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Game Reviews are Broken?
Kotaku is running an opinion piece looking at the process of reviewing videogames, and comes to the conclusion that the whole system is entirely broken. Author Mark Wilson takes potshots at the concept of assigning a numerical valuation to a game, and the emphasis on product reviews rather than content reviews. "If there is no such thing as a perfect game, when why the hell are you scoring out of 100? It's not just PC Gamer that thinks this way--most publications, even those who do give out 'perfect' scores, do so begrudgingly. It's as if the developer has somehow cheated and broken their system. The movie reviewers solved this problem a long time ago. That's why most adopted a simpler rating system in which a 4-star movie didn't imply 'perfection' but supreme excellence. In most cases, games are penalized through being divided by a sum that they can never possibly reach."
Game publishers, consumers, and even the reviewers themselves have been going on about the shortcomings of the current system for quite a while now. Yet we never see any alternatives being proposed. I say to the article writer, "Yes, I agree that the current system sucks. But what is your alternative?"
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The best review has no score. Simply somebody playing the dang game, and talking about what they like, what they don't like, what they'd improve, what really bothered them, what really excited them.
Find a reviewer with a decent command of the language, and who likes the sorts of games you like, and you're good to go.
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These very thoughts came to my mind when I was reading all the Halo3 Reviews... When a game has so-so single player and awesome multiplayer...how does that get the game loads of perfect scores? A perfect game wouldn't need to make up for areas of lacking ANYWHERE. That aside, even the multiplay, while fun, is far from perfect. Halo3 was, and is, a great package but it's nowhere near a "perfect" game. I'm not just picking on Halo3 here either. HL2 for instance was a phenomenal game....but to call it "perfect" (like so many reviewers did) is just naive and downright inaccurate.
Sites like Metacritic are part of the problem. It's these review aggregate sites that force any writer who wants their review to be read to give out a numeric score, or a score that can be converted into a numeric score. Everyone would learn more about the game they're researching if game reviews had no score and you just read about what the reviewer liked and didn't like. But people are lazy and would much rather see that game A is 13 points better than game B. What is 13 points? Does that mean it has better graphics, or a better story? Its nothing, its meaningless, and it should go.
Reviews have been fundamentally broken for years and years. Ten years ago Gamepro gave Bubsy 3D an impossibly high score of 3.5 out of 5 - a score comparable with Screamer 2, tempest, Cruis'n USA and other playable games. Playing Bubsy is about as enjoyable as stabbing your eyes out, it's a turd among turds. Incidentally there was a full page add for, you guessed it, Bubsy 3D in that very issue.
Problem is that these magazines are at the mercy at the games they review. They need to get exclusives, interviews, previews and adds to stay in the game. They are therefore very reluctant to give out bad scores to games from well known publishers.
Once upon a time there was a magazine (Amiga Power?) that did just this, said things as they were, and they found themselves cahoots by devs like Team 17, etc, for simply stating their actual opinions.