Negative Gamer reviews are meant as an accompaniment to other sites’ reviews. This means that aspects which are typically gone into at great length in other reviews (the good points) can be glossed over. Instead the review needs to focus on the bad, more annoying, negative parts.
Never make a point without backing it up! As you will be writing bad things about games, people reading will be taking great care to find ways to prove you wrong. Make sure you back up every point you make.
Here is the review template. Look at it and take note of the structure and how titles and paragraphs fit together. Take a look at other NG reviews and see how they fit to the structure. It’s important that headings and images all follow the standard layout and style.
I find the easiest way to write this kind of thing is to first list all the bad parts, group them into similar points then use those groups as your plan for the article. Also, it’s probably worth differentiating between bugs/accidents and designed bad points.
The header image should be made with game concept art where possible and saved in the .png format. A template in .xcf format (used by GIMP) can be found here.
Here’s a list of things to remember;
- The title of the review should be “Negative Gamer Review: [full game title] ([format you played it on])
- There is a template for review header images that should be used. Be sure when changing the game name field to use ALL CAPS. Save the image as a .png. When you import it into your review set the Title to be “Negative Gamer Review: [full game title]“.
- The opening line for your review is yours to entice people to your review. Take care to make sure it’s not generic.
- Make sure to mention in the first paragraph if you got the game for free. Give thanks to whoever gave it to you (publisher, developer etc.).
- The first few paragraphs need to give background to the game. What was expected, any controversy etc. You should also explain the plot over view, and what the game is in very general (around 50 words) terms.
- That was the intro. In HTML view you can add the break here (add <!–more–> (two dashes on each side)).
- Directly following the break should be the first main talking point. Try to have two or three of these talking points. Each should have a heading sentence that is in bold and center aligned.
- On the first line under each heading sentence should be a 250px x 250px image. Alternate their alignment left, right, left etc. Give it a funny Title.
- Below your talking points goes the A few other points worth mentioning: section. Be sure to use that exact title and make it bold.
- Use a bullet point list of all the problems you found that aren’t covered in the rest of your review. Mention here the difficulty you played the game on, how many times you played it etc.
- Then there is your concluding paragraph. Sum up your feelings in a couple of paragraphs.
- Add the title You should play this game if…, then complete the sentence.
- Now is where you add the final score, the bit people scroll down and look at first. Either get an Editor to add the score for you if you’re not sure, or carefully read the score breakdown.
- Add a small sentence backing up your score in relation to the score breakdown. Keep it short.
- Copy the following code and change the values (any reference to the score, in this example the score is -4, as well as the sentence) if you’re stuck on how to add the score;
<strong>Final Score</strong>
<img title=”-4″ src=”http://negativegamer.com/img/score/4.png” alt=”-4″ width=”100″ height=”67″ />Here is where you write your very short sentence.
- Finally add a link to the review score breakdown for people to read if they want. Copy this code at the end of your review to get the link right;
<p style=”text-align: right;”>(<a href=”http://negativegamer.com/2008/05/18/score-breakdown-0-to-10/” target=”_blank”>What does this score mean?</a>)
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