First Impression articles were meant to go hand-in-hand with Grab Bag streams. The idea was to play a bunch of games for a few minutes each and then write about them.
This felt like a good way to share my thoughts on games which I might not get around to finishing and/or which weren’t up to the standard I expect of games which I write full articles about. While this technically worked, these First Impression articles often ended up being just as long as the standard, featured articles and it quickly became very difficult to write about every game from every Grab Bag stream.
So, the streams are remaining the same, but the articles are getting revamped! Here are the three main ways these articles are changing for the better:
1) Every game in a Grab Bag stream will be written about within the same article. This ties the games more closely to the stream itself and ensures that they all get written about in a timely manner.
2) There will be a lot less writing for each game. I’m not setting a word limit, but there will be a limit of two three paragraphs per game. The idea is to give a quick, general impression of the game which complements the video while also serving as an alternative for those who can’t or don’t want to watch the stream recording itself. While I love to analyze games, lengthy First Impression articles ended up taking more time to read than just watching the video and much of the content would have been painfully redundant for any games I went on to write featured articles about.
3) Scores are gone and replaced with rankings. Giving scores to games in First Impression articles always felt a bit strange, but I thought they were necessary due to the wildly varying qualities while writing about games individually. Rankings solve this problem by killing two birds with one stone. They serve as a way of further tying the games to each other and to the video and they also make for a nice alternative to a more absolute scoring system.
In short, these changes primarily serve as a way of trying all the games from a Grab Bag more closely together. Ditching scores and tightening up the writing to give snappier, more general impressions of each game are added bonuses.
Considering all these changes, names for future articles will also be changing from First Impression articles to Indie Game Grab Bag articles to glue them to the video content as firmly as possible. Gaming Grab Bag is a catchier title, but I’ve opted for Indie Game Grab Bag in favor of a little more clarity.
Last of all, the most recent Indie Game Grab Bag stream was last night, so the very first of these revamped articles will be ready within the next few hours!