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What Makes a Game Review a Game Review?
An anonymous reader writes "Kotaku asks Do Game Reviews Have to Be Puerile? in a short editorial about the state of game reviews. The article points to a recent story in The New Gamer about Silent Hill 4 as an "experiential piece of writing about the emotions and thoughts that swirl through a gamer's head as they play a game over time" The Kotaku article ends on this note: 'The problem with many reviews is that both their writers and readers expect a formula. They don't want to be challenged, instead, they want to have the ideas swirling in the writer's head synthesized and explained. But critical thought, in its truest form, should be something that inspires others to think critically, not just accept what has been handed to them.' What are your thoughts on game reviews? Do they need to have scores and a summary of what's good or bad about the game to be counted? Is experiential commentary more or less useful than a breakdown of the game's design?"
Any review of any service or product is simply someone's opinion, regardless of their writing style, whether it be detailing certain aspects of the product in detail, or having rather abstract ideas based on one's own gamimg experience. I feel it important to find reviewers that you can often agree with, and that you can trust to be impartial. So, I think that a game review is a game review if you think it is, and if you are more informed after reading it.
I'm not stressed. I'm just terribly, terribly alert.
When I read a game review, I want to be told information that will either push or pull me away from buying (or playing) that game. If it so happens that they can accomplish this while giving me some kind of stream-of-consciousness tour of their mind, then more power to them.
What works for me is this: tell me what games the reviewer tends to like, and let the reviewer tell me what he likes about the game.
I'll take it from there.
What are your thoughts on game reviews?
If I already own the game, then I can play it and draw my own experiences from it. No need for the review, obviously.
If I don't own the game, I need to understand why I should or should not buy/obtain it. Whether the reasons for this involve gameplay, graphics or some random gamer's personal experiences is largely irrelevant, as long as the reasons are clearly stated. Both can be good or bad.
Good:
Bad:
If a reviewer feels a certain way about a game I want to know why. Just because the graphics aren't perfectly polished doesn't necesarily denote a -1 from its base score of 10. What made you FEEL this way about this game? Was it that you just didn't plain like the main character and his personality? Was the story overall just uninteresting? What made you decide you would never play this game again after you reviewed it or better yet what astonished you and brought you to decide to make this game a part time job?
I feel the same way about movie reviews. A movie isn't shitty just because it has bad acting. Movies don't need a clearly defined plot to be good (napolean dynamite eh?).
I have picked up several games in the past that got astounding reviews and put the controller down 30 minutes later knowing that game would never be played again. And yet I have also picked up games that did horrible and played them for months. No one is saying a review has to be perfect, but you can't just label it as good or bad.
If we look at movies, there's a pretty substantial difference between Entertainment Weekly and Film Comment. I suspect that the vast majority of moviegoers, even the avid fans, have nothing but disdain for critical/scholerly review. I expect nothing less from Gamers. Nothing more complicated than scale of 1-10, please.
That's not a knock, it just reflects their objectives.
I mean, I don't give a shit about sculpture. Constantine Brancusi? I give him a 9.4
Personally I tend to stop at Gamespot for the large part of my initial game reviews, not because I like their editors (I think they generally fall somewhere between mediocre and stink) but because they have lots of easy to access screenshots and movies, and quite frankly - their video reviews are pretty decent. They also have reader reviews, forums and other informational bits all nicely tied up so I can explore as much or as little as I want.
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The bottom line in my opinion is that we really need both hand fed, just give me the stinking average rating of the game, and immersive, make you think and decide for yourself movies and demos
And for my soapbox speech, reviews very rarely mention the in game music (partly because it isn't part of games like it used to be). Sound effects generally get a mention, but music rarely. When a reviewer actually reviews the music, and heaven forbid actually takes it into account when giving their stamp of approval on the game - the nostalgia runs thick and rich. Lets not forget about all the elements of gameplay, not just story and graphics!
Fundamentally, it is impossible to communicate gameplay and aesthetics with a number. Even a very, very large number (and yes, even all the bits in the program itself; you are not a computer). If anything, ratings can only be misleading by giving you a false sense of familiarity.
I think, then, that the primary goal of the review should be to help synthesize some sense of the game in the mind of the reader. Out of what? Previous experiences, that's what. The review should relate the game to other games, popular and obscure, and note important developments and differences.
I don't think the review should emote about "how fun" or "how it felt" because that really doesn't tell the reader anything about what they'll get. There's no such thing a "pure fun" that I can just draw up in my mind. Now, playing 4-player Mario Tennis on the N64, that's something I could remember.
As far as getting rid of ratings goes, we have a statistics fetish these days. People would probably rather be misled and have meaningless statistics than have no statistics at all even though they were just misleading them.
And the inane emoting? Well, nobody said these review monkies were professionals. Some can do it, almost all of them can't.
I almost think that games companies would be better off letting people openly pirate their games than be at the mercy of review sites.
That really doesn't tell me much of anything about how the game feels. By reading that, I can only glean the following information:
- there are grapple moves
- there are strike moves
- there are strong and weak versions
- etc.
Only the real hardcore wrestling gamer will really care or even understand the button mapping stuff. Even then it tells you nothing about how it feels while playing it. You know the saying: Just because it looks good on paper...
Another thing: I've never played XIX, so comparing it to that game just goes over my head, so once again only the hardcore fan will understand this reference.
When reading a game review, I don't need a rehash of the game manual since it comes included with the game; what I really want to know is: Is the game fun? How does it make you feel while playing it? Is it worth buying?
I think this is the point this article's author was trying to make.
I think this is why the reviews I like best incorporate both. I definitely want to know how smoothly the control scheme works or the length of load times. However, I also want to know if the game was fun and involving.
I never rely on a single reviewer. When I'm dealing with a new reviewer (one I haven't read before), I try to look at how they rated various games I already own. Do their impressions match mine or are they a complete opposite? What is their bar of excellence? What kinds of games do they seem to prefer? It's just like movie reviews - where we like to know that the special effects were "WOW", but we also want to know the reviewer had a good time and would watch it again.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
If there are problems in the game, I'd like to see them reported. I've yet to see anything like that in anyone's reviews, unless they are another end user who's not associated with the game or a web site who sells the game. None of the magazines or on line review sites give you this kind of information. Just to illustrate, I'll name some examples.
:-D) with three different Geforces (a GF2 Ultra, a GF3 Ti300, and a GF4 4600). All were using the latest WHQL drivers for the particular OS (XP and 98SE). No bluescreens or illegal operations.
I've purchased several games only to be severely disappointed. I purchased Morrowind III Bethesda Softworks and it took me 3 months just to get to a point where I could create a character without the game causing me to get the BSOD thanks to an illegal call to my video driver. I was not alone in this problem. How hard it is to tell people that your game isn't compatible with the NVIDIA chipset? At the time the NVIDIA chipset was the hottest card around and in order to meet their sales projections, they kept mum.
The thing is, is it a widespread problem or a single user's problem? A reviewer needs to look at the broader picture. If a big only happens on their PC and not others then should they report it? Maybe.
To use your example of Morrowind, in my house we were playing it on three different PCs (all legit, we all wanted the goodies in the collector's edition
So, the question becomes as a reviewer, does one report that Morrowind won't work with "the NVIDIA chipset" or just assume that the problem lies with one's personal PC? After all, we all buy a lemon part once in a while. It doesn't mean that entire line of parts is bad.
My preference would be for the reviewer to state they had a problem, list the hardware and software used (w/version numbers), and then continue the review with another (stock setup) PC.
"All the darkness in the world can not quench the light of one small candle."
I'll typically look at reviews for games I already have, and see which reviewers tend to look for the same things in a game.
:)
When I lived on the east coast, one of the few stations we received (rural, no cable) had a movie reviewer named Tom New who I trusted implicitly, because I never found myself in disagreement with any movie I watched. If he said it wasn't worth paying for in a theatre, I'd catch it on TV eventually, and lo and behold he'd be right. His opinions obviously wouldn't be useful to everyone but they suited me just fine.
It doesn't hurt to find reviewers who aren't getting free copies of games from companies as well. The Shacknew review system comes in handy, although sometimes you'd be hard pressed to make sense of what the person was trying to say