Tuesday, 28 August 2012 19:07

The Return of the 30-Minute Test Drive Game Review

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Reading time is around minutes.
Halo4-01

Not all that long ago and in the same spot I have been doing work for the last 10 years I developed a concept called the short attention span review. This became a stock feature at one of the sites that I used to write for. The concept was simple; take a product or software and dive into it for 20 minutes. After that time period tell if this product was able to capture someone’s attention. It was based off of research that said the average person had a 20-minute attention span when dealing with new concepts. Sounds pretty simple right?

After playing around with the concept since leaving the all of the other sites I have written for I found that a 20-minute test drive does not work for everything; in fact it works on a very small range of products. There is one area that a 20-minute test drive still does wonders though: Games. We have found that for the most part a game needs to grab the player in about 20-30 minutes or it gets traded in or ends up in the rubbish bin (for my British friends out there).

We will be starting these 20-30 minute reviews of games for the PC and Xbox 360 as we are able to get them in the lab. We promise not to drop any spoilers on anyone, but you can expect video, screenshots and as much information as we can uncover in our quick test. For those pieces of software that are able to grab our attention we will offer additional information on them (again without any spoilers).

Look for the first in this series to show up very soon. We will be covering the games from our usual standpoint of value, performance, playability, ease of use and immersion.  This will not be a bunch of synthetic tests or canned screen shots here.  We will even start to cover these games under Windows 8 just to keep things interesting.

You can talk about this this in our Forum as well as add the names of games you would like us to test.

Read 2571 times Last modified on Tuesday, 28 August 2012 19:32

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