Part of the experiment was for it to be in the vein of tim rogerr’s stream of consciousness style, a style in which he often talks about other, seemingly unrelated things to get his point across. Since it was meant to be in that style, we both did it that way. I don’t know what Eric ultimately favors in his writing, but I like how reading tim rogers is more about the journey getting to the point than the point itself. Most people tend to feel that he needs a good editor. At least we kept it relatively succinct.

I tend to think we’re relatively distinct, but I’m sure the similarities are unavoidable. You’re right that Eric tended to adopt the personal story aspect much more than I did while I opted to adopt more of the stylistic oddities of tim’s style. I don’t think he’s ever had haiku in his writing, but he definitely writes without worrying about what a typical review should look like.

:hangs head in shame: Yes, you do tend to beat our asses in Tetris…

I’m glad you guys did this mini experiment. Both of you are excellent writers and I really love the fact that I can truly see your styles. If you guys did this again and didn’t tell me who wrote what, would I really be able to figure it out? Eric, you tend to vividly describe your memories and really cherish the nostalgia with your bros. You recapture everything very well. Dan, I really liked the haiku and summary in 4 lines. It was very creative.

In the end, one thing is for sure, I can totally kick both your asses in Tetris. Just no handicap ghosts! 

I think that my point was that the mechanics of Tetris were what made it so great, but I didn’t really feel the need to get too deep into it.

Thanks for the compliment! As for the haiku and the other strange parts of my review, I was just letting my mind wander and stop where it wanted. The first one was an obvious reference to the Tetris itself, but the next two were there to round it out (three!) and decrease in length.

The field of games that all three of us have played narrows even further when you throw Min into the mix. He’s definitely got the RPGs down, but some of the other stuff, like Civilization, he’s played, but only some iterations and he doesn’t harbor anywhere near the same degree of love that we do. It’s a pretty cool difference, from that perspective.

Min had a very different childhood and now even you and I have diverged (although that started around the time I hit HS)

I think both the items we both covered and the different things we focused on were revelatory. For example, Dan saw Tetris as something not work talking about gameplay-wise. Where I saw that as a main part of my review and my conception of the game.

But we both mentioned Pong, other games, the Internet, and playing together. I think Dan’s pretty darned talented at writing even better than me (and I consider myself to be pretty good) so I was very curious to see what he’d do. As I commented above, the idea of a Haiku was great. Definitely not something I would think of.

Another difference, although unsurprising if you know us both is how many more images I had in my review.