While it may be hard to believe, I’m coming up on my first year anniversary as a game reviewer here at GameShark. I know, I know, my incredible insight and incomparable wit makes it seem like I’ve been doing this for a lifetime, but I can assure you, that prior to having this gig, the only things I was writing was bad checks. Wait, does forgery count? Ok, two things then.

I’ve learned a lot during this time, and the other writers here have been very accommodating, those that deign to actually speak to me and not ignore my emails asking for writing help, or a compatible kidney. I know that there are probably many of you out there wondering how to break into the business of getting paid to play games, so I’ve put together some of the things I’ve learned over the past year to help set your expectations correctly. I hope you find this useful and it brings you closer to your dream job as a game reviewer, just do it someplace else as I have enough competition for all the good games as it is.

Your editor hates you

Seriously. He totally hates you. Oh sure, without you, nothing gets written, but without him (or her) you don’t get assignments, and he can always replace you. Most likely your editor has been doing this long enough that the constant cycle of changing the review system from using letter grades to number grades to obscure, Sumerian pictographs and back to letters all over again has left him a bitter shell of a person finding happiness only when he can foist some bargain basement Wii chicken plucking title on the new guy and give said new guy only three days to review it.

Deadlines are important

Who knew? One of the best ways to mitigate the fact that your editor hates you is to get your work done on time. I try to get my stuff done within a week of when my editor wants it. Anything more than that is rude and then I run the risk of not getting paid, and I’m all about the ducats. Anyway, you may find that you’ve been given a game that’s much too large to review in the time given, so what do you do in those cases? You can either burn the midnight oil, tirelessly toiling to get your assignment done, or you can see if someone else on your site wrote a preview and then just piggyback on their impressions. I mean, we all know that previews are pretty darn accurate when it comes to predicting a game’s final condition, right? Right?

Your site’s review scale is indecipherable

Wherever you end up getting a review job, there will be some scale used to assign games a final score and whatever it is, it’ll be completely impossible to tell where the fine gradations are. Take our scale for example. Do you know what the difference between a C- and a C+ is because I sure as heck don’t. The best way to get around this is to just pick a grade and give pretty much everything the same grade. Picking a grade on either end of the scale will get you a reputation of either loving everything or hating everything while picking one in the middle will allow you to continue to toil in relative obscurity until you finish that book you’ve been writing for the past thirteen years. Good luck with that. When in doubt, go for negative because too many positive reviews makes you look like a gushing fanboy where hating every thing makes you just look bitter and possibly funny. It worked for Yahtzee so it can work for you, too. The only exceptions here are for Halo, GTA, Metal Gear Solid and any of the Mario games. Rating these anything less than perfect will get you banned from reviewing forever. Forever!