NESfan.com

NESfan is the latest of the multi-webmaster "big" sites to come up, and the reviews sector is a big part of the site. At not even a year old the site has over 40 reviews up. Of course you have to take into account there are multiple people working on it, and more who were working for the site and quit, so putting it all into perspective it's not too great a feat. The average quality of a review is pretty good (even if I don't usually agree :-) and different reviewers means different perspectives. However, the length of the reviews varies greatly in some instances, and so does the format to some extent. One of my gripes is that on most reviews, they put up pop-up links to the screenshots, instead of putting the screenshots in the review body itself. The average person IMO isn't going to bother with this, even when they care about the game being reviewed. In all fairness, some of the reviews do have the screenshots at the bottom, but I believe those are only in the older reviews. One thing I do like is that they post a picture of the front of the box at the top of the page, a nice feature because I don't usually have the box with my games. Otherwise the info table is useless (though many, many sites are guilty of the same thing).

They have a way (unintentional or not) of making the reviews seem bigger than they really are, with tables all around pushing the paragraphs in. However, NESfans reviews are still much longer than many sites, and are about just the right size, no 3 sentence long reviews, and no 15K+ drawn out reviews that bore you into a state of stupor. I don't think they take advantage of the multiple webmasters deal at all. They don't even say who the reviewer is on the index page, not until the end of the review (sometimes in the title). What they should do is let each other 'edit in' to thier reviews and put some sort of "second opinion" box, especially when one of the webmasters disagrees (something to consider, if you're reading this NESfan people).

NESfan takes a somewhat different approach in thier format, that's for sure. I would prefer a numerical scoring system, but maybe that's just nitpicking. They always lead into a new paragraph with some cornball line in bold text. Unique, yes, and it gives NESfan reviews thier own style. I can say nothing more about the raw quality of thier reviews except just "good", with a few exceptions. A game the reviewer likes is going to get a much longer review than an ordinary game. But at least they review ordinary/obscure games and popular games alike, for some reason a lot of sites seem to only review one or the other.

Score

07


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