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On Champions Of Norrath, Forgiving Game Reviewers?
Thanks to Curmudgeon Gamer for its article discussing technical problems with PS2 title Champions of Norrath: Realms of Everquest, and why official reviews of the game didn't seem to mention those problems. According to the writer, who had been "experiencing frustrating lock-ups and hangs which have caused the loss some of my progress through the game", it turns out that "two of the reviewers did see the game hang and didn't mention it in their reviews." However, he argues: "That's a judgment call, really, and since each saw the problem precisely once I can understand leaving it out of the review", and ends by suggesting that "the real burden rests not on the shoulders of the reviewers but on the creators of the game and, potentially, the console itself."
I am currently working my way through this game and have experienced the missing graphics bug several times. The bug caused most or all of the background textures to be completely black. The only thing you could see would be things that moved, like your character and the monsters you were fighting. The ground, walls, rocks, etc were completely invisible when I experience this. Although sometimes it would recover on it's own, most of the time I reloaded the game to correct.
It seemed to happen most frequently when I had been playing for about an hour and had changed areas, causing the game to load a different tileset.
1. Penny Arcade - so far, in the few years ive been reading it, I havent once notice them bowing to pressure from publishers to 'overlook' titles that suck. Theyre pretty much some guys who play games, and let people know what they think of them. Sure they dont review, and dont score things, but ive bought a good few titles on the strength of their word-of-mouth, and havent been dissapointed yet. 2. Edge magazine - if a game gets a 9/10, review its outstanding - something that pushes the genre and is near flawless. Most games get a 6 or so - and those are the ones that ARE average, not the crap games (which get a suitable low score). As has been mentioned before, there have only been 4 10/10s in its 10 year history - Zelda64, Mario64, Gran Turismo and Halo. Each one of those were excelent examples of their genres, and introduced new ideas that have since become stock benchmark for all later games to be held against
Yes, its a print magazine, and all that means is you maybe wait a couple of weeks for a real review, not some half written garbage on a late beta. Oh, and its Edge because it is, ok?
In the good old days, a problem encountered by one console gamer would likely be replicated by others. This, however, is not the case anymore. Dual-layer DVDs are known to cause problems on both consoles that facilitate them - X-Box and Playstation 2. Unfortunately, these problems don't affect everybody, so the reviewers could've just assumed that they were the unlucky ones.
This way you can quite easily get a pretty good idea of how a game is reviewed. I don't know how gametab calculates their scores tho.
Often reviewers are given versions that aren't completely finished. One of the reasons for this is that the print-magazines have deadlines very long time ahead of publishing (especially the case for PC games where the time from the game is finished and until it appears in shops are much shorter that for console games)
If a game has serious bugs like that it is disturbing that it made it's way through Sony's QA which is usually rather welldone, but of course I just took the tinfoil out of my hat so maybe the brainwashing orbital lasers made me ignore that it is a game made by Sony and published by Sony.
I also saw the lockups while playing it. The solution is simple. Eject the disc and put it back in and the game will continue to function without a problem. A real problem I found though that isn't talked about enough in reviews is the shoddy casting system. You have two buttons to cast spells with, and you HAVE to use those two buttons (There is no casting directly from the spell book) So if you have 2 defensive spells you want on as well as your two attack spells ( If you play a mage for example) You have to continually rebind the passive spells to Circle or Triangle, cast them, rebind the attack spells, and repeat 30 seconds later when the defensive spell runs out. The game requires you to push SIX times on the controller to cast one defensive spell. I wish they could somehow release a patch to allow casting from the spell book.
I would like to say that my copy crashed all the time. I would like to say that the graphics dropped all the time. Heck, I'd like to say that the disc just didn't work. Then I'd have a big reason to hate it.
But alas, it's just a bunch of penny-ante stuff that adds up and makes CoN so annoyingly bad. The biggest offender overall, though, is the drop system. Defeated a monster in the tree-tops in the first fight...he drops a magical dagger with 32-40 damage + lightning damage. At this point, I'm like "whoa." Three acts later, I still haven't seen anything as good as that dagger.
And heck, what about the pathetic bosses? Dodge, hit, dodge, hit. They were built so that a group of people could just gang up and beat on them from all sides. That's it. Even in singleplayer (Seeing as how dialup play, and hence online play I could access, was sadly left out) it was painfully obvious that the boss characters were simply regular enemies with stronger attacks.
Meh.
Kids these days. They don't know the difference between classic, and just plain old.
everyone keeps reading them.
I think this contrasts greatly with possibly reviewer ommitance between two SOE products: PlanetSide and CoN.
Snowblind has said that when they burned CoN, they weren't seeing the lockups and glitches that consumers are - which means it's entirely possible that reviewers didn't see them too (as many of them don't get the consumer version).
PlanetSide on the other hand, had technical issues up the wazoo on it's get go, and there was only one version to play there. Many of the bugs were acknowledged by the devs as big old Oopsies.
But then again, reviewers probably had another excuse for the version of PS they played.
It was just a beta.
I think the problem is this need for all reviews to be published the very day a game comes out. I think anything printed on that time line should still fall into the realm of preview, whereas what I would like to read is a review of a copy some reviewer got off a shelf, not in a publisher's envelope. Unrealistic - probably...but definately more accurate.
But for the record, I love CoN (almost as much as I kinda hate SOE). My GF, her sister and I played it for hours yesterday - no real problems. But clearly these problems DO exist, and I have to say - they're indicative of a Sony Online Entertainment product.
Okay, I bought this game. I have 2 PS2s. One is faulty (it won't read ANY media on CD) and one is mostly not (since it's mine, and not my family's, I've kept much better care of it.) Anyway, when I bought the game, it rather consistently locked up in the faulty one, eventually refused to load. In the working one it loaded and ran, with the occasional lockup. I have some lense cloths (of the disposable, alcohol coated variety) that I wiped down the disc thoroughly with, and since then have had no problems on the working or non-working PS2 at all. Admittadly, I had to clean the disc about 4 times, but since then (probably about 4 days after release) I haven't had a single lockup while playing.