Tuesday, January 1, 2013

2012 Reviews in Review


With 2013 beginning, it's hard not to reflect on the past year. 2012 was a very interesting year for me in regards to writing. It is probably obvious to see that my blog has been much quieter than it was at the start, and this is mostly due to the shift in reviewing habits. As the year went on, I reviewed more and more, and became more comfortable with it.

Although it is fun to review games, it did make me think about a few things. For one, with reviews very often on my plate, I felt that I was rarely able to enjoy games that I wanted to play "just because". Instead of flipping through my PS2 collection to find a new gem, I was usually forcing myself to play a game for review. Thankfully, most games I ever review are ones I'm interested in, but there is something to be said for free gaming time as opposed to gaming with a goal in mind. In this post I will share a couple charts which show off various stats for my year of reviewing and links to all my 68 reviews.



Some of these pie charts and bar graphs may not be interesting to you, but they sure are to me! First, I decided to see just how unevenly my review writing was divided up between sites. My main site, Game Podunk, obviously received the most reviews penned by me. It was 53 overall. GameSparked is a site I only recently began writing for and it had 9 reviews. Then there is Play Tribune, which was actually inactive for a while and as such only had 6 reviews.
Next up was finding out just how many reviews were written across a multitude of platforms. Now, this doesn't mean the platform each game is on, as many are multiplatform. Instead it means which platform I reviewed each title for. With that distinction made, here is the corresponding chart. Unfortunately, the PSP will probably drop out of the running completely with next year's reviews. Most surprising to me was the sizable chunk of Vita games.
After that, my mind wandered to ESRB ratings. Many games this year came out without any official ESRB rating. This is a big surprise to me as ratings used to be so important. Even before the ESRB came into being, the industry attempted to regulate itself with a vast amount of rating styles. Of course, after the advent of ESRB, every game that was expected to be sold at retail needed it. Now we're entering a digital age where games don't need them, and that is quite exciting. Here are the ESRB ratings of games I played, clustered all together. 
What else can possibly be charted out? Similar to ratings, I had to know how much of each genre I reviewed. As expected, my gravitation to preferred genres is hugely apparent. Adventure (mostly of the point and click variety), horror, and RPG were highest with 8 titles each. A few genres had only a tiny showing, but mostly the genres were split evenly. 
With all that out of the way, I looked into a bit more. However, there is no need to display them visually as they have a lot less information. For one, it was obvious that many of the games played this year were digital titles. As it turns out, 48 of my 68 reviews were based on games which are only available digitally. At the start of this generation, I would have never believed digital games would grow so prevalent so fast, but here we are. The last thing I checked was the average of my review scores. It ended up standing at a very favorable 7 out of 10. My lowest rated games were Amy and Warlords. My top rated were Lone Survivor, Persona 4 Golden, Waking Mars, and The Walking Dead. However, no game received a perfect score.

Finally I will link all my reviews. Ones without links are reviews still in queues to be posted. Links are alphabetical rather than chronological because that seems easier to sort through.

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