Great review!! Sweet, short and informative. Thanks.

PS Couldn't agree more...

Just a piece of advice for future reviews: you seem to be missing the core aspects of adventure gaming. Art, music, length, etc. are peripheral. Relevant questions are puzzle design, interface, challenge. Leaving those out makes the review somewhat useless, since we can look at screenshots ourselves to figure out what the graphics look like and click on the link to see the playing time. Just a thought.

Reviews like this one might as well just be links with a sentence or two (tops) of text. It can't take substantially longer (any longer?) to write a review like: "Spooks, although clearly borrowing heavily from the setting and theme of the iconic adventure game Grim Fandango, nevertheless is a short but plesant romp. The puzzles are fair if somewhat easy and the pixel hunting frustration is quite low. The writing is good for an amateur adventure game and suits the lighthearted atmosphere. The graphics are likewise sufficient, especially with the interesting use of a grayscale palette interspersed with flashes of color. At 5MB and no cost, you'd be crazy not to check out Spooks."

Note that I've never played Spooks, so I have no idea if any of that is true. I imagine it is, partly because it's full of indy-game banalities like "fair if somewhat easy." Regardless, wouldn't a review like that be much more helpful than what Mackay wrote? He clearly played the game (which took an hour) and is a competent writer, so why not actually try to convey the main information? Shrug.

By the way, I played through Noitu Love, so if you want a review of that I'd be happy to zap one off; I can't remember if you'd reviewed it already

Thanks for your comments guys, its good to hear some feedback. I will discuss this further with Tim!

Again, I should make clear that it's not so much that the review is bad -- the writing is fine and it contains a variety of information that is worth knowing (like it's an AGS game, who made it, it's fun, the palette stuff). It just seems to be missing the core stuff a review could use. That's not b/c Peter is stupid or a bad writer, but probably because it's one of his first capsule reviews (I'm guessing?).

As for your reviews, Tim, some of them -- like the shooter reviews -- seem well done, although not playing shooters I don't know. Those reviews always home in on the key parts of shooters (attack patterns, powerups, difficulty, shooter type), which is what the reader really needs to know.

Other reviews are a little sketchier. Friction, for example, doesn't say whether the games are *fun* or *addictive*, which is probably the core question for a minigame collection. Too busy to read all of them now, but that's just my quick reax.

I like the game and it's monochrome/color subject.
hmm reading the discussion about what is important in adventure games, I missed a thing: the NPCs.
"Spooks" has some really wierd characters, like the talking bulb or the invisible three-headed monster...