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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."
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.
This is why I like the Zero Punctuation reviews so much. Yahtzee has a decent command of the language, goes through all of the good and bad parts of the games, and gives a quick conclusion stating his opinion of the thing.
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I disagree. For good games, a good review is definitely more than the score, but when I check out a much-hyped game and see a score of 50/100, that's a big deal to me. That means I don't even have to worry about reading the review, and in some cases that's the best review there is. During the era of 3000 RTS games a month, it was nice to be able to sort the good from the bad with a glance. It's also nice to be able to see the high and low points of a series, to be able to see that most people find the mechanics of FFVIII and FFIX lacking so that I know, if i'm going to start the series, start it somewhere else.
As TFA states, the review industry is necessary because of the large amount of games coming out and the large proportion of crap that inhabits it. If something is crap from end to end and at least four different people agree, then there's no need for me to look further.