Before I begin going through some classics I want to lay out some of my biases that way you know when to take a review of mine with a grain of salt. I will do this by going through some common genres, explaining my tendencies with each.
Shooters:
I am not a big fan of shooters, but that doesn't stop me from spending a good 8 hours on a halo reach session once in awhile. My personal philosophy with shooters is that the more simple the mechanics the better the game. I tend to enjoy skill and inventiveness more than simple default techniques when playing shooters. I detest the MW series and will constantly complain about it ( I do like MW4 so I'm not unreasonable). I will also criticize the campaign mode to these games regardless of the multiplayer content.
Adventure/Platformers: I love these sort of games. I'm not particularly amazing at them and can admit I've seen my little brother beat the Mario brother games far quicker than me, but these games are definitely fun to dissect. Also Legend of Zelda is an Adventure game and not a RPG. If you disagree with that statement, stop reading my blog.
RPGs: As a writer I tend to love the telling of a story, making RPGs a natural genre I gravitate towards. I detest pointless grinding (ahem final fantasy) and reward games that sacrifice game play hours for tighter narrative. I do take into consideration game mechanics and whether the system is turn based, real time etc. But A good narrative is all I need to convince me of the game.
My philosophy in general: A game needs two things to be successful: a solid narrative and tight game play. One can make up for the other. For example, pong is the representation of two paddles playing ping pong. The tight controls and great game play make it so that there doesn't need to be a narrative. While this can be true for some games, I find that many games improve with a narrative. For example, the create your own player section in nba 2k 11 was more engaging when you were given the opportunity to "talk" with the press. That's because you as a player were creating a narrative of the basketball player who was "spunky" or "respectful". Narrative and game play are what my reviews will revolve around.
Ok enough pseudo intellectual verbiage and lets get to the game reviewing!
Haha I don't see how you can say that you value good mechanics in a shooter and then say you detest the MW series. For all the flaws that series has (namely, that all three games are, ahem, VERY similar), it still has the best mechanics of any shooter made.
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