hey youtube, thanks for finally cooperating with me!  it only took some dirty editing, a second render, and two hours of uploading to get here but we did it

i hope tomorrow is just as adventerous

within that time, reviews were written and jim turned to me for resume assistance.  who?  Gaming-Age's editor-in-chief jim cordeira that's who, you philistines, broken by the loss of his job due to incompetent management of an insurance firm he was with for a decade.  the poor guy is reduced to advice from a 23 year-old government bum... is there no justice in this world

god bless him at least it won't destroy the website

additionally, i opened the bottle.  i sampled the monster, and may have redlined on caffeinated motivation for a solid three hours until i ended up going on a 7-mile bike ride in a mid-80's heatwave.  i didn't die, however, and when i returned, this was ready to be posted... and that is the best thumbnail youtube could scrounge up

i got to finish Combat of Giants: Dinosaurs 3D for the 3DS.  it's the shovelware i thought it would be, never opening up or elaborating on any ideas that other games not only flesh out, but have found rampant success with.  that said, i had to give it a grade to reflect Ubisoft's shameless bid for the unassuming public's launch game fund

review scores are becoming the bane of my existence, as i've never felt it's fair to whittle down years of blood and sweat on behalf of a hard-working team of developers to a singular mark.  notwithstanding, i'm perfectly happy to draw attention to a game that has really earned it.  Dishwasher: Vampire Smile really does that, and although it's nothing special it does have a lot of heart in it.  my poorly expressed feelings will be linked in a review once it's up on G-A, but for the most part video game reviews are broken for as long as they're supplemented with a diluted single grade that says absolutely nothing about what makes it a 6.5, B+, 43%, 5/10, 'really great', or three stars out of you decide on their own

the fact is that it's up to readers to use their brains and take time to understand the body of text next to these scores to understand how the editor came to their conclusion, but how many people are doing that is a number i can't help but feel is depressingly low.  with websites like Metacritic only encouraging the mentality that a score holds more weight than verbalized evaluation, aggregation is raised to an unhealthy level that for all intents is damaging the industry.  and while in the site's very weak defense they are curving scores based on the readership of a critic's site and stick a blurb next to their number, there's not much benefit to the school of thought that a score can be fully understood with more than a flash of insight than these small bits provide

in an age where parents would sooner blame video games than poor parenting that their kids are exposed to adult content, i don't think anything is going to change soon

while G-A's format is to grade video games with a letter scale (one that Metacritic does not accurately translate), it isn't killing me to assign these scores so long as i know most people don't even read the material.  if i could have things my way, in a perfect world of course, compelling content would drive people to tune in to reviews attentively like they do to a Yahtzee video, with no final score as a reward, but a thorough explanation of what the editor felt about the product

oh crap i wrote too much again