Haha. Sadly your paranoia is unfounded. My own comment wasn't all that serious, and I don't think you should be taking it (or the smartassed AC comment before mine) too seriously. Really, there are more important things to be worried about in life.
Oh yeah, from TFA:
"
He may spend eight to 12 hours a day in front of a video screen, but don't mistake him for a geek.
Like most of the top video game professionals, he is an excellent athlete, and was a star on his high school tennis team.
"I work out a lot -- you know being physically fit and making sure your neurotransmitters are working properly and making sure that you're on beat and you're ready to go," says Wendel.
He calls that "neuro-fitness" and he believes it makes him think faster."
Ehh...I'd say it's good for a gamer to stay in moderate shape at least. It might help with personal reflexes, alertness, concentration, etc. At least, most of the really skillful gamers I know personally and know of aren't in horrible shape. Only a few are slightly overweight. The rest either don't work out much but are not overweight, or they work out at least once a week, though usually more than that. Even Fatal1ty, who probably plays more than most of us, isn't a fatass.
"The question is a good one: Where have all the good educational titles gone? Perhaps now that violent games have proven they own the market, there's less appetite for trying something new and educational. Anyone?"
I already mentioned this in an earlier post, but in Japan, Nintendo's educational Brain Training series is doing extremely well. It's showing unprecedented sales trends over there. At least one of those games is set for a US release. There you have it.
Sup at least in Japan, all three of Nintendo's educational Brain Training series games have sold over 1 million units since May. Brain Training 2, released 5 weeks ago, has already sold over 1 million units. So...if educational games can work in one area of the world, they might work in others. Maybe not, but still, there's a new and powerful precedent. Not to mention, educational games are exceedingly cheap and quick to develop compared to blockbuster titles. So in terms of a business perspective, it's blatantly obvious that such games have merit.
"But imagining myself playing Resident Evil 4 with online leaderboards showing high scores in the missionary mode or a timed 'kill as many bad guys as you can' mini-game brings a smile to my face."
For RE4, this sort of already exists...especially for the Japanese. The site http://homepage3.nifty.com/shin3/capcom/bio4.htm tracks both the best times on the main game and high scores for the Mercenaries minigame, ranging from top 20ish to the top 64. I think he just includes the submissions for anyone that sends him videos of their performances. It also includes video downloads for the highest scoring/best time people, so you know it's legit. It even includes submissions from players from all over the world. There is a downside to it, though. I'd love to send some vids in, but I don't want to plop down $100-200 dollars for a good video capture card just so I can send recordings there and have my name on the scoreboards.
The same applies for the Speed Running community across the world. They track and display the top times for a variety of games, but if you want to submit your own speedrun(s) you have to go through the hassle of recording your work, rather than having a built in online scoreboard system. Also they tend to only display the times of the top one or two players, rather than having a top 20 or so. But, at least you get to download their runs and see how it's done!
"Nintendo is the only game company left who places fun, gameplay, and design over advertising, hype, and corporate greed. The gaming industry is dying slowly and turning into a mini-hollywood and the pervasiveness of ad's in games and lack of innovation in favor of sequels and making the biggest grab for money and power does nothing to further gaming."
I can only half agree. Nintendo is in it for the money like everyone else; they just know that focusing on gameplay and design gets you more profit, while advertising and hype gets you more marketshare, at cost of profit. Since they are primarily a games company and not a multi-branch corporation, they like profit. Nintendo is also going for innovative gameplay because they want to reach more people. They know that the stereotypical gaming demographic is now saturated. It's worse in Japan than it is in the US. Over there, the trend towards more complex gaming has pushed away many gamers, especially those outside the historical gamer demographic - causal gamers and older gamers especially. For example, the mother of one of my Japanese friends loves videogames but is turned off by games past the SNES era simply because one look at the controllers puts her off. She thinks immediately that the games will be too hard to play and won't even try. At the 2005 Tokyo Gameshow, Iwata pointed out evidence that the games market is actually beginning to shrink in Japan, and the past trends in gaming are to blame. Nintendo isn't innovating and growing the market for the good, they're doing it for the money. The good for the game industry comes as a secondary, if not unwanted effect.
"You have no idea how many people that are 60 still don't know what their class is used for and how to act in a group."
Back when I played EQ1, the exact same problem existed. MMORPGs are meant to cater to the lowest common denominator, and to achieve that their game mechanics favor time spent by the player in the game world over skill of the individual player. The time-over-skill value in MMORPGs is the reason why you see horrible high level players. "Hard" MMORPGs aren't hard inthemselves; they just take more time to get anything done than "easy" MMORPGs. More time investment doesn't always lead to increased skill or understanding, especially when the game in question requires little of either to be successful. MMORPGs are among the few games that low-skill people can actually thrive in, especially if they pick a valued class. In EQ1, it was cleric, warrior, or enchanter. I've seen many players of the three aforementioned classes that are the "top" people in a guild who have phat lewt and all that, but really they're terrible players who will get lost in the easiest to navigate of dungeons, who will fail miserably at any sort of platforming or careful character navigation, but they are just online all the time and people needed their class abilities...so they were successful.
Oh, and EQ1 had changes to its PVP system where they added the ability to attack player opponents directly behind you. Know why? Because crappy high level players that put tons of time into the game and had elite gear were getting beaten by lower level, lesser geared individuals that had fundamental skill in videogames in the best of the best tournaments. So they dumbed down that aspect of the game just so time spent on your character would be the deciding factor, not skill, in a PVP match.
A quarterly profit of $55 million is kinda small compared to the average ~$1 billion in losses that division has seen per year for the last four years.
At the very least, many of Resident Evil 4's cut scenes had interaction akin to Dragon's Lair and the like. I really think that game did it right, and I hope to see more games utlize that style. It's about damn time too, given that games with interactive cutscenes like those you mentioned came out quite some time ago!
Because it's a game. As I stated before, arbitrarily restricting weapons in a nonsensical way is just as bad as arbitrarily allowing every weapon in the game on your person simultaneously. Halo is not "far more" realistic than most other FPSs. It just uses a different method of weapon management than past FPSs that has its own flaws just like every other before it. That's it.
"...and you have a realistic amount of them on you (2 max with a half-dozen grenades) when fully loaded."
Sorry to nitpick, but I'd say Soldier of Fortune's or Counterstrike's loadout restrictions are a little more realistic. Hell, even Dues Ex is more realistic given the kind of cyborg character you're dealing with. Let me illustrate. Why is it that in Halo, a pistol takes up the same inventory space as a rocket launcher?
Sure, Halo 2 half-addressed that with dual wielding, but it still was far from realistic. You still couldn't carry a large primary (rifle or larger), a medium secondary (SMG, shotgun, etc), and a pistol all at once unless you dual wielded. And if you carried a huge ass rocket launcher and a high calibur yet non-recoil sniper rifle, you'd move just as fast as if you were carrying one human pistol and one covenant pistol. And you could only carry those two pistols (three if you dual wield!), yet they take up far less space, use totally different means of storage on your person, and weigh far less than the rocket launcher + sniper rifle combo. There are ways to make carrying capacities in FPSs more realistic. Halo's method was just as arbitrary as Half Life's allowing players to carry ~10 different weapons with no restrictions.
The potential of games such as World of Warcraft is huge. It now has 3.5 million global subscribers, each of whom pays around £8 per month to participate.
Gee, according to wikipedia and a previous article here on Slashdot, World of Warcraft broke 5 million suscribers months ago. This guy at Forrester got paid to write this?
Did the experiment check for long term effects, or only immediately after play? One of the weaknesses of such experiments that I know of is the concentration on doing tests during play or immediately after play (checking only short term effects) and the lack of follow up studies (not checking long term effects).
Secondly, "Afterwards they received a set of objective measures of physiological and psychological aggression, they found that subjects who played the version that rewarded violent behaviours (running over pedestrians) showed increased hostility and aggression. Note that since subjects were randomly assigned to conditions one can safely assume a causal model in which playing a game that rewards violent behaviour does lead to hostile/aggressive behaviour."
Whoa, hold it. What measures were they exactly? Were the physiological measures changes in body temperature, heart rate, body conductivity, eye dialation, etc, or were they actual physical hostile/aggressive behaviors? There's a world of difference between being in a hostile/aggressive state of mind and taking hostile and aggressive action. If the measures didn't include actual aggressive actions, then there is only a correllational relationship between violent games, agressive/hostile mindframes, and aggressive/hostile behavior.
The only way you could establish a causal relationship between violent games and aggressive/hostile behavior is if the rewarded group committed aggressive/hostile actions in the exact same setting that the other two groups did not commit aggressive/hostile actions in, with sufficient statistical significance. Even if such is the case it is only known to apply to that one setting. Other experiments would have to do the exact same experiment, changing only the setting the three groups are subjected to after gameplay to see if it is more widely applicable.
True enough; but in the absence of compelling (researched, fact-checked) counter-argument, the opinion stands. So you telling me to not take the article at face value, while offering nothing in response, leaves me where I started.
But hey, if you do take a lazy and baseless but oppositional position in slashdot, then you'll get modded up for being insightful!
I hope this isn't taking away from them releasing maps beyond the four that came with the launch. After all, the primary criticism of DoD: Source is its lack of content, not graphical quality or immersiveness.
Just FYI, the Diagnoistic and Satistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV's classification of Antisocial Personality Disorder was classified as "psychopath" and "sociopath" in earlier versions. The latter two terms are no longer recognized by the DSM (and the American Psychological Association).
That said, I personally wouldn't even classify the people that gave louder blasts as antisocial, as such people have a remarkable lack of empathy for others across all situations. I don't think one should expect too much empathy between opponents in a competition - especially one that involves no physical contact or even visual sight of the opponent. The greater the pain one inflicts upon another, the more the one doing harm can physically sense (see, hear, etc) the victim, and the greater physical proximity between the one doing harm and the victim, the greater the empathy response and thus personal distaste for doing harm to another (as noted in Milgram's experiments on torture and obedience of authority). I'd also extrapolate that the less that one reciprocates harm to the person doing harm, the greater the empathy response. But that's just my opinion, and isn't supported by any experiments that I know of right now. Either way, this experiment's not really representative of most real life situations for the above reasons.
Technicalities aside, I get the gist of your point, and I agree with it. The loud noise making is a sign of increased aggressiveness, and aggressiveness does not equal violence, nor does it lead to violence in the vast majority of situations.
Here's a few tips from the WotC Character Optimization boards if you're going to play D&D 3.5 :
For a first character, go with a straight cleric or a druid, unless the flavor of the classes just isn't your thing. You can't go wrong otherwise. They are the two most powerful classes overall from 1-20, they have no weaknesses, and having at least one of the two in your party is a necessity by design of the game. Thus, they will be rather easy to play, and you won't have to worry about pulling weight in your party, even if it's your first time playing.
Making a fighter, barbarian or similar melee type will be easier to pick up, as they are usually more simple to play. However to make a good one, it takes a greater understanding of the game rules than if you play a cleric or druid. Sort of a paradox, I know. Another paradox is that a CoD can actually out-fight most of the primary fighting classes by the mid levels, and definetly towards the higher levels.
Oh, and on a related note, multiclassing is intended in 3.5, mainly for non-spellcasting classes. There's nothing wrong with it or unbalancing about it. A straight CoD is actually more powerful than nearly any multiclass combination.
Also, don't let the character class name bind you to what you want for your character concept. The class names are just handy labels for describing a set of abilities. A barbarian could just as easily be called a "fast, durable skirmisher". Barbarians don't all have to be "THOG SMASH!". So don't pigeonhole yourself just based on what's written on your character sheet. A cleric could even work as a mercenary, wizards can be very devout in following what diety they choose, and so on. Clerics in 3.5 don't even have to follow a diety. They can just believe in a set of ideals or a particular alignment axis.
Before you fly off the handle, RTFA, check out their arguments, see if you can find any validity in their studies, think about the implications.
And then err on the side of safety. In truth, not allowing your children to play some -- or all -- video games is not harmful to them.
Here's an idea. Before you come up with a counterargument to what everyone else is saying, get some actual facts to back it up, or check the arguements of the people you're supporting, and see if you have any ground to stand on first. Think about the implications of spouting off uninformed opinions. And then err on the side of safety. In truth, not allowing people to see opinions that aren't backed up by some -- or any -- empirical evidence is not harmful to them.
Especially when there are counter-opinions that are backed up by such evidence!
Why does FFFish get modded insightful for belting out out an unpopular but still baseless opinion, while j-turkey gets jack for decisively refuting his stance by using very relevant (and ironic) evidence? I hope the latter is just due to mods being normal people that have other things to do throughout the day, but the former I really can't understand.
I think the article was pointing a finger reasonably squarely at the very big review sites that post high scores for the very big game properties.
Enter The Matrix - the game that went along inbetween the second and third movies for instance. If anybody played it could tell you it was a very average game, came out in the 9-10 spots from some big name reviewers, check it out at metacritic. It had initially a very high rating that dropped sharply as more "indy" game review sites reviewed it more realistically and bagged it for what it was.
If by 9-10 spots you mean a score of 9-10, on the link you posted, only the Gamezilla! review gave it a score of 91. There are two low 80 scores following - one is from Play Magazine, with an 83...not a 90+. Entertainment Weekly gave it a 75.
And that's pretty much the end of the noticably above average scores. IGN gave it a 66. Gamespot gave it a 63. PC Gamer, 55. Gamespy gave it a 53. Gamepro, 50. Computer Gaming World, 50. Computer Games Magazine, 40. I'm not sure how big Gamezilla! is, but I'm pretty sure those others that I pointed out that gave the game more average (near 5.0) scores are rather popular and/or are actual gaming magazines, and they far outnumber those that gave the game a score of 7.5 or higher. As far as I can tell, your own evidence presented refutes your claim more than it supports it. Have I missed something? If so, please enlighten me.
Slashdot Mirror
Sup mods, mod this guy up for a well made rebuttal.
Haha. Sadly your paranoia is unfounded. My own comment wasn't all that serious, and I don't think you should be taking it (or the smartassed AC comment before mine) too seriously. Really, there are more important things to be worried about in life.
Owned by an AC :o
Not to mention, it's not all that realistic to expect average gamers to have the same level of military training that their in-game character has.
Bah, what I just posted wasn't from TFA, but from an article that another commenter added: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/01/19/60minute s/main1220146.shtml
Good game.
Ehh...I'd say it's good for a gamer to stay in moderate shape at least. It might help with personal reflexes, alertness, concentration, etc. At least, most of the really skillful gamers I know personally and know of aren't in horrible shape. Only a few are slightly overweight. The rest either don't work out much but are not overweight, or they work out at least once a week, though usually more than that. Even Fatal1ty, who probably plays more than most of us, isn't a fatass.
I already mentioned this in an earlier post, but in Japan, Nintendo's educational Brain Training series is doing extremely well. It's showing unprecedented sales trends over there. At least one of those games is set for a US release. There you have it.
Sup at least in Japan, all three of Nintendo's educational Brain Training series games have sold over 1 million units since May. Brain Training 2, released 5 weeks ago, has already sold over 1 million units. So...if educational games can work in one area of the world, they might work in others. Maybe not, but still, there's a new and powerful precedent. Not to mention, educational games are exceedingly cheap and quick to develop compared to blockbuster titles. So in terms of a business perspective, it's blatantly obvious that such games have merit.
For RE4, this sort of already exists...especially for the Japanese. The site http://homepage3.nifty.com/shin3/capcom/bio4.htm tracks both the best times on the main game and high scores for the Mercenaries minigame, ranging from top 20ish to the top 64. I think he just includes the submissions for anyone that sends him videos of their performances. It also includes video downloads for the highest scoring/best time people, so you know it's legit. It even includes submissions from players from all over the world. There is a downside to it, though. I'd love to send some vids in, but I don't want to plop down $100-200 dollars for a good video capture card just so I can send recordings there and have my name on the scoreboards.
The same applies for the Speed Running community across the world. They track and display the top times for a variety of games, but if you want to submit your own speedrun(s) you have to go through the hassle of recording your work, rather than having a built in online scoreboard system. Also they tend to only display the times of the top one or two players, rather than having a top 20 or so. But, at least you get to download their runs and see how it's done!
I can only half agree. Nintendo is in it for the money like everyone else; they just know that focusing on gameplay and design gets you more profit, while advertising and hype gets you more marketshare, at cost of profit. Since they are primarily a games company and not a multi-branch corporation, they like profit. Nintendo is also going for innovative gameplay because they want to reach more people. They know that the stereotypical gaming demographic is now saturated. It's worse in Japan than it is in the US. Over there, the trend towards more complex gaming has pushed away many gamers, especially those outside the historical gamer demographic - causal gamers and older gamers especially. For example, the mother of one of my Japanese friends loves videogames but is turned off by games past the SNES era simply because one look at the controllers puts her off. She thinks immediately that the games will be too hard to play and won't even try. At the 2005 Tokyo Gameshow, Iwata pointed out evidence that the games market is actually beginning to shrink in Japan, and the past trends in gaming are to blame. Nintendo isn't innovating and growing the market for the good, they're doing it for the money. The good for the game industry comes as a secondary, if not unwanted effect.
Back when I played EQ1, the exact same problem existed. MMORPGs are meant to cater to the lowest common denominator, and to achieve that their game mechanics favor time spent by the player in the game world over skill of the individual player. The time-over-skill value in MMORPGs is the reason why you see horrible high level players. "Hard" MMORPGs aren't hard inthemselves; they just take more time to get anything done than "easy" MMORPGs. More time investment doesn't always lead to increased skill or understanding, especially when the game in question requires little of either to be successful. MMORPGs are among the few games that low-skill people can actually thrive in, especially if they pick a valued class. In EQ1, it was cleric, warrior, or enchanter. I've seen many players of the three aforementioned classes that are the "top" people in a guild who have phat lewt and all that, but really they're terrible players who will get lost in the easiest to navigate of dungeons, who will fail miserably at any sort of platforming or careful character navigation, but they are just online all the time and people needed their class abilities...so they were successful.
Oh, and EQ1 had changes to its PVP system where they added the ability to attack player opponents directly behind you. Know why? Because crappy high level players that put tons of time into the game and had elite gear were getting beaten by lower level, lesser geared individuals that had fundamental skill in videogames in the best of the best tournaments. So they dumbed down that aspect of the game just so time spent on your character would be the deciding factor, not skill, in a PVP match.
A quarterly profit of $55 million is kinda small compared to the average ~$1 billion in losses that division has seen per year for the last four years.
At the very least, many of Resident Evil 4's cut scenes had interaction akin to Dragon's Lair and the like. I really think that game did it right, and I hope to see more games utlize that style. It's about damn time too, given that games with interactive cutscenes like those you mentioned came out quite some time ago!
Because it's a game. As I stated before, arbitrarily restricting weapons in a nonsensical way is just as bad as arbitrarily allowing every weapon in the game on your person simultaneously. Halo is not "far more" realistic than most other FPSs. It just uses a different method of weapon management than past FPSs that has its own flaws just like every other before it. That's it.
Then the parent shouldn't be using the term "realistic" in a positive manner.
Sorry to nitpick, but I'd say Soldier of Fortune's or Counterstrike's loadout restrictions are a little more realistic. Hell, even Dues Ex is more realistic given the kind of cyborg character you're dealing with. Let me illustrate. Why is it that in Halo, a pistol takes up the same inventory space as a rocket launcher?
Sure, Halo 2 half-addressed that with dual wielding, but it still was far from realistic. You still couldn't carry a large primary (rifle or larger), a medium secondary (SMG, shotgun, etc), and a pistol all at once unless you dual wielded. And if you carried a huge ass rocket launcher and a high calibur yet non-recoil sniper rifle, you'd move just as fast as if you were carrying one human pistol and one covenant pistol. And you could only carry those two pistols (three if you dual wield!), yet they take up far less space, use totally different means of storage on your person, and weigh far less than the rocket launcher + sniper rifle combo. There are ways to make carrying capacities in FPSs more realistic. Halo's method was just as arbitrary as Half Life's allowing players to carry ~10 different weapons with no restrictions.
Gee, according to wikipedia and a previous article here on Slashdot, World of Warcraft broke 5 million suscribers months ago. This guy at Forrester got paid to write this?
Secondly, "Afterwards they received a set of objective measures of physiological and psychological aggression, they found that subjects who played the version that rewarded violent behaviours (running over pedestrians) showed increased hostility and aggression. Note that since subjects were randomly assigned to conditions one can safely assume a causal model in which playing a game that rewards violent behaviour does lead to hostile/aggressive behaviour."
Whoa, hold it. What measures were they exactly? Were the physiological measures changes in body temperature, heart rate, body conductivity, eye dialation, etc, or were they actual physical hostile/aggressive behaviors? There's a world of difference between being in a hostile/aggressive state of mind and taking hostile and aggressive action. If the measures didn't include actual aggressive actions, then there is only a correllational relationship between violent games, agressive/hostile mindframes, and aggressive/hostile behavior.
The only way you could establish a causal relationship between violent games and aggressive/hostile behavior is if the rewarded group committed aggressive/hostile actions in the exact same setting that the other two groups did not commit aggressive/hostile actions in, with sufficient statistical significance. Even if such is the case it is only known to apply to that one setting. Other experiments would have to do the exact same experiment, changing only the setting the three groups are subjected to after gameplay to see if it is more widely applicable.
But hey, if you do take a lazy and baseless but oppositional position in slashdot, then you'll get modded up for being insightful!
I hope this isn't taking away from them releasing maps beyond the four that came with the launch. After all, the primary criticism of DoD: Source is its lack of content, not graphical quality or immersiveness.
That said, I personally wouldn't even classify the people that gave louder blasts as antisocial, as such people have a remarkable lack of empathy for others across all situations. I don't think one should expect too much empathy between opponents in a competition - especially one that involves no physical contact or even visual sight of the opponent. The greater the pain one inflicts upon another, the more the one doing harm can physically sense (see, hear, etc) the victim, and the greater physical proximity between the one doing harm and the victim, the greater the empathy response and thus personal distaste for doing harm to another (as noted in Milgram's experiments on torture and obedience of authority). I'd also extrapolate that the less that one reciprocates harm to the person doing harm, the greater the empathy response. But that's just my opinion, and isn't supported by any experiments that I know of right now. Either way, this experiment's not really representative of most real life situations for the above reasons.
Technicalities aside, I get the gist of your point, and I agree with it. The loud noise making is a sign of increased aggressiveness, and aggressiveness does not equal violence, nor does it lead to violence in the vast majority of situations.
Making a fighter, barbarian or similar melee type will be easier to pick up, as they are usually more simple to play. However to make a good one, it takes a greater understanding of the game rules than if you play a cleric or druid. Sort of a paradox, I know. Another paradox is that a CoD can actually out-fight most of the primary fighting classes by the mid levels, and definetly towards the higher levels.
Oh, and on a related note, multiclassing is intended in 3.5, mainly for non-spellcasting classes. There's nothing wrong with it or unbalancing about it. A straight CoD is actually more powerful than nearly any multiclass combination.
Also, don't let the character class name bind you to what you want for your character concept. The class names are just handy labels for describing a set of abilities. A barbarian could just as easily be called a "fast, durable skirmisher". Barbarians don't all have to be "THOG SMASH!". So don't pigeonhole yourself just based on what's written on your character sheet. A cleric could even work as a mercenary, wizards can be very devout in following what diety they choose, and so on. Clerics in 3.5 don't even have to follow a diety. They can just believe in a set of ideals or a particular alignment axis.
Anyway, I hope that helps.
Here's an idea. Before you come up with a counterargument to what everyone else is saying, get some actual facts to back it up, or check the arguements of the people you're supporting, and see if you have any ground to stand on first. Think about the implications of spouting off uninformed opinions. And then err on the side of safety. In truth, not allowing people to see opinions that aren't backed up by some -- or any -- empirical evidence is not harmful to them.
Especially when there are counter-opinions that are backed up by such evidence!
Why does FFFish get modded insightful for belting out out an unpopular but still baseless opinion, while j-turkey gets jack for decisively refuting his stance by using very relevant (and ironic) evidence? I hope the latter is just due to mods being normal people that have other things to do throughout the day, but the former I really can't understand.
Enter The Matrix - the game that went along inbetween the second and third movies for instance. If anybody played it could tell you it was a very average game, came out in the 9-10 spots from some big name reviewers, check it out at metacritic. It had initially a very high rating that dropped sharply as more "indy" game review sites reviewed it more realistically and bagged it for what it was.
If by 9-10 spots you mean a score of 9-10, on the link you posted, only the Gamezilla! review gave it a score of 91. There are two low 80 scores following - one is from Play Magazine, with an 83...not a 90+. Entertainment Weekly gave it a 75.
And that's pretty much the end of the noticably above average scores. IGN gave it a 66. Gamespot gave it a 63. PC Gamer, 55. Gamespy gave it a 53. Gamepro, 50. Computer Gaming World, 50. Computer Games Magazine, 40. I'm not sure how big Gamezilla! is, but I'm pretty sure those others that I pointed out that gave the game more average (near 5.0) scores are rather popular and/or are actual gaming magazines, and they far outnumber those that gave the game a score of 7.5 or higher. As far as I can tell, your own evidence presented refutes your claim more than it supports it. Have I missed something? If so, please enlighten me.