I’m sure most people reading this will be aware of The Well-Red Mage, a rather good site run by a rather cool chap of the same name. Over at TWRM, long-form reviews are the name of the game: in-depth discussions which recognise the need to go into qualitative discussion around a game’s merits, context, and wider importance as well as the natural desire to rate things quantitatively. This latter part is where TWRM’s approach really sets it apart from other review sites: games are rated on an ‘8-bit’ scale, drawing on relevant aspects and assigning grades from 1 to 10 (in a non-inflated way, so a 5 is average!), then finishing up with an aggregated grade that should accurately reflect as much as possible about the game’s strengths, weaknesses, and ultimately how good it is overall.

The site’s run by Red himself, but these days he’s got a roster of mages large enough to compete with a Suikoden game’s character roster. (I mean, not really. Not yet, anyway. But it’s a pretty big party of Mages of all classes and alignments!) If you check out the list of authors and scroll right down to the bottom, you’ll spot a chap called the Sometimes Vaguely Philosophical Mage whose interests might look vaguely familiar.

In case it wasn’t clear by now, that’s me. I’m the… y’know. It’s me. Yeahhhh.

So yes, I am very pleased to be able to say that I am now officially a Magely member of the party over at The Well-Red Mage, and my first post, a review of the rather smashing co-op chaos party Overcooked, is already up for your reading pleasure! It was a lot of fun to do, something I’ve not done in quite the same way before, and I hope to do more very soon. I feel very lucky to be part of a community like this one – I mean both the Mages and the blogging family in general, actually; I’ve been around at Overthinker Y for a year and a bit, and I’ve discovered some really awesome people putting out really awesome stuff, and made some actual proper friends and everything.

So, yes, I plan to be putting out more long-form reviews in future under my new Magely guise. I’ll also be doing my regular thing over here on Overthinker Y, but ‘proper reviews’ have never really been something I’ve done here, so basically it’ll be business as usual on me own site, I’ll just also be doing cool stuff over at The Well-Red Mage.

I must quickly say thank you to the Well-Red One himself for bringing me into the fold. I feel as if there have been a few people in particular who have given me a chance to get involved in bigger things while I’ve been here, and being able to now say that I’m a contributor to a site as reputable as his is something that makes me feel very… I’m not sure what the word is. Validated, I suppose, that I am in fact writing stuff that I don’t just enjoy but that at least a couple of other people think is half-decent too. It’s rather nice.

See you soon, pals.