Dear Blast Away the Game Review readers,

For the past five years, Blast Away the Game Review has continually strived to be the place you go for your gaming news, reviews, and exclusive editorials brought on by our team of talented writers. For the past few years, we’ve also received a few requests, ones from parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, and even those cousins you like to game with.

After long deliberation regarding the content we will cover in the upcoming years, outside of our normal gaming features, etc, we’ve also decided that it’s time to expand. Not just expand the size and amount of content we release on a daily basis, but what kind of content we will be expanding with. Today, we’ve decided that it’s time to include content for your children, your grandchildren, your nieces and nephews, your siblings, or even your cousins who may just enjoy games altogether.

In order to do this, we had to begin by evaluating what kind of content we would want to cover. Would it just be a simple answer for us to start covering children focused games? What about family fun night titles like Family Game Night or Lego titles? Sure, those are extremely easy alternatives, ones that may seem like an easy answer, but only in the short term. In order to help grow the “Children’s Corner,” we’ve decided to tackle this situation from two different angles. With this letter, I do plan on outlining how we plan on doing this and why it should be of interest to those of you with youngsters that game.

What caused this new and thought out approach?

Over the past few months, I’ve had a chance to spend a lot more time with my nephew than ever before. Over the course of these past few months, I’ve had a lot of time to consider what games I do play and don’t play during his visits. As someone who is a grown adult and inherently has opted to play adult themed titles, I’ve had to consider what games are okay for him, what games are not okay for him and ultimately make my choices around his time around on the weekends.

After enough time, I knew something was apparently off within the products we cover here at Blast Away the Game Review. Now that we’ve figured it out, we want to be able to help you, the loved ones of young gamers, find products more suitable for them and genuinely would benefit in their social development through the use of games. In order to do this, we’re not going to just go grab your average run of the mill game, ones motivated towards just movement and motion-based controls. Rather, we’re going to find ones that don’t just help them grow in that aspect.

 

We want to provide a definitive and evergrowing experience with games that will also help them to socialize with other people their age, to problem solve with their friends, relatives, and other gamers. We want to help you find games that will help them grow as a person and that you feel comfortable with them playing.

While we have reviewed several of these games, we want to expand and so we’ve worked together to find a few of our writers already on our team that will be helping to make this happen. Among these contributors and members of our team, you will see an increased flow of child-oriented games from Tyvon J. Hunter, Dave Dailey, and myself at this time. We will be working together to ensure our coverage for you, as parents, is viable and will offer the news and information you needed in order to help find gaming information or your kids. This starts today. I want you to be able to have the experiences I have had during my life and see the magic of what games has to offer.

As with my nephew and I, we play games that we have to work together when we play them. It’s a nice way for us to problem solve and for him to learn how to play the games he does. Because of this experience I’ve begun to have, I personally feel it’s time for us to begin doing the same for you. It’s time for us to offer you a way to know how you can best experience gaming with them and create the memories I have with my father and now my nephew.

Our approach to fixing what could fix a potential problem.

In order to fix this, we’ve opted to work with the video game publishers we have an established relationship with in order to ensure that we can cover these games. They will, hopefully, range from Lego titles to educational titles. Some requiring users to input letters and such (The Typing of the Dead for teens? Helps with typing responses through typing works in order to deal damage).  Some of them will hopefully be cooperative play titles such as Minecraft to more enjoyable titles such as Detective Pikachu.

While we do intend on making this happen sooner than later, we do want you to know not all problems such as this matter can be solved overnight. It will take some time, it will take us working directly with the game publishers behind child-friendly games, and ultimately, it will take some work on our end. I do hope you bare with us as we will attempt to work with the developers and publishers to the best of our ability. We’ll even be working on ways to suggest games already available for you and your young gamers to enjoy.

However, we do want you to know, we didn’t forget about the children at all, but rather, we’ve been trying to learn how to fix this long-term problem we’ve had under our belts. Now that we have an idea of doing this, we’re going to and we hope you are along for the ride. If you’re new to Blast Away the Game Review, we want to thank you and on behalf of all of us, thanks for understanding and we hope to see you join us on this new journey we will be taking.

Best,

Dustin Murphy,
President, Founder, and E.I.C. of Blast Away the Game Review