The Reviews Section

Welcome to the Review section of The Realm.

When I first created The Realm, one of the things I wanted as a part of this website was a section where I‘d review movies, books, and games. Anyone looking into the early updates for the site will see me listing updates for that section. In fact just looking at The Realm’s home page shows a listing for reviews as one of the items one would find on the site, along with a link to a reviews section.

Sadly, I eventually abandoned the reviews section as I wasn‘t doing anything with it. Anyone clicking the link would find an error message. The fact was simply that my idea for the site had evolved, but my time spent on updating the site had dropped to just mainly adding new links. And in both I just didn‘t see any more room for a reviews section I wasn‘t going to bother with.

In part this loss of a review section within my vision for this site was due to my own views on reviews and critics in general. I hate the idea that people turn to critics to decide whether or not they are going see a certain movie or read a certain book. Or even what games are good and which ones we shouldn’t waste our money on. It makes us sheep because we’re looking to accept the opinions of others as what we should think. We are all able to form our own opinions as to how we feel about these things, but like obedient sheep we would much rather follow the majority or listen to those who are paid to tell us what to think. And that’s exactly what big name movie, book, and game critics are. People paid to give their opinion and tell us what to spend our money and leisure time on. How many good books, movies, or games get panned by the critics and get to see the success they deserve?

Well, the simple fact is that we will never know because it’s up to each of us to our own opinions as to what is worth it for us, but sadly this is not the case. We would much rather let others tell us what to think. I can’t even mention the number of times I’ve heard someone ask if a certain book is worth the time for them to read it and they get dozens of people telling them it should be burned because it’s just that bad. So naturally they say “ok, I won’t read it.” But I have seen at least ten cases where people say they ended up reading the book they were told wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on only to discover that they actually enjoyed they book.

And the same goes for movies. I really hate looking at users reviews on a major search engine to find folks panning a movie that they claim to have seen with their only reason being because the critics said it was terrible. That tells me right there that either these people never went to see the movie or else they were already biased against the movie thanks to the critics and were not going to bother to form their own opinion no matter what. Which typically means these folks don’t actually bother to write a real review but just a paragraph, if even that, about the movie being so bad that they lost so many minutes of their life because of it, minutes they’ll never get back. Well, why was it bad? What was it about? These are the kind of things I’d expect to see but they don’t even bother to do that. Even worse is when they say a movie is a must see because the critics endorse it and then never answer the questions of why it’s good or what it is about.

So in addition to focusing more on adding new links, this view of reviews made me largely decide to abandon the idea of a reviews section. But on November 11, 2006 this view towards the need for such a section changed. While my views on reviews haven‘t changed, I have occasionally posted my opinions elsewhere on the web for others to see. In doing a review of a recent movie on that date, I found I wanted to repost my review right here on my site. I‘m not looking to influence anyone to take my opinion, so I‘m not going to post any kind of rating system. Rather, I‘m just going to let folks know what my opinion is. It may not be updated often, but at least their here for people to see.

As I have said for years concerning whether something is worth it or not, don‘t listen to me or anyone else and take the opinion given to you as gospel. If you think you would find it interesting and enjoyable, then by all means read it, watch it, or play it and form your own opinion about it. You may agree with folks or find you disagree with them, but at least you’ll have formed your own opinion rather than let others tell you what that opinion on the subject should be.