All right, who asked that? Give them a medal - it's just the question we wanted to answer!

Oh. Right.

Anyway, what GameLemon is about is a couple of things:

        First off, it's about an extra dose of fun. When you are on our site, we want you to smile a little more often, scratch yourself in your favorite places, and even snort occasionally at how silly we allow ourselves to be. Hell, even an outright giggle wouldn't hurt once in a while. We hear it's good for your health, that smiling/scratching/snorting/giggling thing. Not that this is webMd, or anything.

        Of course, we are about a few other things too - like NON-BORING writing (everyone sick of "formula" approach to game reviewing, raise your hand!), about occasional excursions into the old brain on the overall state of the game industry (see that toxic dump of a section we call the "Philosopher's Corner"), and a few other things a little to wacky for those other sites that take themselves too seriously.

        We are also about ridiculously obscure references, puns, parodies, sarcasm, off-topic rants, and beer stains.

        But overall - we just want you to have a blast while you are searching for yet another good reason to loose precious sleep (a.k.a your next game) - or just wasting valuable work time (which is highly encouraged, as long as you don't tell your boss we said so). Ok? Fantastic.

What OTHER funny game review sites?

Exactly.

Hey - we do what we do, all right?

        Seriously, no, we do not get paid by game companies, in fact, we don't get paid crap for any of this stuff at all. We do it cuz we love games, play games, and actually spend time (shriek!) thinking about games, and what games are, and what games used to be, and what games might be tomorrow, and about the game industry in general, and about how some things about it are good and some stink to high heaven so much that they could well be a hereto undocumented cause of acid rain.

        We also think a lot of popular game reviews are not worth the screen glow they are printed on, cause they spend too much time talking in very generic, cliche terms that really say very little about the game at all, and give about as much useful information as you can read on the back of the damn box in the first place. And they are written by people who much prefer to spend time yapping about how they hung out with this or that game designer (asking him a total of ZERO original questions) than talk about what it's actually like to be playing the damn game. And they keep putting in f@#*$@#$ spoilers. And they are written by people who can't write for shit. And they are bad, bad game reviews.

        Believe it or not, we play'em straight, just like regular folk. We get them from GameFly (for which we pay!) and we play them evenings and nights like mortals. We play them until we finish them, or until they get too repetitive/boring/stupid/tiresome, which admittedly happens a lot more frequently. But in any case we play them for AT LEAST a few days (in the case of the really hard to stomach ones) and for as long as a few months in the case of the really good ones. And no, no god mode. No walkthroughs or cheat codes. We are pushing the peanut just like you, dammit.

        Yes, crazy it would seem. But we must admit (perhaps a subdued whisper would be most prudent here) - we actually respect your time. We live in the real world too, and know that you don't always have the time to read a full review. So we put a little extra work into our Quick Facts to help you quickly grasp the gist of the game without spending a lot of time. And don't worry, there are still a few jokes in there to get a semblance of a smile onto that work-beaten face of yours :)

        You should still read the reviews later if you can, though. They are fun to read. Really.

        Well, you know, coming up with names isn't easy :) We wanted a name that clearly showed that we are all about games, would make a good url, have an original sound and a fresh, zesty, lemony flavor to it. (Ok, so we may be reaching a little on that last one). In any case, GameLemon seemed to quite fit the bill, and after we tossed it around a bit, it stuck like gum on a hot sidewalk, and the rest is history.

        The grading system works kind of the same way it did in high school, except it's a 10 point scale instead of a 100. So 6.5 is "passing", anything below that is a waste of your time, anything from 8.0 and up is a solid game, and games above a 9.0 are a top-notch alternative to doing something productive.

        Another thing probably worth mentioning is that we rate based on absolute game quality. Wait, you say, doesn't everyone? Not quite. A lot of people tend to also throw in comparative factors like "how much did it improve on it's predecessor" and "are the graphics better than X or Y". While that's a valid approach, that's not the way we look at things. To us, the ultimate and only question REALLY worth answering from a consumer point of view is "how much fun is it to play this game?" There are plenty of other perspectives from which it may be interesting to examine cross-game comparisons, but that isn't what we are trying to do here (not in the reviews section, anyway). A game either looks good or it doesn't, and we don't rate it as compared to Game A or game B - the only thing we compare it against is what one might call "reasonable gamer expectations". At the end of the day we aren't doing competitive market analysis for game companies - we are reviewing games for people who just want to get a realistic sense of whether or not they would like to pop a particular game disk into their PS2 for an evening or ten, and that's the point of view we try to stick to.

        We don't mean to box ourselves into any corners, and generally try to make sure that GameLemon's content is interesting to a wide variety of readers. However, a lot of our writing and presentation is sort of naturally targeted towards the 20- and 30-somethings - we fall into that group ourselves and so that's where our view of the world tends to fit best.

        All right, all right, it's just me, ma! Jeez!