I'm glad you took the time to look at the "About" page; I'd imagine not a lot of people do. The team here desires to create a site that is a little bit different. There is no way we could compete with sites like Kotaku, Joystiq, or Colony of Gamers for day-to-day news. The team here has some diverse careers, and we would never be able to mimic the quality coverage of other sites. However, we do all like talking about games, and we believe there is a lot of value in doing so. The game industry is filled with people that have great ideas and great talent (and some, frankly, that lack either) and with games that bring innovation and excitement for hours on end. People that play games can always think of game moments, mechanics, stories, developers, and events that have led to discussions, or at the very least fish tales, with friends. We wanted to explore these discussions in depth, and really look at what we're playing and why we're playing it. Or in some cases, what we aren't playing and why not. Essentially, we can boil our goals down here to three basic objectives:
We do reviews a little differently here at fiftycal; you may have already noticed that none of them have scores. We don't believe a scoring system can capture what a game is about; too often reviewers have to distill a complex game down to a handful (at best) of numbers and realize that half the people will never read the article anyway. It's a tough job to try to and evaluate each game on its own merit while at the same time keeping in context the general "state of the industry" to evaluate it against. Of course, no matter how great a writer a reviewer may be, you'll still have a thousand raging gamers questioning why GameX got rated higher than GameY at the end of the day, and to make it worse they may not even be in the same genre!
Our aim is to provide enjoyable, easy to follow articles that sum up what we feel worked and didn't work in a game, and give the reader a sense of what they could expect from a title. We aim to evaluate a game as objectively as possible, but we realize and make note that fun is subjective, so we'll do our best to tell you honestly how we feel, but we ask in return that you understand your experience may vary. Ideally, due to the great diversity of folks writing here, you'll find people whose tastes line up with yours and you can weight their opinions a little heavier.
Finally, like our last objective states, we want to be genuine. If we don't like something, we're not going to hide it. Likewise, we'll always try to be upfront when our person bias may tip the scales in favor of something as well. Our reviews will clearly state at the beginning of a review basic information about the author's experience, such as if they completed it, how long they spent playing it, and if we received the game for free as a review/promo copy. This is to let you know exactly where we stand when we're laying down the line. If you think we aren't living up to this, we always invite you to send us an email and call us out.