Rental Reviews 23/07/09

We’re always looking for new ways to keep you, our community, happy. We like to think that TheSixthAxis listens to our readers more than any other gaming website. So when we launched our Guest Writers feature we noticed in the comments that there was quite a lot of interest in writing reviews. Now, avid readers will remember that I have blogged about the importance of our reviews before. What we write in our reviews is read by publishers, developers and platform holders as well as being picked up by Metacritic and used as a part of that game’s metascore. So we simply can’t allow untested readers to write reviews for TSA. It isn’t practical. We wanted to do something though because a lot of you seemed so interested in giving it a go. So we brewed a fresh pot of coffee and we threw some ideas about and here is what we came up with…

Every week, on a Thursday evening, we will announce a game and ask you to send us brief reviews of it. All you have to do is rent it (hence the feature’s name) and play it like you normally would. We’re not asking you to complete it or play it for fifteen hours, that would be unreasonable. We want this feature to encourage you to play more games but we don’t want it to feel like work. So, we announce the game, you rent it, play it as you normally would and then write a review of no more than 250 words, give the game a score out of ten and send it to us. The following Thursday we will put together a few of the best-written reviews and publish them on TSA along with the review written by one of the writing team. We will also collate the ratings you have given the game and show a sort of TSA-user’s average score alongside our own.

Obviously there are TSA points on offer for the reviews we publish but they have to be good enough to publish and they have to be under 250 words. Think of it like a book club but with video games and points to be won!

Hopefully you all get the idea of how it works so without further ado I would like to announce that this week’s game for Rental Review is: Red Faction: Guerilla. So go rent it, have a play and get your sub-250-word reviews sent to peter[at]thesixthaxis[dot]com with RR in the subject field (otherwise I might miss them). See you back here next Thursday for the round-up and your next assignment!

Update – Just reminding everybody to get their submissions in to the above email address (before midday tomorrow if possible)! Anyone who has played this game should knock up a review under 250 words. All reviews properly submitted are getting 25 points and all reviews that are included or quoted in the round-up will get 50 bonus points. What are you waiting for?