PC Roundup Comments by Darren Allen

All I have to say is that this had damn well better not be the new norm for PC reviews...

Ditto with the first poster, but I just wanted to ask if there's any chance they'll be getting Rimmer back to to do the voice of Simon?

I don't mind. The reader can distinguish in-depth reviews from roundups, I may hope. It's nice to read at least something about these smaller games.

Indeed. Penumbra sounds quite intriguing.

Simon, we love you.

People been saying PC is dead for years, and it never will be but of course it can get more and more sidelined for the better attentions given to the consoles. Other thing is score add up to an average titles in whole collection aside from Black Plague.

It could be that it just damn easier to collate together an average titles rather than individually and may not get own review space!

I loved the orginial Simon but the series today doesnt really have the presence it had?

6/10. OH MY GOD PC GAMING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Is Simon the Sorcerer 4 out? Amazon only has a german looking version

I wish someone would remake the two first Simon the Sorcerer games. Gold, both of them. (Despite the "cliffhanger" ending in the second game which led to the horrible third one.)

Also, should buy the Penumbra games. But was it going to be a trilogy, or is everything wrapped up in the second game?

Svecke, I believe they cut it short, so the second game is the last one.

Also - Spore will make PC gaming the winner again.

PC gaming is always the WIN!!

oh my god PC gaming has some bad games, SO WHAT

good grief, its not like any of these games had massive budgets like army of two, turok and dark sector, and got bad reviews

Actually, I've only played the demo, but people who like turn-based wargames may actually like to give Fantasy War's demo a shot. It's a niche title, certainly, but it struck me as having some interesting things.

KG

Ditto again with the first poster.

I'm sure the dozens of PC gamers not hooked on WoW enjoyed these reviews.

So, Viking gets a full review, so do a boatload of below-par Wii/X-box live-games, but Penumbra and Simon are rounded up (probably to deport them afterwards)?

If EG is becoming CasualGamer I'll visit other sites in the future.

Oh Simon the Sorcerer I loved that on the Amiga, is the second one still available anywhere other than E-bay?

Just an observation ... you could argue that the "massive" comments thread you've got going on here fully justifies the amount of coverage given to the reviews.

Never knew the amount of comments should be an indicator for what a site should write about or how that site should present its articles. That's like saying EG might as well just ignore all these smaller titles and only write about big-budget games (which EG fortunately doesn't, some titles do deserve their seperate review articles though). If you have any love for gaming in general then you must know there is a lot more to it than what the biggest companies want to sell to us.

Hmm, Penumbra does sounds quite good.... bit of horror stealth action always nice

@Ryuken
The amount of effort put into articles must be based on reader interest though, and the number of comments is some indication of that. I'm not saying they should ignore these sort of title, but there is some justification in putting them in a "round-up" surely? EG aren't there out of the goodness of their hearts, they need to make money. That comes from advertising and this is unfortunately going to be based on hits.

So EG could spend a lot of time and effort wrting big articles on single smaller niche titles, but they wouldn't last very long would they?

Why not? If it works for Darwinia it can work for any title. Remember that gamessites themselves have an influence on what's hot and what's not, they are partially responsible for the hype a game and the love a dev gets. If most of the coverage always limits itself to the big wigs (which contain just as many awful titles as smaller projects do) then we're stuck forever with single-page articles of "Shocking, according to all expectations it actually did suck!" alternative-reality-shooter nr.1895 on the frontpage. Why give even more attention to a big title that fails than a small title that fails or is just average?

Anyway, it's just that there are more than enough titles with their own EG review article which deserve less attention than some of the games in this piece.

I agree that EG have to cater towards there readers DrDamn

But a few fanboys flaming each for a couple of hundred posts does not indicate popularity as such... 300 posts could easily be made between 20 - 30 posters, where as 50 posts on another article could be made up from 40 posters. Am I making sense here? I know waht im trying to say anyway

But I would hope any site would cover both the big releases and the little releases to ensure they give balanced coverage for the whole of the games industry, not just the main stream part of the industry.

Or what Ryuken said. I'd stop reading any site that "sold out" so to speak. There is plenty room to cover everything from the biggest console titles to the smaller PC titles. In fact surely covering both ends of the spectrum can only add to the hits they get.

At the end of the day if they just want to get hits for money just provoke the fanboys... Doesn't very appealing does it, but then as you say they are not hear out of the goodness of their hearst.

Review Trials 2 you lazy bastards! Its freakin genius.

@Ryuken
Sure, but the review scores given here indicate none of them are a Darwinia. If the reviewer had felt the score justified it then maybe it would have got a bigger spread? It's important to give some space to bigger titles which get poorer scores to really explain why they don't come up to scratch. If there are a lot of people anticipating them then they are going to want some good reasoning behind the score and EG are going to do this.

Besides it's not just some PC reviews which are getting this sort of treatment. DS, PSP and LiveArcade round-ups are fairly common too. I would be more worried if a bigger PC title was put in a round up or one which scored very well here and other places.

@FooAtari
Yeah I know what you mean, but even in this small thread about 5 games there is very little discussion of the games themselves and more on the article itself.

Which probably tells you a bit about the games being reviewed. In this case a round up is fine. Just as long as all PC games don't end up reviewed in a round up

The appearance of Fantasy Wars has reminded me I have ye olde Fantasy General on a CD somewhere around here... perhps I'll try and get that up and running instead...

They've done round ups for Wii games, PSN games and Xbox Live games. All the major consoles have had niche/small/low score game put in a round up. They won't do this to any of the "big" games, mainstream or indie. There'll be full reviews of Fez and World of Goo alongside Spore and Far Cry 2.
Unless you really WANT significant time taken up reviewing Sims addons...

matrim83: Coming up shortly.

As a freelancer, I can't really talk about the site's editorial direction, but from my perspective, the idea seems to be that "We'll spend our space on stuff that's actually worth reading about". That is, minor games not worth getting excited or having much to talk about get relatively little coverage, and stuff like Trials 2 gets full reviews.

(How EG knows that is because the reviewers get all excited and tell them they should give BIG REVIEWS TO THIS MINOR GAME NO-ONE HAS HEART OF)

The idea that EG is a casual site is ludicrous. It was the first major game site to give a review to Armageddon Empires, for example.

KG

I don't think EG is a casual site. Still my favorite games site on the intertubes.

The reviewer is way off on this review. If you really like turn-based games, this is a winner. Yea its hard but its turn-based so you should be planning your moves carefully. Easily gets a 9 score from me.