This is exactly the kind of perspective I was hoping someone would add here. Thank you!

I'm a journalist, not a gamer, so I don't review games in the Pop Culture Shorts column and write about them mainly when both a game and something I've read about it seem unusually interesting or newsworthy (e.g., last summer I wrote about a major publisher that designed a playable online game as a promotion for a novel about game designers, something I'd never seen a publisher do). It's so helpful to me--and, I'm sure, to others--to have comments from someone who can speak from hands-on experience.