Update again

New this Tuesday:

• Star Wars Battlefront 2 review (PS2)
• The ESRB Ratings Widget (copyright ESRB, 2008) can now be found at the bottom of this homepage. The widget searches the official ESRB rating of a game title you type in. It also displays the game's content descriptors, which are the ESRB's way of flagging unsuitable content in games. It also lists what platforms the game is available for.

Future developments

• News-letter to accompany Tuesday updates
  
• YFG Styleguide -- has to be consistency somewhere

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Why you won't find it here...
Why there aren't reviews for many movie- or cartooon-based games at Your Family Games
Meghan Ventura

If you’ve glanced over the list of the reviews posted on Your Family Games, then you might have noticed the lack of movie- or cartoon-based games that are based on large, young-audience-targeting franchises. Yet, while in the videogame store or shopping online, you’ve probably noticed Spiderman and X-Men games or the Fantastic Four game that I saw entirely too many commercial spots for on TV when the movie was released. You’ve seen the unceasing deluge of Disney character or Spongebob-based games. You know what I’m talking about. Yet, you never see any of these games represented on Your Family Games.

And, until we hit the big-time, you probably won’t. This can be explained by two reasons.

First, most of these gargantuan franchises—whether the original source material comes from movie, comic book, TV show, book—they have an extremely difficult time being translated into an interesting and decent videogame. And, although there are exceptions to this rule, these games tend to stink. Badly. For example, Jaws Unleashed is a game with wonky controls and repetitive, flat gameplay that revolves around eating things. The videogame versions of Pirates of the Caribbean, Chronicles of Narnia, the Golden Compass and the Fantastic Four are just a sampling of movie games over the past few years that often don’t provide a fundamentally rounded gaming experience.

The second reason is the same reason I’ve been using to explain away almost every aspect of my life for the last one-and-a-half years: I’m a college student, and so are all of the writers. Even if we wanted to afford these typically terrible games, we couldn’t. Well, with careful budgeting we could, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to pay $30 to $50 for a game that offers flawed design and is targeted at 10-year-olds. Part of the fun of gaming is picking out games you think will appeal to you, or that someone has recommended to you. Yet, herein lies the challenge, because the amount of games you want to play always seems to outweigh the amount of money you can afford to spend. Most gamers have to be frugal, careful with their money.

Thus, I can’t in good conscience ask a student writer to buy and review of a sub-par Hannah Montanta game. So, I’m very sorry, but you won’t find any of these kinds of games reviewed here (with the exception of some Star Wars spin-offs, in which the Lego Star Wars and Star Wars Battlefront games have proven to be good fun. Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Batman also look like promising upcoming titles).

Another result of having the college-aged staff is that while we do feature some E for Everyone games, the current balance in our reviews section tends to slide towards the sometimes touchy T for Teen rating (13+) or the definitely-not-for-kids M for Mature (17+). When you take YFG’s mission of being a resource for family-friendly videogaming and compare it to this current trend in the site’s content, our writings definitely seem to contradict our end-all goal. But when writers send me the list of games they own, the games with the Everyone and Teen ratings get reviewed first. Always. We’re always trying to expand on suggestions for family-friendly content, rather than focus on warning parents about M-rated games that younger kids have no business playing anyway.

Money really does make the world go ‘round, and YFG simply doesn’t have enough to spend on titles that wouldn’t be enjoyable to play. This also makes the site look bad in the fact that we recommend nearly every game we’ve reviewed so far because, as poor college gamers, we would start to hate our beloved hobby if we always picked up games that weren’t worth buying in the first place.

Last quarter, I was talking with the journalism professor who has given me
advice for this site before (a good deal of which I haven’t yet put into practice, shame on me). I told him I was considering trying to partner up with a non-profit game research organization on campus called the GRID Lab. You know, because YFG is non-profit, too, I said.

And then came his correction. YFG isn’t a not a non-profit. We’re a commercial enterprise. We’re just not making any money.

Ah, how true.