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Is There Something Wrong with Video Game Reviews?
unclethursday writes "GamesAreFun.com has a new editorial about what the Editor in Chief feels is wrong with video game reviews, GamesAreFun's included. The editorial touches on the importance of scores to people, the importance of getting the first review out there, the problem with trying to review online parts of a game before the game is released into the wild, reviewing games in a series, the expectations from reviews about overly hyped games, and review length."
Anyone remember when the EBGames magazine reviewed Ninja Gaiden months before it came out? When the game REALLY was released, they had an apology and a new review of the game in it's finished state, which mostly consisted of a comparison between the finished game and the build they produced their original review from. WTF?
Dear diary: Today I stuffed some dolls full of dead rats I put in the blender.
There is not a proper focus on multiplayer gaming in ANY of the review sites. I *only* play multiplayer games (with a few exceptions).
There are some issues that simply are not touched. In Burnout2, my wife & I could race against each other using 2 forcefeedback steering wheels. In Burnout3, the same 2 wheels don't work -- only 1 is recognized.
But no reviewer out there even mentions using two wheels at once. They only care about the single-player experience.
Also: Online games. There are games that are 4player locally, and you can play online. But can 4 local players play online? No. You can play online only 1 at a time. So my choice is: Play with wife, or a complete stranger. BUT I WANT TO PLAY WITH MY WIFE *AND* A FEW COMPLETE STRANGERS (like we do when we play Quake3 online--I also wish I didn't have to purchase 2 copies of the game to do that.)
Some sites will say "1-16 players". But that is the online count. It doesn't answer the question of "Will my wife be able to join in?"
Magazines don't mention it. Gamefaqs only gives a # of players that MIGHT be online or MIGHT be in-person.
Also, gamefaqs does not have select-by-controller. For instance, i'd like to see all the Eye Toy games, or all the steering-wheel games, or all the headset games in a category. I'd also like "4 player games" to be a category.
Does anyone have ANY suggestions on a site that might give my wife and I the type of reviews *WE* want???????
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Is this much different than what happens with any media? Look at news corporations...I will assume that at one time they actually understood their job to be informing the public, being a trusted figure, etc. Now look at Rather; rushing to break a story that wasn't properly vetted in order to be the first, and only, person out there with "the scoop".
Sports is the same...it used to be to entertain people and compete (what were salaries in the 20's and 30's?), now it's about how young you can get recruited by a team and how many ridiculous numbers of zero's are attached to your paycheck.
The only reviews that I'll trust come from amateurs...ie, other gamers. Just like most of the sports I enjoy are the amateurs, like college athletes. While they may have agendas, a whole lot of them play just for the fun of it, like me.
--trb
Warning I did not RTFA.. I might later but honestly I stopped giving a crap about reviews years ago, same with movie reviews.
Games like movies are a matter of personal choice. God some of the movies and games I have loved the most have been slammed by reviews and won awards for being among the "worse".
Every reviewer will be biased based on their own preferences, tack on some nostalgia related to the old games they loved then given a rating based on what they like - not what I like. Worse than that is the problem (and I do believe it to be a problem) of reviewers catering to game companies to get favors like early review copies, and various free crap.
I rent games, read the manuals online and look at screenshots and make my own opinions.
I can't tell you how many times it's happened. I read a dozen reviews online to hear that a game is great (baldur's gate for mac was a classic example), so I buy said game, and WHAM severe bug. Every time you try to rest (in certain circumstances, which occur about half the time) the game just crashes completely. This now fundamentally changes the nature of the game. Rather than trying to fight bad guys, your primary mission is to find a way to rest without crashing the game, the actual plot of the game becomes secondary to working around the bugs in the game.
Once the game has been out for a little while, this is all over the bulletin boards, nearly everybody (or maybe actually everybody) has this bug, so..... How did the reviewer not know? Did he even play the game? Did he think that a single bug that crashed the game 5 times an hour was insignificant? What exactly is going on here?
For reviewers, first and foremost, actual obvious bugs should be the first thing to look for. If you play the game for a whole day and it ever crashes, that should go in the very first sentence of the review. In addition, include a full list of the bugs you saw, and any game with more than a few obscure bugs (or god forbid a single crasher or severe bug) should get the thumbs down automatically.
I can't stand the reviewers ignoring obvious deficiencies and claiming "this game played like a dream......" when it is a scientific fact that they couldn't have played more than 10 minutes without having a complete crash.
Does anybody remember this one? THis is what made me lose faith in all video game magazines. I haven't bought one since. Gamepro swore up and down that the Genesis version of SFII was better than its SNES counterpart in almost every way. It simply wasn't true. I owned both systems. I bought the SNES version when it first came out. I decided to rent the Genesis version since I hear it was so cool. I'm really glad I only rented it. It was pretty bad stacked up to the SNES version. Not only that, but it seems like the things Gamepro touted about the Genesis version were the worst parts (ex. sound, which was downright pathetic compared to its counterpart). I'm sure there have been earlier examples of misleading reviews but this is the one that made me put down the magazines.
I think one of the biggest problem with reviews (if we ignore the corruption) is that we all enjoy different types of games
While I understand exactly what you're saying, and think it can be a big issue in game reviews, for me the biggest problem is the opposite:
Certain types of games become entrenched as "canonical" among every reviewer--and gamer--and there is no "bigger picture" analysis of how a game is or isn't innovating in terms of gameplay. That is, every reviewer, whether preferring RTS, FPS, or whatever genre, seems to expect--and want--a game to fit nicely into one of those genres.
HL2 in my mind is a good example of this. HL2, for me, has been a bit let down, and it's seemed overly hyped to me in a big way. The gameplay is incredibly linear and forced, and the scripting is so extensive that it seriously detracts from immersion for me. The story is incredibly incoherent and poor. I felt HL1 was a much better game in this way. Very few reviews I have read have raised these problems, or if they have, they quickly dismiss them, or condone them and essentially ignore them.
Aside from issues of hype that are well explained in the target article, part of what I think happens is that reviewers come to expect a prototype FPS, and never question whether or not that prototype should be improved upon. That is, there is so much focus on improvements in technical quality--e.g., graphics, physics--and very little discussion of what the game brings that is new in gameplay itself. I think this is, in large part, due to the fact that certain genres have become entrenched as expectations and preferences in reviewer's minds, and they overrate games to the extent that the games fit their prototypes of what a RTS, or FPS, or MMORPG should be like.
For a traditional scripted single-player FPS, HL2 is very good. But is it really good as a game, in general, if what you're getting is, in fact, a standard, if well-executed "prototype" of a traditional, scripted single-player FPS? Should Valve have tried to introduce nonlinearity into the story line, even a little, with a couple of different game paths or something? An RPG element? Should have they done something to increase freedom of choice in the game? More interactivity and dialogue?
These are questions that don't get asked, but should, and I suspect it's because the reviewers are so focused on whether a game meets their expectations rather than asking what could be different, or how it fails to be different. There's no discussion of gameplay as a general topic in the same way that there is the merits of different approaches to lighting, or physics, or view, or whatever.
So, to follow up on what you're saying, it's not just that that RTS-preferring reviewers don't appreciate games from other genres, it's that preferences for games get so attached to particular types of genres that there is no meaningful discussion of the gameplay itself.
We once ran a set of experiments where we compared subjective taste tests against the physical properties of apples. At first, the tester were told to jot down any number of single words like "crisp" or "sour", as they ate the apple. We started to see some interesting clustering around some of the words.
Well, some people don't like qualitative data, so they switch the experiment to a score. Now testers were told to give the "sourness" a numerical value.
All of a sudden, we had white noise. Data became highly correllated with previous apples, and the clustering disappeared. Why? No standards. People could only measure one apple relative to another.
Similarly, when you're playing a game, you don't have any basis for thinking "Whoah, dude, this is gameplay 4 out of 5!" Except in relation to some previous 3 out of 5 game, itself arbitrarily scored that just happened to be in your mind when you were fabricating the new scores out of pure nothingness.
Play Command HQ online
Have you actually looked at the explanation of GI's review section? They specifically state that 7 is their "average" score, on a scale from 1 to 10. Whether or not this is sensible is debatable, but the fact that that is the way they do it doesn't change.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
So ignore those reviews and read the ones written by people who tested the game after it was released. I don't understand the obsession with having to have all reviews completed before the game is even released. Just have some patience and wait for decent reviews by people whose heads aren't up $game_company's posterior.