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.'"

Comments

how to not buy crap games

[davez0r]

two options:

1. don't buy games
2. go to http://www.gamerankings.com/ and don't buy anything that gets lower than 90%.

this isn't rocket science, come on.

Re:Film and Movie Tie-ins

[badasscat]

What do you think about http://www.gamerankings.com/?

Everybody knows about gamerankings.com and I think a lot of people put too much stock in them.

The problem is review scores - even aggregated ones - tell you nothing. Reviewers often get so caught up in hype themselves that they can't (or won't) see a game's faults, and of course there's the issue of paid advertising at almost every publication. That's not to say reviews themselves are useless, but just looking at a score - even an average of the scores from a bunch of publications - is not going to tell you anything.

But for some of the same reasons, simply reading one or two reviews is not going to help you either. What you need to do is read between the lines when you read these reviews. Ask yourself "what is this reviewer not telling me about this game?"

For example, before I bought NFL 2K5, I read a bunch of reviews about it. None of them spent more than a couple sentences talking about the franchise mode, which is the main mode I play in every sports game I buy. If they said anything, it was just about it being more "fleshed out" than the year before. Still, they all said the core gameplay was great, so I bought the game. Sure enough, franchise mode was so buggy that it was literally impossible to play more than a couple seasons of it (destroying the whole point of that mode). The developer forums were flush with complaints about numerous game-stopping bugs, several of which I personally encountered pretty quickly, but none of which were mentioned in any review I read.

Obviously, these reviewers simply hadn't played that mode. They looked at the options and assumed they knew how it worked and that was enough for them. I should have known better, because not a single one of these reviews mentioned anything about playing more than a couple games in franchise mode.

It's not just about bugs, though. Reviewers are paid to review what's there, not what's not there. Ask yourself what you're expecting out of a game and whether the reviews you're reading are speaking directly to those wants or not. If you're looking for an adventure game and you find a game you think you might be interested in but the reviewers just talk about how much fun it is to shoot zombies, then even if the game gets a high score, it's probably not for you.

Beyond that, though, there is definitely real corruption in game journalism, whether intentional or not. I think a lot of it is actually not intentional; reviewers get wooed and wowed by big publishers with trips and gifts and whatnot, and all the while the publisher hammers into their heads how big a particular game is going to be, how awesome it is, how everybody's looking forward to it. Eventually it becomes a self-fulfilling thing, and you see more preview coverage and more hype. The press themselves buy into it. The game comes out and in order to justify themselves, all of the press gives it a ridiculously high score. 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.

So my point is you cannot rely on scores (even aggregate ones) and you cannot rely solely on "sound bites" culled from reviews. You need to read reviews carefully and think about why reviewers say certain things and why they are not saying other things. Basically, just use some critical thinking skills - skills that a lot of game reviewers lack.

Terrible way to choose a game

[brkello]

This "article" reads like it was written by someone who reads the daily gripes about games on Slashdot. They really are guilty of generalizing specific game categories rather than helping anyone find good games. There are good games out there with movie tie-ins. There are great games that take place in WWII now matter how tired they are of it. Independant games are not magically good. Non-Sequels can be terrible. Now, if they said "A large number of games with movie tie-ins are very very bad. There are many exceptions though. Do some research on a title online first and see how people rate it. Check multiple sources." Actually, that's the advice I would give on any game. That article doesn't do much to actually help you. You'd get more out of going to gamefaqs.