New Name

I've renamed my blog to "Clio's Games". I'll still be posting Sims stuff here, and the web address will remain the same (since it would be a pain to port everything to a new, re-named blog), but I'll be covering all sorts of computer and video games here. I'll have short reviews, screenshots, hints, etc., along with mods and stories.




I won't be making any money from this blog, so the reviews won't be "professional quality" -- I was a professional game reviewer for a time, and it wasn't very fun. The biggest problem is that game companies are riding your editor to make sure your reviews are favorable to their big games. Can you imagine if book or movie reviews worked like that? "2 thumbs up for the brilliant intellectual and spiritual masterpiece of our time, New Year's Eve!"

But there's another problem with the nature of reviewing games. Try to be objective about something as immersive and time-sucking as video games, and you end up doing silly things like talking about graphics for half the review. Comparing this to movie reviews again, it's as if reviewers spent half the review talking about how hot the actors are, in detail. "In New Year's Eve, Ashton Kutcher's hair is slightly messy, but he's tall and cute*. Michelle Pfeiffer, of course, is gorgeous... 10/10 for visual awesomeness! The story is incredibly stupid, so we give it a 5 [the lowest score possible if the movie actually plays], but the soundtrack also gets a 10, so overall this movie rates an 8."

Plus there are whole genres of games that reviewers have to play whether they like them or not. (This explains the relatively low scores for RPGs -- and, conversely, the relatively high scores for shooters, which most reviewers like for some reason.) So what you'll be getting here are my unvarnished and totally subjective opinions, mostly about RPGs, mostly for the PC. I'm going to talk about lots of old games, along with a few shiny new ones.


* Ashton Kutcher looks almost exactly like my first boyfriend, if my first boyfriend's eyes had been vacant of any sign of intelligence. I am immensely weirded out by this.