Chris "BeachAV8R" Frishmuth video reviews X-Plane 9
http://simhq.com/_air13/air_414a.html

I do kind of miss a written review... Mostly because I tend to read most of my reviews at work, where watching YouTube movie with sound is not that great of an option.... Guess that is about the only thing I can give an opinion about right now...

There is no written review to miss, because all was written about version 8 a while ago! Read that one, it is very comprehensive. Thx a lot for the update and vids Beach! A great read, and I'll get myself the new version soon.

I really enjoyed the videos. Nicely put together Chris! I sure wish my rig could run it at those settings .

Guess I'll have to be the dissenter, here: I have no interest at all in video reviews.

One reason is that mentioned above by grazi. But of more importance is the fact that while an amateur can reasonably expect to write a polished, professional quality review with a little dedication and practice, the same does not hold true of video -- and especially of voice overs. Professional voice work is a very well-defined profession requiring specific talent, years of training, and a great deal of practice. No offense to the author, but having the average Joe who sounds like the the dude in the office next door drone on about some video game is not in the least interesting to me. Stick to written reviews.

Thanks for the input guys. We are trying to find the balancing point because we've heard time and again that 8 page reviews (or 30 page reviews in the case of X-Plane and FSX) aren't holding our audience. I tend to agree that I'm not a huge fan of video only content because I'm not one of these "YouTube" fans... That said, I think a morphing of the two might be the best approach. For instance, in this EECH AH-64 cockpit article we wrote a couple years ago we have a fairly concise 3-page article and at the end we have 14 short (:30 second) clips of in-game features we discussed in the article:

http://www.simhq.com/_air10/air_313a.html

The most important thing is input from the community. We need to know what you guys think (the good, the bad, and the ugly). We are trying to evolve with the rest of the world but we need some guidance from our members.



BeachAV8R <- The Droning Average Joe

It's a good job that you know more than the 'Average Joe' about the subject matter Chris . I thought the narration was pretty good actually. Seeing everything in motion really brings the sim to life in a way that static screenshots can't. I'm bandwidth limited here so I guess having all reviews in video format would mean that I would have to just pick out those I want to watch, but I tend to do that anyway even with written reviews (I am not all that into racing sims for example and rarely read those reviews).

Not a bad review. Like some of the other guys, I also missed the text to read, but then the information delivered in the video was okay. In terms of balance, I think that the balance between video and text in the G940 review was much closer to I would personally prefer - the main body is text, but interspersed with short (15-30 second) video clips to demo some of the points highlighted in the text. The only thing is that doing stuff in this way probably leads to content overlap, which means that you end up doing more work. *shrugs*

Having attended some conferences, I feel for you when it comes to... public speaking. The only advice I can give on that respect is to be clear at all times, and exaggerate changes in tone; most of the subtleties you get in face-to-face chatter is lost in recording.