The Future of Niche Appeal

I’m now halfway through the second season of Niche Appeal and have consequently gotten into thinking about the future of the format. To make the most of this blog type thing I’m going to use the opportunity to relay a few thoughts and schedules here, so the most persistent of my readers (I’m looking at you there Maet) know what they’re in for.

The remainder of Season 2

With Zeno Clash now out there gathering dust in the forums Season 2 has seen its eighth review and since I have no desire to break the 15 review mode established by Season 1 this means that there’s 7 reviews left to do. As you probably guessed from the poll, Risen, Hitman: Blood Money and Dark Messiah are already planned. At the time of writing Hitman is up front so that’ll likely be my next release. I’ll probably make time to write it during my easter break next week. I started the one on Dark Messiah a while ago and it’s about halfway done, but I’ll probably end up rewriting those parts when I pick up the project again. The entries on Risen and Hitman so far only consist of a few isolated paragraphs. Apart from that Crysis 2 is strong contender for a review, provided I find the time to play it, and I might end up reviewing Blur and Rainbow Six: Vegas just because they’re two of the few titles I picked up recently. This leaves one review and, again in following the tradition established last year, it’ll likely end up being something big and partly unusual. I guess there’ll still be a review somewhere in there, maybe even one of the few I just mentioned (with a different game stepping up for a regular entry), but it’ll also include some nonreview parts.

I’ve been playing around with a few ideas concerning this finale. I already did interviews and statistics last season, so that probably won’t happen again. I thought about finding everybody who played a game because of my reviews and getting short statements from them, mostly because I’m interested to see how well my column performed in that area, but the viability of this plan depends heavily on how many people I get. If I find a willing partner and the time to set something like this up I’ll hopefully be able to do a joint review of some sort. Pimppeter is a strong candidate for this, possibly Domble if I can convince him (since he’s already proven he does that sort of thing) and maybe even Maet. Not for a game review probably, since our reviewing styles are a bit too similar to make the most of the format (Or rather mine is a very fumbly imitation of his), but I’d enjoy being able to get him for an “On the state of User Reviews” type thing, a sort of general debate on amateur critique, elitism vs. populism and schools of thought surrounding reviews. This has proven a popular topic last time and I feel a lot has been left unsaid. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. On The Escapist the few people who regularly produce something (Hypocritically, I include myself in that list) are more or less going in the same direction anyway, but being after meeting some actual (mostly literary) critics I’ve only recently realised how strongly I feel about some of these ideas, particularly elitism. Plus the idea of working with these people is appealing by and in itself.

Season 3?

I’m not sure if I’ll do another season after this one. Season 2 is going to take me all the way to August to complete, possibly longer (or shorter, but that doesn’t seem likely). I know I said this multiple times and still slip up horribly on occasion, but I’d like to believe that I’m a fairly decent reviewer by now and this means that the current format doesn’t offer me a lot of room for growth. Don’t get me wrong here, I’ve got a long, long, long way to go as any kind of penmonkey, but I feel that I can’t take it much further in an amateur forum. There’s other venues for writing that I should explore. I should get this blog running at a decent pace and connect it to the general blogosphere (god I hate that word). I should also try to publish something outside of self publication, as even rejection might get me further than another obscure review.

So if I do return for more Season 2, it’ll probably be after a long hiatus. It’s still likely, I mean the few months between Season 1 and Season 2 alone have taught me how hard it is to drop this habit. Now that I’ve been doing it this long, reviews start forming automatically when I play new games. It still takes a long time to reform this into anything readable, but it’s hard to shut off my drive to analyze a game. I guess what I’m saying here is that I’ll probably do another review eventually, but you’d better not hold your breath.

 

Back on Track

Moving my reviews over here to have them archived took a little longer than I expected. Partly because it took me a while to figure out the best way to move the script over here without having to redo the entire BB-Code and links, but mostly because the task is ultimately about as engaging as repeatedly slamming my head on my desk. It’s done now and the experience made me realize a few things:

The word’s spelled definitely, not definetely. I need to get this into my head. Also, I need to start actually using possessive case properly.

Doing something mundane never takes as long as you think when you first look at it. Just throw yourself right in.

Fast-paced, upbeat and completely batshit music surprisingly helps me stay focused. On the other hand I’ve now got Caramell Dansen stuck in my head.

I don’t know why, but a specific string of code keeps appearing in my posts after previewing or saving them. For the record I’ll publish it this time: qtl { position: absolute; border: 1px solid #cccccc; -moz-border-radius: 5px; opacity: 0.2; line-height: 100%; z-index: 999; direction: ltr; } qtl:hover,qtl.open { opacity: 1; } qtl,qtlbar { height: 22px; } qtlbar { display: block; width: 100%; background-color: #cccccc; cursor: move; } qtlbar img { border: 0; padding: 3px; height: 16px; width: 16px; cursor: pointer; } qtlbar img:hover { background-color: #aaaaff; } qtl>iframe { border: 0; height: 0; width: 0; } qtl.open { height: auto; } qtl.open>iframe { height: 200px; width: 300px; }.

I’m not entirely happy with the pingback/trackback situation on the Niche Appeal page, though right now I don’t know how to improve it.

The format of my reviews doesn’t exactly work well with the current layout of the blog. I’ll make sure it suits the blog next time, which might mean that the format on The Escapist will change drastically. The pre-review spoilerbox nonsense will be reduced to bare minimum and I’ll have to rework whatever ideas I had for there into full-blown blog posts (that’s what that section was always about anyway). I’ll probably stop inlining my images as well.

While we’re on that note, I need to stop checking how the BlueInkAlchemist solved the problems I’m facing right now.

I need more links to fill the sidebar. I can think of a few people who I’d like to put there, but I don’t really want to link them without contacting them, and I don’t want to contact them before I put this thing into working order. Suggestions would not go amiss though.

Is my text too greyish?