Good evening you are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host Rob Zakene.

With me, once again, is 3MA founder and Devolve PR man, Troy Goodfellow. Troy, welcome back to the show. Always happy to come back home. We also have a special guest with us tonight. Ars Technica Games editor, Ben Kacharra. Ben, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me. So tonight we're going to be discussing game reviewers, our process

and what we consider to be our obligations when reviewing a game. Ben, you actually brought

this topic to mind a couple weeks ago when you filed your review of Alice Madness Returns. Would

you explain how you handled that one and the questions it raised? Sure. I mean, basically I was just, I was reviewing the game,

and I realized really quickly that the pacing was just absolutely terrible on it.

It was just this utter grind, and it became this soulless thing for me to continue to play it.

And I put it on the back burner through E3,

and I came back from my E3 trip, and I realized that

the review code was still on my desk, like this dead weight, and I was just dreading going back

to it.

And I had already played the majority of the game.

And I realized that if I wasn't being paid to play this and review it, I would have

put it away a long time ago.

So I just decided screw it.

I'm sticking a fork in it.

I'm giving my thoughts and I'm going to tell all the readers why I quit playing.

It just got to the point where even if there was something amazing in the final act,

I just didn't think it was worth it for me to grind through and play it.

And that's something I talked about on Twitter extensively to get people's thoughts.

I disclosed it in the review.

I gave people an idea about where I stopped.

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