New Blog!

So, some of you might have already noticed this, but, for those of you who haven't, I've started up a new blog!

Basically, due to Nerd Circle Online needing some more time to get redesigned (expected to return in 2019 due to a desire to find a larger team and me undergoing various studies to improve upon business knowledge, as well as the actual redesign work), I've decided to do some more blogging for the time being. However, I didn't want to come back to this blog, as I felt that I needed to stand on my own and not rest on my old material (plus, I'm not going to be doing metal album reviews on my new blog: that'll be covered on the forum Black Phoenix Rising!)

So, new blog was the answer! If you want to read what I'm posting on my new blog, then check it out at https://nemoatkinsonline.blogspot.co.uk/

Hope you like the new blog!

Personal Musings On YouTube

OK, this is going to be a very atypical post from me. I'm doing this because I feel that to not do so is to ignore an issue that needs to be addressed, and I would highly appreciate everyone reading this taking the time to read, share, comment and the like on this one post if you think I'm making a good point, regardless of your stance on my actual work.

As most of you reading this know, I am a very small name music reviewer and video game reviewer for my site at https://nerdcircleonline.wordpress.com/ (I used to do stuff on here and probably will still occasionally come back to here if I need to say something that I can't do on my site). I have done VLOGs on YouTube in the past, I have done writing for a few sites in the past (sometimes under the name Nemo Atkins, sometimes under my real life name of William Brown), I host a local radio show on the radio station Lionheart Radio, I will be acting in a web series that, if it gets the full funding, will be filmed in the summer and I likely will be adding video game streaming to Twitch to my range of stuff in the future. I'm definitely not someone who wants to be viewed as a figurehead or anything like that: I'm honestly just happy doing my stuff and leaving it at that. I also don't like talking about serious stuff because I try to keep myself neutral on stuff and avoid speaking on issues that people will have almost certainly heard before and told far better than I can manage.

However, this is something that I need to discuss, because it affects so many people and is not something that is going to improve by staying silent.

The source of this article is an editorial released yesterday by Doug Walker, best known for the Nostalgia Critic series of video reviews. Now, I will admit, I have lost interest in watching Walker's series over the last year or so. For me, I feel that the pacing of episodes has started to drag horribly due to the addition of sketches which, while not necessarily badly acted, take too long to reach a payoff and which don't tend to be worth the wait, I find the more mean spirited comments since the revival to not be amusing to hear and I strongly dislike the decision to move towards clipless reviews. I mean this with no disrespect to Walker as a person, obviously, and I will certainly urge readers who are not familiar with his work to give his stuff a watch (I will even be kind enough to say that you should try episodes from both before the reboot and after the reboot and not to take my viewpoint on the current day episodes of the show to be the only viewpoint worth holding), but his series has just lost me as a viewer and I only stay subscribed to his site's channel because I can't be bothered to unsubscribe from it due to having other larger priorities than that.

The editorial (link here), however, is one that I felt was worth giving a fair shot, as I am well aware of the issues with YouTube's copyright system from listening to individuals like TotalBiscuit, Angry Joe and Jim Sterling talk about them and even having a few brief encounters with copyright issues myself on my own videos (although not to the extent of any of the previously named individuals). The points that were raised in the editorial were nothing new to me, but I felt it was worth adding my two cents to the debate, if only so I can explain my own copyright stories and hopefully help to showcase exactly why YouTube's system needs a complete overhaul.

The point of free use, as most people would be able to tell you, is the ability to use copyrighted material outside of the original context it was created. For example, a review would be able to include images, sounds and the like from something if it is being done for review purposes, entertainment purposes and the like. This is obviously meant to counter stuff like posting entire episodes of a show onto YouTube and, while you can definitely find channels which do stuff like that, the vast majority of people do try to do that. While video reviews can arguably fall into a grey area if they're used to make money, most people would agree that a video review is still a review and, as such, should be protected by fair use laws.

Unfortunately, YouTube's system for copyright is badly designed and, as a result, can be exploited. And it is, quite badly.

For those of you reading this who have never put content onto YouTube in the past and aren't familiar with the details of this, YouTube's system for copyright is that, if you own the copyright for something, you can put out a claim on a video if you feel that it is infringing upon your intellectual properly. On paper, this is actually a good thing, since it allows you to stop people from illegally sharing your work. However, the system is designed in a way which is badly flawed in several ways:

1. The person making the claim does not have to prove that they own the copyrighted material and does not have to have actually watched the video themselves to make the claim.
2. The person making the claim have full power to monetise your videos, take whatever money you make from monetising the video away from you, block your videos or even threaten legal action against you, even if your video is one that you are not monetising yourself.
3. The person making the claim suffers nothing from making the claim, even if the claim is proven to be by someone who does not own the copyrighted material and they release the claim later.
4. The person whose video has been claimed suffers a lot of issues if their channel receives a single strike against their channel, which can include an inability to monetise their videos or even having time limits imposed upon any videos they upload to their channel.
5. The claim can continually be contested by the person making the claim, potentially meaning that even contesting a claim does not guarantee that the issue will be resolved, for the claim could keep being put back up.

All of these, understandably, are very unfairly slanted towards the person making the claim. I can see why it might be necessary on one level, since it is intended to stop people from doing stuff like uploading an entire episode of a show up to YouTube and monetising it for their own gain, but, when it comes to stuff like video reviews, you start to see the problems springing up. Many people will be able to give examples of having had videos of them covering songs taken down or even having completely original works receiving copyright claims.

My personal stories involving copyright are based on four incidents. Here is a screenshots of the claims on my channel at the time of writing:

Here's what each video is being claimed for and the responses of the copyright holders:

Gamma Ray VS Helloween video:

Cardfight!! Vanguard VLOG:

Doctor Who rant:

Comix Zone test stream:

For the sake of reference, I do not monetise my own videos and the stream was purely a test stream to see if my streaming software was working. It is because of this claim on the stream that I plan to move towards Twich if I take up streaming in the future,

Here's the funny thing: in all of the videos, there were more tracks in the videos than were given copyright claims (I had ten tracks total in the Helloween VS Gamma Ray video, four in the Cardfight!! Vanguard video, two in the Doctor Who video and, obviously, the entire game's soundtrack in the test stream) and I included a disclaimer at the end of everything except for the stream saying that the music was not intended to breach copyright laws and was simply being used for backing music. Yet I still got the claims all the same.

I'm sure most people reading this will agree that what I did would be covered under free use: I was not playing the full song, what I was doing was for entertainment purposes and the songs were not the key focus of the video. Yet I still got the claims.

Now, I'm lucky in that, for my reviews now, I work in a written medium and keep backup copies of everything I wrote to prove that I was the original author of what I've written. But these claims show just how broken the system is, and I'm saying this as someone who doesn't rely on YouTube to pay bills and whatnot.

Here's the thing that makes it worse: there are cases of people using YouTube's system to take down negative criticism of their products. Examples that spring to mind are TotalBiscuit's troubles with the developers of Guise of the Wolf and Digital Homicide's attempts to silence Jim Sterling when he critiqued their game The Slaughtering Grounds. This is directly breaching the law on free speech, which is that you are allowed to say what you want to. It does NOT mean that you can say stuff which is racist or stuff like that without receiving responses to your words, but it means that it is illegal to censor someone else's opinion just because you do not like it.

You might be reading this and think "Oh, people don't do that, surely?"

Yes. Yes, they do. And, because of the earlier mentioned "no consequences for filing unlawful claims" issue, they can keep doing it for as long as they want to without fear of retribution. And they could potentially monetise a video they had no part in making for a copyright they do not have, meaning that they could potentially make money off of someone else's hard work with no risk to themselves if they get caught.

That, luckily, is unlikely to happen, But the fact that it COULD happen is particularly unpleasant, especially if the person who has had their channel hit with the claim has to use the money they get from their videos to live and the claim continually gets reinstated without ever going to court.

Oh yeah, and the thing that makes this worse? In real life, filing a false claim to try to force someone to do something is a criminal offence which can earn you prison time and, if you are in the legal profession, get you disbarred. False copyright strikes? No penalty except MAYBE having your ability to send out claims stopped if you repeatedly do it. Which can be got around by making a new email and a new YouTube channel in less than half an hour.

Not a great situation to be in if you want to get into content creation, is it? Even if you make something truly original, someone could falsely claim that you are stealing their work and make money off of your work with no fear of retribution if they get caught.

Is there a way to fix this system? Yes.

1. Penalize those who make false claims.
2. Make copyright claims only be available to make by manually selecting an option at the end of a video to minimize copyright strikes against reviews or videos which fall under fair use.
3. Allow monetising of unmonetised videos with material from copyrighted sources only if a claim is resolved in the favor of the claimant.
4. Money generated from a previously monetised video is placed in a third party account until the claim is resolved.
5. Make a requirement that the person making the claim has to prove that they own the copyright before they can make a claim.
6. Make a dedicated helpline so that people who receive false claims can contact someone for help quickly.

Will those completely fix the system? No, but they'll go a long way towards sorting it out. But it almost certainly won't happen, because it's probably going to be seen as too much work by YouTube's makers and Google won't want to put that much work into making that happen, so good luck seeing those changes happen!

I've already rambled on far too much, so I'm going to finish off by saying this: the internet is a wonderful tool when used right. It has so much information on it on so many topics that it is pretty much guaranteed that you can search for anything and you'll find it somewhere, it allows people to keep in contact who might never be able to speak to each other, it allows people to share their love of different things together in ways that they might not have been able to manage without it and it is a way to share stuff that might not have an opportunity to reach people normally. But the potential to abuse it for your own selfish needs is all too real. YouTube's copyright system is all the proof you need of what happens when people abuse the internet for their own selfish reasons and, until the system stops putting an ungodly amount of power and authority over people's entire livelihood in the hands of the rest of the internet without repercussions if you are caught trying to do what would be breaking the law if it was done in real life, it is not going to get better.

Avenged Sevenfold Lawsuit: Thoughts

...Huh, and I thought this blog was going to die after I did the catch up reviews. Seems old habits die hard!

Anyway, a bit of news that has been circulating the news recently is that Avenged Sevenfold have tried to leave Warner Music Group and are being sued by their label. While I will freely admit that I don't know all of the details and am basing this on the original article that was released on Billboard.com, from what I've been able to gather, the band have opted to leave the label as from the 25th of November of last year and the label are suing them under the California Labor Code (the same code that the band are using to justify their departure from the label), citing a breach of contract under the claims that the departure was unlawful and seeking damages for uncompleted albums in their contract (just the one, although it is a bit ugly when you consider that the label had already funded the recording of the band's upcoming album).

Needless to say, this is a topic which I will freely admit that I am not in a valid position to talk about with any authority. After all, I'm British: the California Labor Code is not a thing in UK courts, so I don't know what laws are connected to it and I can't say that I'm that familiar with the specifics of the California Labor Code myself. However, this doesn't mean that I can't give my thoughts on this topic as a music fan and a person looking on in: it just means that you should take what I'm about to say with a good pinch of salt, since I am not able to talk as someone skilled in American law (heck, I'm barely qualified to talk about UK law!).

So, lets start by explaining some of the details that I personally find a bit suspicious about Warner Music Group's side of the debate. Based on the limited information I have, the band sent the label a letter saying that they wanted to sever ties with the label effective from the 25th of November, but the label are claiming that the letter doesn't constitute an official notice because it arrived to them on the 30th of November. This could possibly be excused on some levels, considering that post has to travel a great distance across the US, but I feel that the key point that the label are ignoring is that the letter is clearly indicating that they intend to leave the label on that date, so the implication is that the band had already expressed their dissatisfaction with the label in the past and tried to discuss the issue only to be ignored or that the discussions were felt to be unsatisfactory. The label seems determined to claim that the band doing this was done out of the blue, which also contradicts with their own statement later in their claim of having attempted to renegotiate the band's contract in the fall of 2015 (which, admittedly, is from September to November, so this could be fairly discounted, but, again, begs the question of how the label didn't seem aware that the band weren't happy from these negotiations falling through) to include an extra album and having invested significant funds into the band's next album under the belief that the contract would remain effective. This implies that the label had been fully aware of the letter, yet continued to put money into the band's next record in any case. While the label could be being completely honest (considering how large a label Warner Music Group is, some offices could have failed to have been informed of the decision and put funds towards the band's next album without even being aware of the letter), I personally have to say that I find this very suspicious.

Some people reading this might be thinking the label put the court summons in too late for it to stick. Unfortunately, I have to rain on your parade and say that the label actually DID get them in in time...just. The lawsuit is dated from the 8th of January, which is 44 days from the date of the band's noted date in their letter, which is before the 45 day requirement for a label suing a band to claim lost profits for uncompleted albums ends. Where a valid question DOES deserve to be asked is why the label didn't put them in sooner rather than putting money into the band's next record and trying to renegotiate the band's contract to be further in the label's favor after it was made plain to them that the band didn't want to stick with them any longer. It also begs the counter question of why the label are trying to treat the notification in the letter as invalid, yet still made sure the lawsuit went in before the deadline would have passed from the date of the letter. Maybe I'm overthinking this one, but it seems like a very suspicious move to me, as if the label weren't sure whether they'd be able to get the case to go ahead if it did come down to that point and decided to put the case forward on the last possible day just to be sure it would stick.

I also have to ask how you can sue for lost profits when you've no sure way of knowing how much money you're going to lose. This is more an issue with the law itself than the case, but it seems like a very difficult thing to prove, especially in this day and age where people are arguably more likely to just illegally download an album than buy it. You could argue that the lost profits is more "recovering the money already spent on the next record's stuff", which would be fair enough, but the document specifically is asking for a trial to prevent the band from leaving their contract, have the aforementioned lost profits recouped, restitution and disgorgement of all gains and benefits that Avenged Sevenfold have received (or, in plainer English, the return of anything that the label has given to them and repayment of money given to them to fund the next record, all of which can have interest on top of them), pre- and post-judgement interest (which, I'll admit, doesn't make a huge amount of sense to me, but I'm guessing is related to the last one), attorneys' fees and any other relief deemed appropriate by the courts.

Yeah...forgive me to pointing out the obvious, but that's A LOT the label is demanding, and it's not a small amount of money the label are asking for either: this could well be looking like a 6 digit figure minimum! On top of that, this is intended to go to a trial as well, so it will limit the band's ability to tour because they'll have to work with their attorney to prepare legal documents, be present in court on the appropriate days, call witnesses and all of that. They almost certainly will also not be allowed to sign up to a new label while this is going on because, well, if they turn out to lose the case and have to return to Warner Music Group, then that new contract isn't going to be valid any more and may well incur FURTHER legal stuff with that other label. I won't say that this case could well be the end of the band if they lose it, but what I can say is that expecting the band to be particularly active while this is going on is somewhat unlikely, which isn't going to help keep their momentum going. It's almost like what happened with Helloween between Keeper of the Seven Keys Pt. II and Pink Bubbles Go Ape, although I highly doubt Avenged Sevenfold are going to go on to record anything like 'Heavy Metal Hamsters'...

However, I will have to point out that Avenged Sevenfold's side of the story isn't flawless either. If the label is telling the truth that the band had led them to believe that the contract would remain effective and that the reason they got the money to record their next record is because of this, then I have to say that I have to side with the label on that point, as taking the money from the label and then quitting the label is taking their investment in the band away from them. While I think that the label's demand to everything else is FAR more than acceptable, I think that the label is within their right to ask for the bit of money given for them to record the record (and any that is tour or promo related for the album that they're not doing for the label) back at least, since that's a financial loss which I can understand wanting repaid and feel that the label is justified in receiving that back. Bear in mind, this could still be a decent amount in and of itself (to give you a sense of perspective on this one, Nevermore's album Enemies of Reality from 2003 had a recording budget of about $20,000, which the band felt was not a large amount to record an album on, and the label they were on, Century Media Records, is nowhere near as large as Warner Music Group, so Avenged Sevenfold could well have been given a 6 digit figure to record the album on, maybe even more) and the costs for preparing a world tour and promoting an album will add a fair amount on to that (I can't give exact figures here, but I'm pretty sure that arenas aren't cheap to book and promoting a record requires more than just saying "hey, new record coming out today"), but those costs are ones that I would argue are justified to repay, as this is money that the label put aside for them which isn't going to be returned at all.

I also have to question why the band didn't decide to get out of the contract by requesting that they put out a compilation record or something like that and then waiting until that record had been released before announcing their departure from the label. Now, I'll admit, this one depends on the specifics of the contract (if it specifically says "albums of new material", then a compilation record won't cover it) and I don't know what the contract says, so I'm having to take a guess here, but there are so many cases out there where bands have put out a compilation album to get out of a record deal that I'm surprised the band didn't opt to do that. Although I guess one could make the case that not doing so shows more integrity, since it means that they are actually putting out material that they stand by and not just doing a cash grab to get out of a contract.

Of course, that comment will immediately result in some snide elitist metalhead going "A7X had integrity in the first place?", but I'm not here to judge the band based on their genre. Frankly, I'd be making the same point even if it was One Direction who were in this position: if One Direction said in an interview that they want to leave their label, but they aren't going to put out a cash grab record or a compilation just to fulfill their contract, I'd be applauding them for treating their fans with respect, and I'm saying this as someone who would rather drench himself in petrol and set himself on fire than give them any praise!

Anyway, backtracking a tad, the band apparently owes the label a CD/DVD live album, which they apparently have recorded (if the comments in Blabbermouth are to be believed, which is hardly a good source of information, but it's worth noting), but haven't made steps towards getting released. Running on the assumption that this is true, the quality of the recording is sufficiently good enough to make releasing it a valid option and Arin Ilejay's presence on the recording isn't a problem, I would have to question why that hasn't been just given to the label as the final album on their contract. However, those are some big assumptions to make, so this could well have valid answers which I'm unaware of (and, for all I know, the comments on Blabbermouth could be completely wrong, so I'm going to take that with a pinch of salt).

So yeah, long story short, I have to say that I think Warner Music Group are probably not going to find this case will end well for them. They certainly have a case on SOME aspects of stuff, like the album recording financing aspect, but the rest of it feels like it's going to backfire on them horribly to me, as they are basing their case on facts which don't hold up too well under scrutiny, which look downright suspicious when thought about carefully or are demanding stuff which they don't really have a valid case on. This is all just my personal opinion, obviously, and has no basis in legal fact, but, honestly, I'm more inclined to believe Avenged Sevenfold's story from where I'm sitting, despite them usually not being a band that I care all that much about.

However, the key thing I'm going to end this on is this: we only have one definite article on this case and we do not have the evidence provided by either side in front of us to back up either side. So, while we certainly can speculate on this and give our thoughts, we can't say anything for definite. I would urge everyone to not jump to conclusions on this one just yet, for we do not have an inside eye on the situation and I am basing everything I've said so far on my own observations and using logic to deduce what feels like valid explanations.

Or, to put it another way: treat this whole article as just speculation, because that's all it is on my part.

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.