Write a Review Competition

Review Competition: Win £30 worth of steam games!*

Have an opinion on a game you played recently? Consider yourself a decent writer? Fancy a new game for free?

Between now and October 31st every review we receive and choose to publish gives the reviewer a chance at the prize. After October 31st, 1 lucky reviewer out of the received reviews will be chosen to receive up to £30 worth of games of their choice on Steam.

Winner

We’ve received a fair few strong entries, but one of them stood head and shoulders above the rest and was quickly adopted as a favourite in our team. We do of course speak of the Mafia II review written by Dree. We loved her writing style so much that Dree has become a regular contributor to the site – so you can look forward to more articles written by her in the future!

This is the selection of games Dree has chosen as her prize:

• The Polynomial – Space of the music
• DogFighter
• Blade Kitten
• Plants vs. Zombies GOTY edition
• VVVVVV
• Zombie Driver
• Dead Space

Once again, congratulations Dree – we hope you enjoy the games and look forward to hearing what you thought of them!

How to Enter

Note: This competition is now over and entries are no longer accepted. If you wish to join our team of writers and contribute to the site, please contact us.

To enter the competition, all you need to do is write a review on any game that is not already reviewed on our site between now and October 31st 2010. Each review we receive that meets our guidelines counts as a chance to win this cool prize!

Reviews should be send to myreview (at) manapool.co.uk and your e-mail should contain the following:

• E-mail Subject: Review Competition Entry <GAME NAME>
• Your Nickname and VALID e-mail address should be stated EXPLICITLY to ensure we can contact you.
• Title of the Game + Genre(s)
• A rating between 1-10 on: (Average of the 5 ratings forms the total score)
  • Graphics
  • Audio
  • UI & Controls
  • Gameplay
  • Value / Replay
• The review itself, at least covering the areas above in one form or another. We leave the structure up to your creativity.
• As a guideline, try to exceed at least 800 words. Shorter reviews would have to be exceptional to pass this guideline!
• 640×240 JPG ‘banner’ image for the review. (See our reviews and you will know what we mean!)
• Any other images that you feel would contribute to the article – and a caption of your choice for each image. These should be screen shots that you’ve made yourself. Bear in mind that they get cropped to thumbnails in the article so there is very little point sending screen shots at 1920*1200 resolution.

NOTE – You don’t need to send us a list of your preferred games at this point, as prices can change over time. We will contact the winner directly after October 31st and ensure we are crystal clear on their desired games. The winner will be publically announced afterwards, which we estimate will take up to a week.

Competition Rules

• All received reviews become Copyright © by Mana Pool.
• Reviews can be posted under the Nickname you provided, or the user “Guest Author” if you prefer.  If we either receive multiple reviews that pass the guidelines from 1 person, or you specifically request to become a regular contributor – we can provide you with a login to an account where you can contribute content directly. (We welcome talented individuals that wish to share their gaming opinions!)
• We reserve the right to make corrections or alterations to reviews in grammar or structure if we feel this would improve the quality of the review.
• Received reviews that fail to follow our guidelines are disqualified from winning the prize.
• The winner will be contacted directly – and announced on Twitter and Facebook once we’ve established contact and know which games you choose.

*Winner gets to pick games up to a total value of £30 maximum. To gift the games to you, a steam account is required. You can however easily register one at that time if you don’t already have one – so no steam account is required prior to winning. If your country of origin is excluded from steam or other issues arise, another arrangement can be made to the value of £30, bearing in mind that postage costs might reduce the total value of the prize in such a case.