Asbeau: link would be helpful ;-)

Gremmi: If this feedback comes off as overly critical, I apologise. But the only way to improvement is via critical feedback, so you shouldn't be put off by it. Read it, take it on board, then either follow it or ignore it completely, either way is fine with me. But you asked for my thoughts, so now they're formulating.

Plus, I'm currently involved with feedback and critical analysis at university level, so I'm heavily into the zone of proper criticism. So this is actually good exercise for me, even if it may be entirely redundant.

Disclaimer - I don't know you. I don't know how old you are, what level of education you have, who you're aiming this at, what your purpose is, so it's very hard to target my feedback. As such, I'll just do a blanket targeting presuming early-to-mid-20s (assumed because of the timing with Unreal Tournament - released in 99, with a DC port in 2001, tied in with the mention of ninth grade = reasonable to assume that was around 10 years ago), college level education, and hoping to get a wider recognition of your writing and possibly present it as a portfolio for entry into the professional world (this is the goal for most blog writers, and you allude to it in your 'about me'), though that assumption is at the risk of being redundant in some areas, overly detailed in others.

So in other words, if this is just random opinions you're springing up for only friends and family to read, you can more or less disregard this post entirely.

First immediate thought: Too anecdotey and too vague. The very best reviewers, essayists, writers, can tie in personal experience to opinions and facts. The UT post, to its credit tries to do that. But it has major issues. It's too overwhelming at first, too much personal information and irrelevant detail. Two medium-sized paragraphs that ultimately just say 'I couldn't get on with the console controls. This was made for PC.' Condense that right down, there's far too much extraneous detail. People don't need to know the specifics of the Dreamcast controller or the specifics of how you obtained it. The idea of the post, as far as I gathered it, was to talk about how the UT mods distracted you from writing it in the first place - but this gets mostly a footnote at the bottom. Two mods, barely explained. It comes off like you were still too distracted to write properly about them, and it's quite off-putting. It needs heavy reduction in some parts, heavy expansion in others.

Second thought: The language isn't great. There are some sloppy grammatical and punctuation issues, but those are easily fixable. What isn't easily fixable are parts of the flow that come off as illogical:

"Despite the controls; I kept playing because it was fun."
"The controls were still a problem however and because of it I stopped playing."

These two sentences are entirely at odds with each other, even in context. Saying you kept playing in spite of the controls, then later saying you stopped playing because of the controls is a logic bomb.

Third thought: Relevance. It's all very well talking about UT. There's a lot that could be said about it, a lot of interesting discussion points that can be made. But fundamentally, it's still a ten year old game that's no longer of interest to most people. Retrospectives can be enjoyable to read, but only if there's some relevant reasoning to it for the reader. 'I like UT so I'm writing about UT' isn't a reason. If they were developing a new UT game, then there'd be a very valid reason for a retrospective (one which you could detail in the piece), but as it is, there's nothing to tie it in with a wider picture for the audience. It's just a sudden thought, hanging in space.

Again, all this feedback is made of assumptions I have made, and if any of those assumptions are off, this feedback may be somewhat (or entirely) redundant. But if I'm on target with my assumptions (that is, that you're hoping this will be some sort of portfolio to enter into professional writing of some capacity), then I hope my meager and brief words will offer some direction to you. Good luck.