Slashdot Mirror

Mario Kart: Double Dash! is a fairly fun single player game. However, get your buddies to come over and play co-op or battle mode and it's an instant party game. Tons o' fun, IMNSHO.

I do see your point about 3D hysteria a few years back, but I would say that Mario 64 is an extremely bad example as many people in the game industry rate Mario 64 as one of the top games of all time.

Metacritics has Knights of the Old Republic for the PC an 89, while gamerankings has it at 92.5. Note that the reader score at gamerankings is an 89. The PC version of Prince of Persia gets a 92 at gamerankings while metacritic gives it an 88. The gameranking reader score is an 86.

Both times the difference is about half a review point (on a ten point scale) which is pretty significant. And both times the high metascore goes to gamerankings. And both times the reader score is closer to Metacritic's metascore.

Metacritics has Knights of the Old Republic for the PC an 89, while gamerankings has it at 92.5. Note that the reader score at gamerankings is an 89. The PC version of Prince of Persia gets a 92 at gamerankings while metacritic gives it an 88. The gameranking reader score is an 86.

Both times the difference is about half a review point (on a ten point scale) which is pretty significant. And both times the high metascore goes to gamerankings. And both times the reader score is closer to Metacritic's metascore.

That anyone still cares.
That game was downright horrid in so many ways. I'd rattle off why buts thats been done many times before.

And yet it receives a 79.1% rating (an average of the review scores from 36 different sources) at gamerankings.com, only 0.3% less than Metal Arms (which I've read a lot of good things about), 1.2% better than True Crime (a game that has been selling well and has a sequel already in the works)...In fact, it's 8.8% better than State of Emergency for the PS2.

Of course, never having played a game doesn't tend to stop people from insulting it, just as it never stops pre-release hype.

Oh come on, everyone knows that Britney's Dance Beat has the best soundtrack ever!!!</sarcasm>

if you haven't got one of the recent Gauntlet Updates, they're worth a look too.

If by "sucks" you mean an overall 85% rating, then I guess you're right. I'll concede that the PC version needed some work, but I think sucks is too strong a word. Add in whatever you mean by "improvements" and the co-op to Halo PC logistically means re-writing the entire code for the single player campaign. Essentially, you're looking at at least another year in development, which is to say another year of PC fanboys whining. And I would venture to say that nearly every single one of those reviewers would completely disagree with your assertion that Unreal 2 kicks Halo's ass. My guess is that you just haven't played Halo. And I also guess that means that by Unreal 2 kicking Halo's ass, you mean getting a %78 percent at gamerankings. Whatevs.

A note. I beta tested Halo for the PC and had somewhat of an inside look at the process, and it was a bitch to port. People have been whining about how their PC is soooo much better than Xboxes since before the Xbox even came out, but the fact of the matter is that the GPU within the Xbox is so well tailored to pixel shaders that it made porting the game from the Xbox to PC extremely difficult. Bungie did a great job with Halo, but they did do it rather quickly, so unraveling all the Xbox code for PC was a monumentous task for gearbox that they pulled off brilliantly. I wish you could see how far they came from the original alphas.

Game Ranking has ever removed the N-Gage from the frontpage listing of platforms, that they had a few week ago.

Capcom's Cannon Spike is one of my favorites. It's a very simple and short action game, but it's great when you only have 10 or 15 minutes and just feel like blowing some stuff up. Also, Mega Man is a secret character. It's kind of like a shoot-em-up version of Power Stone: quick, frantic, and surprisingly entertaining.

So, you're honestly trying to say that Resident Evil Zero isn't a sequel to Resident Evil? Dude. C'mon. Episode I, as a movie, is a sequel to Star Wars, regardless of where it falls in the chronology of the story. Same with Zero. And Zero didn't sell up to expectations and even at a bargain price, 2 and 3 barely sold at all, nor did Eternal Darkness.

But regardless...

Check it out... from prawth.net:
"Recently, the remake of Resident Evil was released in Japan and the USA for the GameCube. While it is no secret that Resident Evil (knows as Biohazard in Japan) has a huge following, sales of the game in Japan were just north of dismal. While sales are looking a little better in the USA, this probably won't be enough to stay Capcom's hand."

Want more?
From GameRankings:
"As reported by Bloomberg Japan, Capcom's losses for the 2002 fiscal year were even worse than anticipated... The profit plunge was attributed in part to the middling sales of three of Capcom's most anticipated games: Resident Evil 0 for Gamecube, which sold 1.12 million copies against a projected 1.42 million..."

Look, all I'm saying is that the GameCube is primarily marketed toward children. Doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the system or with you because you prefer it. But there's a reason that there are few fighting, driving and RPG-type games and lots of platformers, kids games and Mario-themed games -- adults tend to prefer the former group, while kids tend to prefer the latter and Nintendo plays to that base. Good for them.

Rotten Tomatoes is handy for deciding what movies to see, and I often consult Game Rankings when trying to decide on games, as well.

Oh, and I find the GTA:VC reviewers logic hilariously absurd. That entire passage is hard to follow, but if I'm right in thinking he's trying to say that playing Vice City, like fighting wars, is giving into man's basest desire for violence... I'd have to vocally disagree! It could be easily argued that a game like VC is another manifestation of man's desire to find an acceptable and safe outlet for violence, whereas fighting wars is very unsafe and often unnacceptable for those involved.

Reviewers shouldn't confuse their roles with critics. Rotten Tomatoes is a review site, and so that person's attempt at analysis seems out of place, although I guess this underscores the fact that there really is no acceptable forum for video game criticism yet.

While I'm at a loss to explain just why GameRankings users score the way they do, it is interesting that their opinions of games are consistently lower than the average of all game review sites recorded on GameRankings. Furthermore, the Xbox is by no means alone in this respect; GameRankings users are similarly critical of the top twenty games on the PS2 and GameCube.

It should be noted that the user scores from GameRankings are going to be well below the average for all platforms. As as avid user on GR, I know how fanbois attempt to affect the user rating on games on the systems they do not like with the user voting system (and, conversely, attempt to raise the user rating on even shit games on their system of choice by voting "10" on every game). Many of the votes are from second and third accounts used just to vote against games on the other systems and for games on their system of choice.

For example, I'll show the top game from each system and how many total votes vs how many of those votes were for a "1".

GameCube:

Metroid Prime (User Avg. 8.3)
Total votes: 1969
Total "1" votes: 241 (12.2% of total votes)

PS2:

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (User Avg. 8.6)
Total votes: 1573
Total "1" votes: 73 (4.6% of total votes)

Xbox:

Halo (User Avg. 8.7)
Total votes: 2350
Total "1" votes: 186 (7.9% of total votes)

Notice that the PS2 game actually had the lowest percentage of "1" votes (4.6%), while the GC game had the highest (12.2%), even though the GC game had less total votes than the Xbox game it still had a higher percentage of "1" votes. This trend seems to fluxuate between the GC and the Xbox for the highest "1" vote percentage on games.

One of the things those of us on the message board wanted to do was only make votes count towards user average if a review went with it, in order to keep fanboi votes to a minimum effect on the total user average....but that never happened. And now that Scott sold GR to C|Net, we doubt it will ever happen.

Thursdae

I'm just wondering since your opinion seems to be somewhat askew from everyone else's.

If you want the very best example of this, you need not look any further than SCEI's Ico, a brilliantly designed game that clocks in well under 10 hours (most complete it in 6-8 hours of game time in their first run through). While most review outfits gave Ico very high scores, the one stand out complaint that the non-100% scores were that the game was "too short."

While it seems plausable that game reviewers would have oodles of time on their hands to play games for hours and hours, most regular gamers have around 5-20 hours a week to devote to games, in a world that is constantly releasing more and more "must-have" games into our hands. With that rationale, why would one deny themselves an amazing gaming experience that would allow you to prospectively beat a game in enough time that you can actually remember the beginning of the game enough for the whole thing to make sense in the end, let alone beat it at all?

Superman Has the Nintendo quality seal, heck for that matter so does Aquaman, so does charlie's Angels for Game Cube and nfl blitz 2003 for gameboy advance.

So Here's how much a nintendo quality seal Matters

is GameRankings.com which has a lot of MP2 reviews here

In all honesty, you sound like you care and that you know what you're talking about. However, your examples aren't really on the money. Soul Calibur for the Dreamcast was extremely ahead of it's time. In 1999, it's detailed character models and fluid animations were like nothing else on the market. Also, the gameplay is much deeper than Street Fighter's.

What's wrong with 9 console games appearing on the list? Why is it so hard to believe that a system designed from the ground up for gaming would have better games?

Anyway, I'm not really asking you to respond to these arguments. What I really want to know is, what games do you play?
What games have you played that allow you to dismiss that list so easily? What am I missing?

Viewtiful Joe - $40
A 2D action platformer. Showcases the true capabilities of the system. There's Nothing else like it.

F-Zero GX - $50
Easily the fastest racing game of all time. Really.

Soul Caliber 2 - $50
Fight as Link!

Metroid Prime - $30
Third Best game of all time.

Pikmin - $20
Innovative Real-time strategy. Shigeru Miyamoto's first Gamecube game.

Super Smash Brothers Melee - $30
Excellent 4-player nostalgia-fest.

So, that's why according to GameRankins, the Xbox has 112 games that are averaged at below a 70%? The Xbox arguably has the best hardware of all of the consoles. Sure there's 175 with rankings of over 70%, but almost half the games are 69% or under.

The GameCube has 127 games over 70%, and 103 with below 70%, and the PS2 has over 200 with below 70% and over 200 with above a 70%.

Looks like the good games don't seem to follow the hardware, since all the consoles, from the weakest in technology (PS2), to the strongest in technology (Xbox), seem to have very similar ratios to good to crap games.

The PS2 survived an early dearth of good games because it was good hardware released at the right time. The Dreamcast wasn't bad hardware, but it wasn't good enough for its time - thus we see mediocre game support and poor sales.

The only two things the PS2 really had over the Dreamcast was the ability to play DVD movies/use DVD ROMs for game storage, and more polygonal pushing power. The Dreamcast had full screen anti-ailiasing in most games, better texturing abilities, generally better load times, and a lot of good games on it when the PS2 was released.

The PS2 got to where it got, early on, due to hype, hype, hype. Sony hyped it up as the Second Coming of video games, and it still hasn't lived up to that claim. Yes, there are a lot of good games on it, now, but in reality, the hype made it more popular than the DC, because overall the DC was the better machine.

Thursdae
Posting anonymously due to modding already.

To make matters worse, Gamerankings shows that the games for N-Gage are simply disastrous. Who would want to buy a $300 console when the games suck so much?

~$6, 5 days, and the ones I've seen have had rows of games. If you decided to buy, yes it would add to the total, but it works out well enough if you go for older titles and buy used.

To prevent a tangent, I try to base my spending on the entertainment factor. A movie lasts 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours, and costs $5 - $15 depending on timing and snacks, or $10 - $20 for the DVD. I generally equate this to $10 for 90 minutes. If a $50 game gives me 10 hours of interactive entertainment, I generally consider it worth it. It's the perception of dropping so much money up front that makes the price seem unbalanced, when in reality it isn't.

(Also keep in mind a major sporting event or concert lasts maybe 3 hours and can vary wildly from $10 to $150 or more. Compared to this, games that are playable are a huge bargain.)

Oh, and another review page to check is Game Rankings. They try and collect various reviews together for games and their average ratings. The reviews themselves are rated Game Rankings. I've found these useful because one or another may point out just the detail that makes or breaks the deal.

There are not vastly more titles available for the XBox than for the GameCube. According to Game Rankings there are 429 GameCube titles, and 591 XBox titles. (There are 1005 PS2 titles).

Wait, so even though Hudson had their own fairly successful console, they have no IP like Master Higgins, Bonk, ZONK, Bomberman or any other Turbo-Grafx 16 game they made? What about the Bomber Jetterz/Generations character? Max? Birdy? The Hige-hige Dan?

And I'm obliged to mention Hudson is the group behind both Sonic Shuffle AND Mario Party. They know how to make a fun game.

Also check out a game on the GBA by the name of Konami's Krazy Racers featuring such hits as Ninja from MGS, Mystical Ninja Goemon, Dracula and many others. Looks like you stopped purchasing games when THE GBA LAUNCHED IN JAPAN OVER TWO YEARS AGO.

Taken from the top 100 GameCube Games on gamerankings.com:

Super Monkey Ball (1 + 2, and soon 3)

Resident Evil 1 (If you haven't played the original)

Ikaruga

Burnout 2

Star Wars Rogue Leader

Skies of Arcadia Legends

Phantasy Star Online Episodes 1, 2, 3 (only 3 is currently exclusive)

Bomberman Generations

Beach Spikers

Sonic Mega Collection

Lost Kingdoms 1+2

Cubivore (3rd party published in North America)

Godzilla: DAMM (was exclusive for a time)

Granted, some of these are borderline, but if you like carefully at the Xbox lineup, you won't find many more exclusive 3rd party titles.

The real problem is that while Microsoft has billions of dollars to cut exclusive deals with publishers to improve the visibility of those 3rd part games, Nintendo actually has to make a profit on their business. Nintendo can't afford to prop up every single 3rd party game that comes out, but they try with the limited budget they have. (The new demo discs are a good step in the right direction)

But yeah, Acclaim generally sucks with its games. Except Burnout. That game is a blast.

GameFaqs has a really great selection of FAQs but its problem is that it does not 'own' any of the FAQ submissions. GameRankings mainly owns a database filled with statistics and although not easily replicated there are alternatives.

I prefer GameTab to GameRankings (and to a lesser extent MetaCritic.com). GameTab is not owned by a large company like CNet and has a much nicer design and set of user features. It also uses quotes in its review summary pages and quotes help me decide much more easily than raw numbers whether or not a game will be to my liking. So for now on I'll be supporting GameTab (but I'm sure I'll go to GameFaqs because as of yet there is no nice alternative to that site.)

I think sites like these are the future of info dissemination. I don't have the time to check out the separate game review and movie review watering holes. I have my local paper bookmarked, and BBC News, but all other news comes from Google. So on down the list. These meta-sites save a buttload of time and research.

When I do my online shopping, I always look for customer ratings. Now, I don't have to. Instead of the opinions of fifty average joes, I have the opinions of fifty paid professionals. Now, before you come at me and say that those reviewers might be paid to say something good, I can say from experience that bought opinions aren't as prevalent as you think and least come without a slew of spelling and grammar mistakes.

It's the wave of the future, like it or not. ve3d.com is fast becoming the unofficial hub of gaming news, despite the fact that you could fit its in-house content in a thimble and their admins' lack of journalistic ability is exposed on a daily basis.

And honestly, how many of you have /. as your primary info source? It's great, don't get me wrong, but it's another example of a meta-site...one where many people don't even take the time to RTFA. Content is not king once you realize the threshold of human consumption. You just end up bowling people over with sound and fury. I don't have a cell phone, pager, or use IM, but I'm still overloaded by email. I have my primary email, my site registration email, my new primary since the old primary's shot through with spam, my work email, a website email, an alias for that website email...Then there are stock tickers, weather reports, sports scores, online banking...

I think, however, that the worst element is spam. Not just unsolicited email, but telemarketing calls, junk mail, door-to-door, etc. Then there are TV commercials, radio commercials, print media commercials. It's advertising that kills. Something like 80% of all email in the US is unsolicited. How many dinners have you completed without a sales call? How many days have you gone without another credit card in the mail? Yadda, yadda, yadda, and I wonder how many even read this far.

another great compendium of game reviews is gamerankings.com. website and magazine reviews for almost all modern games are included, with lotsa nice features for comparing titles, genres, etc.

IHMO, I prefer just going to this one page, Enter The Matrix Reviews. I Really like Game Rankings because it lists links to various reviews by differant sites.

For those who are too lazy to click the link, the average rating is 81% from 35 articles.

I always head to GameRankings.com to check for reviews of games. They even give you an average of all the review scores collected.

There still aren't many reviews, but at least there are a few. See Enter the Matrix reviews:
PC
XBOX
PS2
GC

I always head to GameRankings.com to check for reviews of games. They even give you an average of all the review scores collected.

There still aren't many reviews, but at least there are a few. See Enter the Matrix reviews:
PC
XBOX
PS2
GC

I always head to GameRankings.com to check for reviews of games. They even give you an average of all the review scores collected.

There still aren't many reviews, but at least there are a few. See Enter the Matrix reviews:
PC
XBOX
PS2
GC

I always head to GameRankings.com to check for reviews of games. They even give you an average of all the review scores collected.

There still aren't many reviews, but at least there are a few. See Enter the Matrix reviews:
PC
XBOX
PS2
GC

The general gaming community would tend to disagree with you. This site which basically ranks games based on reviews from users and various gaming sources has Zelda: Ocarina of Time ranked as the #1 game out of over 6000. Also, another Nintendo Exclusive game Metroid Prime comes in at #2 and Zelda: The Wind Waker comes in at #7. So I would say that Nintendo games are that good.

What, precisely, makes Metroid Prime innovative, apart from the control scheme?

Don't take this as a critique of MP, as it's one of the most enjoyable games I've played in a long time (excepting Wind Waker, which currently has a stranglehold on my precious gaming hours), but I'd say MP is hardly the first adventure/expoloration game born out in full 3D (Thief and Deus Ex come to mind as prior art). I'll grant you that the platforming/morph ball elements are unique, but I don't think they qualify as innovative.

As for FPS innovation: Planetside. Want arcade-y action mixed with your FPS? The upcoming Tron 2.0 looks very interesting. Battlefield 1942 is a recent example of getting a team-based FPS truly, terribly almost right.

A Tale In the Desert is a current example of a game that defies current MMO conventions and instead prides itself on being a virtual community simulation.

Enigma: Rising Tide is wicked fun, as is Moonbase Commander.

How about Mafia? Sure, it's seen ports to the consoles too, but it started on the PC. Or Freelancer?

So speak not to me of "innovation". It abounds on the PC platform.

What, precisely, makes Metroid Prime innovative, apart from the control scheme?

Don't take this as a critique of MP, as it's one of the most enjoyable games I've played in a long time (excepting Wind Waker, which currently has a stranglehold on my precious gaming hours), but I'd say MP is hardly the first adventure/expoloration game born out in full 3D (Thief and Deus Ex come to mind as prior art). I'll grant you that the platforming/morph ball elements are unique, but I don't think they qualify as innovative.

As for FPS innovation: Planetside. Want arcade-y action mixed with your FPS? The upcoming Tron 2.0 looks very interesting. Battlefield 1942 is a recent example of getting a team-based FPS truly, terribly almost right.

A Tale In the Desert is a current example of a game that defies current MMO conventions and instead prides itself on being a virtual community simulation.

Enigma: Rising Tide is wicked fun, as is Moonbase Commander.

How about Mafia? Sure, it's seen ports to the consoles too, but it started on the PC. Or Freelancer?

So speak not to me of "innovation". It abounds on the PC platform.

For the original question: the poster may wish to look at Game Rankings has a way to find out what the concensus ratings on games are, plus you can restrict the genre pretty well.

I thought Metroid Prime (GCN) did a great job of an 'alternate' FPS style. For those of you who haven't played it, you just need to move your aiming reticle near something, and hold down a lock button and your aim stayed on it.

This forced much of the focus of the game to be on maneuvering your character and exploring the surroundings. as opposed to just shoot shoot shoot.

But if there is one company to keep the 2D spirit alive in a transition to 3D, it would be SNK.

It would be great to see a Metal Slug game 3D rendered but a side scroller; something along the lines of Klonoa 2 (PS2) or the upcoming Viewtiful Joe (GCN).

But if there is one company to keep the 2D spirit alive in a transition to 3D, it would be SNK.

It would be great to see a Metal Slug game 3D rendered but a side scroller; something along the lines of Klonoa 2 (PS2) or the upcoming Viewtiful Joe (GCN).

It isn't a news site, but GameRankings.com is a great way to find out what the highly rated games are. They compile a list of reviews of games for both consoles and PC and rank the games. They also provide links to the actual reviews. You can filter the rankings by game platform, game genre, and release date. Ever wanted to know what the best baseball game for the PS2 is? Now it's easy to find out which game has the best reviews, so you get a good start.

It isn't a news site, but GameRankings.com is a great way to find out what the highly rated games are. They compile a list of reviews of games for both consoles and PC and rank the games. They also provide links to the actual reviews. You can filter the rankings by game platform, game genre, and release date. Ever wanted to know what the best baseball game for the PS2 is? Now it's easy to find out which game has the best reviews, so you get a good start.

For editorial reviews, I head straight to Game Rankings or GameTab. They're great at showing all the editorials out there and averaging the scores. I usually find the averages are a more faithful indicator than the 100% fanboy review at the top of the pile.

Just my 2c.

Honestly, you should never just take one persons advice. Get a lay of the land first before you make a decision. That's why I love these sites:

www.rottentomatoes.com
www.gamerankings.com


The same can be said about news media. If you just get your perspective from CNN or FOX, then you're only learning one perspective.

...with a game called Majestic. Ron Dulin at Gamespot gave it a 6.7 and said "Majestic is a very passive experience, and as the novelty fades, so will your interest". The game faded after a couple of months because it just wasn't immersive enough, since you had to wait for phone calls or emails or faxes for the game to progress. It was also pretty linear and didn't take advantage of collaborative gaming. Maybe these new games can improve on that. I can imagine ARGs in which you join a government agency or revolutionary faction and work with other players on your side on different tasks set up by the game server, like collecting counterintelligence information on the internet and saboting the other team's networks and...umm, I think I let my imagination run wild there. Sorry.

This would be the expansion that received rather mediocre reviews, and was dropped to a closeout price of $10 at the local Frys within a couple/few months of release?

I didn't run into any of the bugs the original poster did during the relatively short time it held my interest, but I did observe the critical and Usenet community quickly cool on the game. The initial press was terrific, but the game itself got pretty tedious after the first couple of islands.

I loved the UI, and generally believe in Peter Molyneux's game designs, so I'm looking forward to B&W2. I do hope you guys are actually including a game this time around though.

That's why I cited an independent source for that pronouncement.

GameRanking's Top 10 Games

What's at #1? Go on, take a look. I dare you. You will also note that Majora's Mask doesn't even show up on the list, so I don't think you can support your argument that "most people consider Majora's Mask superior to Ocarina". Both journalists and users ranked Ocarina higher.

Dumbass.

Well, Ubi can make a god game from time to time. Splinter Cell has been getting good reviews. But yes, their track record is even worse that EAs.

This explains the differences, or at least starts too