Hello everyone

My name is Mike Smith; I am the UK Community Manager for Slimgamer.com and we have recently started a wonderful relationship with the excellent people here at Gog.com.

We have started a new feature on our site called Pixel Perfect which Gog.com have kindly decided to sponsor - this feature will specialise in looking back at retro games and titles which people may have missed the first time around and are hard to get hold of now. But that's where Gog comes in! Bringing classic titles back alongside recent titles and making them as accessible as possible. Not all of our features will be games available via Gog.com but we are very happy to be spreading the name of Gog.com

We at Slimgamer are very excited to have our name associated with Gog.com, we feel that the more exposure that Gog get, the better and we hope you enjoy our articles in Pixel Perfect.

The full list of the feature can be found <span class="podkreslenie"><span class="bold">here</span></span> and we'd love to hear what you think.

Thanks again!

Mike Smith
--
UK Community Manager - Slimgamer.com

Well, I checked the site, and the Baldur's Gate review, and my first impressions aren't positive.

- The site is laden with advertisements

- The review starts with very simple factual errors. BG does not have a top-down perspective, it's isometric. You're calling it top-down in a paragraph right above a screenshot which shows that it isn't, that doesn't raise my confidence.

- The review definitely needs better proof-reading. It is littered with sloppy mistakes (e.g. saying "ultima crazy" when you apprently meant "craze", "releasing" when you meant "released", "bought" when you meant "brought" etc.), and there are serious issues with punctuation, which make the review harder to read. There are also grammar errors, which again make it unnecessarily hard to follow the review (e.g. "Also, with character death being semi-permanent reminds you ...")

- I would expect at least the game's title to be spelled correctly. Your review spells it in two different ways, neither of which is correct.

- The screen shots are simply copied from across the net.

- There is little interesting content in the article. Most statements are self-evident. Some are good to have in such a retrospective review (like talking about the higher difficulty, and mentioning mods, which is always nice). But these statements are thrown together haphazardly in a review that has no structure whatsoever.

In short - while the design of the site, and your post here, are trying to give the impression of an at least semi-professional level, the review itself is extremely amateurish on pretty much every level. It's nice to see GOG mentioned on the net, but honestly, you're not giving me any reason to revisit your site.

I'm interested in the exact nature of your sponsoring, could you elaborate? Did GOG provide you a game for free in exchange for this (unfortunately) rather badly written review? If so, then I'd suggest doing it over. GOG, and the game you got, are certainly worth more effort.

Firstly, thank you very much for the comment and the observations/comments

Advertisements are unfortunately a nessesary evil for a young site such as ourselves and whilst I agree that there are a large number of ads on the site, this is something we need to maintain for the time being and whilst the number of ads we currently have is out of my control, I will endeavour to have some of them rearranged or 'thinned out' so that it's easier on the eyes.

You have highlighted some extremely elementary and unforgivable errors in our review - my review to be precise. I would like to take full responsibility for any and all of the mistakes within the Baldur's Gate review. I will change many of the errors you have mentioned as soon as possible.

It is mentioned at the very bottom of the review that Gog.com did indeed provide Slimgamer with a copy of Baldur's gate for review and I completely agree with you that through some unfortunate errors my review did not portray my true feelings towards this wonderful title. It saddens me to know that I have published something which has been seen as amateurish and for this, I can only apologise. I would however like to thank you Psyringe because without your frank and direct comments, some of these mistakes would have remained on the site - reflecting badly not only on the site which I represent and believe in but also my own personal work, something I take great pride in and am constantly looking to improve.

I can only hope that, as our collection of Pixel Perfect reviews grows, you can find it successful enough to revisit us. You'll always be welcome, especially for your critique. :-)

Thank you again.

Mike

Mike, sorry if it seems out of line for me to say this, but that is a very short term way of thinking. Making a site look like spam is a sure fire way to ensure you never gain any sizable readership. Then it becomes a vicious cycle where you have no income because there are too many ads on your site (so people don't want to visit it), and you end up putting yet more ads to "increase revenue".

I would suggest taking as many of the ads (if not all) off until you have a sizable readership. You won't be making much off them until then anyway, so all they will do is annoy people and send them packing. Once you've gained a loyal following of people who are convinced your reviews are legit, then comes the time to monetize that traffic.

If that business model would cause you cash flow issues in the short term (though it's hard to imagine these ads make much difference at this stage), then look at getting sponsors for each section like you're doing with GOG, or get the publishers to pay you to review their games (an ethically questionable tactic, but it works well for sites like Playandroid.com).

Again, sorry if that all sounds presumptuous, but I am speaking from a reasonable amount of experience.

Psyringe's observations aside, the site isn't very interesting, at least not at the moment. You don't differentiate yourself from similar sites with anything, and you don't offer any added value to the reader. If I may suggest a few solutions:

1. For every game you review, make a short list of the best mods and where to download them from. Be sure you give only links from sites that are relatively well-known at least until you earn people's trust.
2. Make a contest here on the GOG forums, where people have to go to the site and write a comment there, and then write in your thread on this forum. Bloodygoodgames.com already does this on a regular basis, offering one GOG game and one Gamersgate game per month.
3. Make a shortlist of games that are similar to the one you review. You don't have to write reviews for each, just make sure they actually are similar to the game you reviewed, then add a link to where the reader can buy the game.
4. Add a small trivia section whenever possible with stuff like, say, "The lead-designer named this character after his dog" and other stuff like that, people like those.
5. Subtitles my friend, add subtitles, like this:


GRAPHICS


(text)


GAMEPLAY


(text)


Hope this helps :)

I was wondering what people meant about the ads until I'd realised that I'd completely forgotten that I had AdBlock installed. Now I've disabled it temporarily, I can only concur with MonstaMunch and Psyringe above. The ads are simply nothing short of extreme overkill. A big advert with "Make money playing video games" that looks highly disreputable does it no favours either.

Now, as a language professional, the thing that really struck me was the apparent lack of any editorial proofreading. Aside from the factual error Psyringe mentioned above (I'd be less inclined to criticise the top-down/isometric flaw, but still), there are literally at least two grammar or spelling errors per paragraph in the few articles that I read.

The texts themselves don't read particularly well and are full of irrelevant information that create poor flow. In the Darksiders 2 review, for example, you start out by talking about summer (which is written in lower case, by the way) being the worst time to release a major triple-A title. May well be, but what bearing does it have on the rest of the review? Seems to me that you've latched on to and imitated the journalistic approach of starting an article with an anecdote but ultimately failed to follow through.

Towards the end, you wrote:

"There are obviously the downsides to Darksiders II and I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t point them out."

What's the point of this sentence? A reviewer will be expected to examine the flaws of any game and there's no need to point out that it's the reviewer's job.

I'm sorry Mike, but the articles for the most part are just atrociously bad and the number of ads is unacceptable. It's a pity because with AdBlock switched on (go ahead and criticise, but you will have a considerable number of visitors using AdBlock Plus) the layout is clear and easy on the eyes, and Justin's articles seem to have a little flair to them (but also have not been proofread).

What you need to do is get some decent writers and proofreaders on board. This will probably cost you, but it's necessary to maintain a visitor count that makes the ads financially worthwhile, and will hopefully eventually introduce you to the eternal financial tightrope that is the running of a high-traffic news website.