that you feel like returning back to it. That’s not a complicated formula to nail down, really, and, while a free game might require some time and effort to pull it all together, it really can be done: Hearthstone has done it, Eternal Senia has done it, Team Fortress 2 has done it and Everlasting Summer has done it. You might notice that these games are highly regarded among their target audiences (above 90% on Steam in the case of the latter 3 and, well, Blizzard games are always very highly regarded anyway) and are all free games, so they are shining examples of how to do free games well to me. True, they had development teams in all but one case (Eternal Senia was mostly done by one guy), but they show how important it is to put time and effort into games and that being a free game should not be a sign of a lack of quality.

So, in a nutshell, I feel it is fair to criticise a free game for when it doesn’t do stuff right, but I feel that a more supportive tone should be given than the usual one that a lot of people do, especially if the developer has made it fairly obvious that they haven’t made a lot of other games in the past. Critiquing a game (as in, being a proper critic) that is free should also be fair because, well, you can say what the game does well and doesn’t do well, which, if you take the approach of being hard of the game, but put it through a supportive tone and style of writing and offer ideas to improve the game, can be FAR more helpful to an aspiring developer than you might think. However, a free game should not be defended with the excuse “Well, what do you expect from a free game?”, for it reinforces the belief that free games are always awful, which is completely untrue.