Thursday, April 12, 2007

TenTonHammer Review

The reviewers at TenTonHammer.com praise dreamlords with

4 / 5

Thanks!

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Zitron's revenge

Ed fought back. Rather well so. Nice move.

To my amazement some people have actually read my rant about Zitron.

I am sure that I would be entertained by Zitrons reviews as well, but you cannot expect me to be entertained when he kills my game?

Surely, looking him up on the net, was an act of fury but nevertheless, he made me furious, thus an act of fury...

Friday, April 06, 2007

More good news

More reviews keep coming in and this time it is MMORPG.com which I would call the first of the big fish.

7.6

We scored a very respectable 7.6 out of 10 and I couldn't have dreamed of a better score at a huge international site.

I would like to thank MMORPG for following the development of dreamlords with some interest and embracing us in the mmorpg family (after some persuasion).

Obviously I am biased to say they did a good job, but really, their coverage of dreamlords have been very professional and the rating they now produced is the result of many playing hours and years of following our project.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Booyah!

Stratics comes to the rescue.

Read their review here

8.0

I feel it needs to be said.
Normally I wouldn't say that one review is more right then another... But yes, I do think the stratics interview, or ANY other interview is more correct then Zitrons. That's just my honest oppinion.

We also dug out some server statistics on him showing that he hadn't activated one single technology being perfectly equivalent to; not becoming level 2 in wow.

This, might very well be our fault not making this clear etc, but his criticism did not bring that up.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Officially killed by Ed Zitron!

Dreamlords has received its first head shot!
The killing blow is dealt in PCZone UK and it is made perfectly clear that dreamlords is possibly the worst game ever! (and obviously I can't handle it well)

So how am I going to tackle this, besides throwing things around in absolute rage?
Obviously I am going to take this guy apart and engage myself in war! Like any reasonable person would. Something that might haunt me for the rest of my life given this particular reviewer's reputation... I present the man with the plan, Ed Zitron a permanent residence of, and lifetime chancellor of "Doctor Ed's house of pain".



So what of it?
Has mr. Zitron no right to hate dreamlords? Of course he does, and he could perhaps even have risen some questions that other reviewers have missed or been kind enough not to mention, my objection lies entirely in the lack of actual analysis of the game and lack of constructive criticism.

I get the distinct feeling that Ed has an image to protect which makes what he has to say rather light weight. It's like evidence in court, this man your honor is clearly biased.
Dreamlords isn't the best game ever, in fact it's rather well known to have it's downsides that are being taken care of one by one. Once again I don't mind him hating the game but I do mind the fact that he forgets to mention several important factors that are important for the reader to make up their own mind. Ed is not reviewing dreamlords, he is laying down the law, which in this case is; his own opinion and irrefutable judgement. Ed Zitron is not a reviewer, he is an entertainer.

On a personal note I certainly don't trust this man's reviews. Here is an example.
Guitar Hero 2 (OBS Ed's editor has informed me that he stands by Eds review but that he disagree with the judgement cast.)


So now that I feel I smeared him at least a little bit I feel better. And now I am going to indulge in much more positive news.

A more balanced presentation of dreamlords on gamespot player reviews
We just scored 74% in the largest swedish PC Gaming magazine (PC Gamer sweden) that was a blast.

Finally
Just look at the dreamlords gameplay tutorial film here and tell me this is a 17% score game. If you honestly think that, so be it.


Over and out.

Monday, April 02, 2007

Esthetics

Fellow game designer Andreas Roman commented on my MFD post and said he thought appearences had much more importance then I gave it credit for and he is right.

I fully appretiate the importance of an attractive interface, relly, I actually think that the interface is an important visual signature of a game. However, I am 100% uncapable of conceiving a "beautiful" interface my self and gladly leave the esthetics to artists even though I have my fair share of oppinions.

A great example of an attractive visual "interface" (although this is news design) is this one. It's an illustration/fact sheet about death. I find this very attractive in terms of appearance although I would never have been able to come up with this myself.


So my point is, combine my skills as an interaction specialist with this guy (Stefan Rothmaier, DN) and we could perhaps be able to break some new ground.