[AMK]

Evening all,


Allow me to introduce myself - I'm the somewhat infamous Aaron McKenna, author of the Raging Tiger review which has been taking so much flak over here in the past days and weeks since its publication. I'm afraid I'm not a regular on Shrapnel's forums or website and so a lot of this may have gone over my head, and so I do apologise, as I do like to respond to criticism of my reviews.

Raging Tiger is an interesting case, as I think a few things have clashed - the deadly trio of Shrapnel, Matrix and Wargamer, the review of a game which is close to some of your hearts and my own sense of humour and style of writing. If I can I'll address these issues one by one, and do excuse me if I'm rather forthright on some of these.

On the issue of Wargamer being affected in its work by Matrix, well I can certainly say I've never encountered any systemic bias within The Wargamers editorial process, and consider it one of the "cleanest" places I've worked at during my career in journalism.

On Raging Tiger, as I stated in my review, I thought it was, to be frank, a terrible game with some minor appeals to the truly hardcore. Beyond that really inner circle it was a face only a mother could love (which is what I think the problem here may stem from :-). On the issue of the manual which has been gathering such criticism over the last while, it's not so much the size of the Raging Tiger manual that drew such attentions from me, but rather the fact that it was so poorly written - my apologies to the author of the manual, but I've read better by a stretch, and especially considering the complicated nature of the game (no bad thing in itself, when it's pulled off correctly), this is particularly inexcusable. The title of the section is more my own sense of humour at play (which you may notice through a lot of my reviews) highlighting the poor nature of the manual, albeit not in a precise fashion (the term of phrase being more for effect than description - read the review for the actual impressions, as they say ;-)

On the issue of "who" should review games, well, I think in this instance the folks here at Shrapnel are throwing a bit of a tantrum because of an opinion - back to the "face only a mother could love" idea. Whilst reviewers are always going to be biased to a degree, a good reviewer looks at a game from all angles, putting himself first in his own shoes, then in the position of the "masses", with the "masses" being a relative term to the game itself - for example "the masses" for a first person shooter are going to be different to the masses for a strategy game, or a niche game such as Raging Tiger. However, Raging Tiger was, from all views... well, terrible, and just because you may want to look past any imperfections to see the very rough diamond beneath... well, I just think this is lazy design and excuses.

The fact of the matter is, Raging Tiger is not a good game, and I'm far from the only reviewer to confirm this. I think the developers here need to get off their collective soapbox for a bit and instead look at making Raging Tigers successors better titles, rather than attempting to make cheap shots at the media who review your games when they do not give the impression that all developers want to see given of their games. I appreciate the toil that goes into many games, and that a lot of the time failure can be due to anything but lazy design, but the bottom line is this title is a poor one and no whinging can change that.

I'm sorry to have to lay it down this thick, but I think that Shrapnel is getting increasingly *****ey about who and what gets to review its games, damn well near expecting the developers to get to review the games as Mr. Brooks suggests above. Really, get a bloody grip.



Once again, sorry for the strong tones, but I'm sure we all appreciate frankness over hissy footing...



Aaron McKenna


(PS, On the bit of a writers rivalry myself and Dr. Cobb, well, I wouldn't miss that party for the world :-)