Slashdot Mirror
How Not To Buy Crap Games This Season
The Guardian Gamesblog has a short guide on avoiding bad games and helping the games industry. From the article: "Say no to film and TV tie-ins - These are generally belted out in nine months by newcomers treated little better than sweatshop workers. If you're fed the line, 'the director was fully involved in the making of this game', beware. This means, roughly, 'The director sent his lawyers to the studio with a 300-page guide, warning that if it were breached, the team would be shot.'"
As a general rule the avoiding movie/tv/comic book tie-ins is good advice. Sure, there are exceptions (as there are to any rule), but keeping it in mind as a guideline can save you a lot of pain and suffering (Aquaman anyone?).
The best advice you could ever get for purchasing games is (assuming you know what kind of games you like to play):
- Read reviews. Not just one review from Gamespot or IGN (I find their reviews to be garbage more often than not), but from other places as well. Try a site you may not frequent very often and get their take on it. The more opinions you have of a game, the better you will know what you are getting into with your hard earned cash.
- Rent it first! If you like it and think you will play it longer than one rental period, buy it. Otherwise, play it and enjoy (or hate) it during the rental period, then return it and save your money.
Enemy of the Sun
What do you think about http://www.gamerankings.com/? It seems to work pretty good if you are looking for multiple review scores for one game and it puts them all together in a handy location. Then you can just follow the link to read the actual review. I use it when I am really serious about wanting a game but I want to check with multiple review sites to see if they all gave it the same general rating.
My Xbox Live Gamer Card
Metacritic games is where I visit first.
Prettymuch if a game has an 85+ rating on here it's not going to be a total lemon.
Just last week I was talking with our facilities manager who was lamenting he hadn't played any games on the Xbox lately, but was wanting to get some more FPS and didn't know which games were any good.
We went to metacritic, used the advanced search, and printed off a list of the top 25 FPS for Xbox, stopped by Gamestop at lunch and he picked up 3 highly rated games.
The article mentions indie games, but fails to mention one of the greatest draws -- they are also generally cheap (or at least cheaper than the standard $50 per game of most large releases).
Mutant Storm is a brilliant arcade style game that combines old school frenzy with purty graphics. It is nice to see that folk are still making games like this (now, if I could find a decent platformer -- the last good game in that genre was Castlevania: Symphony of the Night). Not only is Mutant Storm a great game, but it costs less $20.
Darwinia is another wonderful game. Sure, it is a bit short (10 levels, less than 10 hours if you go through it at a reasonable pace), but some of the best games ever were rather short (Sonic the Hedgehog is still one of my favorite games, and can be beaten less than an hour -- two hours if you take your time). Add to this that Darwinia has a very different set of aesthetics from most modern games (rather than realistic graphics, Darwinia seeks to produce a very clean, artificial look, something like the movie Tron), an interesting interface, and a compelling story. Price: $30.
I know that both of these were briefly mentioned in the article, but I thought that they both deserved a bit more praise.
Rhapsody in Numbers
I've done this in the past:
Instead of buying one $50 game, buy 5-10 $5-10 games. You know, games that are a year old, on clearance, etc... Sometimes you find a good game that you otherwise would have overlooked.
If 80% of those games aren't worth playing, you still end up with one that is.
Look used.
GT4: $50
GT3 (used): $6
Will you have 700% more fun w/ GT4 over GT3?
That's not to say don't buy the $50 game. After all, many are well worth it. (ie: Shadow of the Colossus)
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
1. Don't buy anything from Sony.
2. Don't buy anything that runs on a Sony platform.
3. Don't buy anything from EA.
4. Don't buy anything from the "Square" side of "Square-Enix".
Or you can just follow these rules:
1. Don't buy any game immediately after release, wait at least three months for there to be enough reviews to give you a good opinion of the game.
2. If in doubt, play at a friend's or rent.
"Rent it first!" - Once upona time I'd wholeheartedly agree with you. Nowadays, I don't think that's such good advice. Where I live, it costs $7 - $10 to rent. Granted, that's for a whole week, but my rental store options don't offer weekend rentals anymore. That's about 1/5 the cost fo a game. When games were $4 rentals and $40 purchases rent-before-you-buy made a whole lot more sense. Now when I look at a title, I rent the ones that I'll only play for a week or two at most. For example, X-Men Legends 2 is an incredible game, but after two weeks I was ok with taking it back. I'll play Madden 06 weekly until 07 comes out so that's a good purchase for me. Some games like Zelda: Windwalker and Metroid Prime are cheap enough now that I don't see why the rental stores still bother to stock the game.
Personally, I hardly ever need to check reviews by the time a PC game has hit stores. I'll know way before that point if I'm interested in buying or not. Everything gets preview'd beforehand. If somehow a stinker slips by me and onto my PC, I'll return it if possible and get my money back.
Only review I remember being super helpful was this one for Space Rangers 2. Never heard of it before finding the review but it been quite a time soak. :)
Eurogamer Review
Company site
GoGamer is one of the few places that has it
Look at a game like The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker, which even Shigeru Miyamoto now calls "boring" and basically unfinished. But it has a score of 94.9% on GameRankings, because the press bought the hype that they themselves helped create.
Miyamoto did not say Wind Waker is boring. He said the triforce hunt section of the game was boring. He did have a list of things he would do differently if he had more time to work on the game, but every game designer has a list like that for every game they have ever worked on.
The triforce hunt does get boring, but it's not that big a section of the game. The only other significant flaw in the game is that you have to get pretty far into the game before the enemies do a significant amount of damage to you, which means that once you get a couple hearts you pretty much can't die unless you're trying to. Despite the claims of the people who only played Ocarina of Time, the graphics fit in with the style of the rest of the series perfectly and are very well done. Quite honestly, if the development team had another 3 months or so to work on the game, it probably would have easily topped Ocarina of Time. In the end, it definitely is one of the better games in the series.