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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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Although he has a point, we humans love to compare and if you don't give us any metric by which to do that, then we don't feel like anything has been achieved.
"SuperGame is really good" is meaningless to me. What I want to know is, is it any better than GreatGame? If the reviewer gives a score for both then I can understand which he/she feels is better and by what margin. Since I've played GreatGame (and assuming I trust the reviewer), then I can set some sort of expectation of what SuperGame will be like.
Personally, I use Metacritic which aggregates a number of reviews. Again, it's not perfect, but when it gets a 75 or above score, I can be reasonably certain that I'm not getting a dud game. It might not be my type of game, but if it is, then it shouldn't be disappointing.
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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.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad do you think the 10 point rating system is.
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The solution would be to have a "Consumer Reports" of gaming where people unaffiliated with the publishers, buy the game at a retail outlet like anyone else at launch, play it, write the review, and then do this consistently for all games that are released.
The disadvantages:
-You wouldn't see the review until after launch. (Probably a week for some games.)
-It doesn't seem to have a viable revenue model, unless someone knows a counterexample?
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