As I kept adding various reviews and chapters to the book I realized two really important things. One was that I wanted to simplify the scoring and the reviews themselves and the other was that the Menus were getting bulkier and harder to navigate (even on a PC, let alone on the mobile site).

So after several weeks of thinking about it and then some more time spent tweaking the webpage configurations and rewriting, I have finally got to a point where I am happy with how it looks and am therefore writing this blog post to announce it (and explain).

Reviews

If you’ve been reading my blog in the past or even just glanced over it, you might have seen that I divided the reviews into five different sections. Depending on what I was reviewing some examples of sections are atmosphere, gameplay, story and entertainment. The problem with having such a system I realized was that often times I didn’t have anything meaningful to say in a given section and merely repeated myself. For example, on more than one occasion I found out that movies had enjoyable music, but not memorable, and so I would keep writing that. Another example is when a game’s mechanics worked well, but they were nothing new or particularly exciting, once again I would just say that.

So what I decided to do now instead is just focus on the things that stand out, either as The Good or The Bad. This allows me to not waste my words and your time explaining something that is merely ok or passable. Instead, I focus on the strengths and weaknesses. If anyone still finds that too long, there is The Summary section at the end, where I briefly summarize the experience and give my final verdict.

As far as the scoring goes, I streamlined it from what I was talking about in the previous blog post (On the scoring system) to only two.

Anything that I review as Worth it means that I would easily recommend to anyone. On the other hand, Skip it does not have my personal endorsement. Keep in mind that even this one might still appeal to select audiences. Especially because a lot of people have their “guilty pleasures” where they know the work is a pile of garbage and yet somehow inexplicably enjoy it.

Lastly, have my own kind of “guidelines” on how to chose what to invest my time in and maybe it will be helpful to you too. If it is:

• … another product from a company / director / artist that I have overall positive experiences with, I just go ahead and support them by going to the movies or buying the product.
• … the same company / director / artist had some great works in the past, but also some not so good, I am cautiously optimistic and pay attention to negative reviews.
• … a new development team / director / artist or a theme that I usually would not enjoy, I try to focus on the positive reviews.

Menus and Navigation

The Menu on top now contains the minimum possible. This does mean that in most cases an extra click is needed to get to the final page, but I realized it was better this way. I’ll explain how they’re meant to be used.

The Home brings you to the default webpage from where you can see the latest blog posts.

Clicking on Books gets to the general webpage about my novels and then as a subsection, clicking on Lambda gets you to the Index of my first novel. You can easily access all the pages from there, plus once you start reading, there’s a link to the next chapter at the end of the current one.

Clicking on Short Stories gets you to the general page containing a list of them – only Moonlight Madness exists for now.

Reviews explains the hows and whats and also has links towards the different review parts (accessible through the menu as well). Currently these are Board Games, Movies and Series and Video Games.

Finally, the About is a page briefly talking about who I am.

As usual, any comments and feedback appreciated. Thanks for reading!