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[inteuniso]

Standards aren't slipping all that much. Just as people who enjoy 70's music don't necessarily enjoy modern music, people who enjoy 90's games won't necessarily enjoy modern games.

While I admit big review sites are certainly biased to the big titles, there are still some great games out there. Dwarf Fortress, Mount & Blade: Warband, there's a lot of good, recent games out there.

[lumin]

Whenever I go look at a game review I ignore the main score and look at the player score.  They are almost spot on to what it should be rated.  For example, Gamespot gave both GTA4 and GTA:SA a 9.0, but the users gave GTA4 an 8.0 while still giving San Andreas a 9.0.  That seems just about right to me.

Another example is Battle For Middle Earth 1 and 2.  By most professional reviewing outfits, BFME 2 scored much higher, but in most cases BFME scored about the same as BFME 2 by users.  I always personally thought BFME 1 was better than 2.

User scores give you a hype-less score and evens out over time when the "newness" factor has cooled.

[Shades]

Maybe the reviewers are being bribed (it really wouldn't surprise me, after the Kane&Lynch fiasco) or at least pressured into giving better reviews than the games deserve.

Not bribed as such, but when your also buying half a million pounds of advertising too with the threat to withdraw it if the review score is below a certain value then there is... pressure... to rate high.

This goes for all magazines and websites that I have been privy to any details about. I'm sure there are honest ones out there but I've yet to find them.

Don't feel too cynical about that though, the rankings for top 10 games in shop displays are just straight sold

[Sowelu]

A lot of my favorite games back in the early 90s sucked.  I liked them despite them sucking, but they still had huge, massive flaws.  I tolerated them then because the market was so small, but I'd be whining my head off about them if they showed up in a modern day, because my own standards have gone UP.

If you want some benchmarks to look at review scores...well, instead of comparing today's awesome RPG against Planescape: Torment (which, be honest, the combat system wasn't that great, D&D doesn't translate THAT well to computer, especially for non-tabletop fans), compare it against the legion of flash games out there, the legion of FREE or donationware little indie games out there, etc.


I posted about Hero Core last night or so.  It's a free indie metroidvania with a retro feel.  It's great at doing exactly what it does...but is it objectively as good as Mass Effect, different genre notwithstanding?  HELL no.  It's short, the graphics are purposefully retro; if I saw it on a review site, I would *expect* it to get a score in the mid-high 60s, with a summary like "A decent way to spend a couple hours if you're a fan of the genre".  It has VERY polished gameplay, but that's the score it deserves in my mind.

What deserves lower than a high 60?  Well, I still think that modern hits shouldn't be compared scorewise with other modern hits, but instead, with all games regardless of length.  I thought that Today I Die was a neat little artsy flash game.  Great presentation, but hey, short, confusing, and at the end, you shed a single tear and then forget about it entirely.  It's not a bad game, it just has zero lasting impact, it's confusing...I still liked it, but it does not deserve a high score.  What does it deserve?  Low 40s for a game you can play in five minutes (or 30 seconds if you know what to do).

There was some overhyped game called Time Fcuk on Newgrounds a while back.  You could spend MANY hours on it, if you found it challenging, and if you liked playing with the level editor and sharing levels with others.  But I really didn't like the execution at all, I didn't enjoy the game.  Played it anyway because I was bored, but regardless of length, it gets a low 40s from me as well.

There's a ton of shareware-type games out there where you click to find objects on the screen, or to find differences, or whatever the hell.  Some people like them, like my ex, but the graphics aren't great and the gameplay is quite middling.  But they still do a "play for an hour free, then buy it"--so it's not just free games that I think are bad.  Low 60s from me.

Today's tower defense faffle?  Probably in the 50s.  I could blow some hours on it, but I'd feel dirty afterwards.

What ranks in the 20s-40s range?  One of those weird semi-Rube Goldberg games on Newgrounds, where you click the lever and the windmill pops up, then you click the windmill and it blows the seeds over to wherever and they start growing and open a door and whatever.  There's some really bad ones out there.

Below 20s and it's not really playable but YOU CAN STILL FIND IT ON NEWGROUNDS, and the players still rate it 10/10, because Newgrounds users have terrible taste.  I saw several people give a rating of 10/10 to a giant mecha dressup "game" (click a part of the mecha, and it cycles through a library of stuff).  The sounds were way oversampled, the graphics weren't that great, and there was no "game" at all.  It didn't even deserve a 10/100.

While I'm at it.  The indie games that are a lot longer, a lot more worth playing, that I think EVERYONE on this board should play?  Iji, which can easily eat up a week or three...  High 70s, not quite low 80s.  Imperfect controls, graphical style got a B for effort but a C for execution, the story really reached and did a great job--but it didn't follow through with all the promises of storyline branching that it sold to the player.  It was a wonderful game.  But there's no way it deserves a score in the 90s.  Spelunky, which many players have an addiction to?  I'd put that at low 70s.  An awful lot of big-team games are better.

In all honesty, I probably overrated many (but not all) of these indie games.  Ask yourself, "What would this indie game have to do to get a score in the 80s?"  If the answer is "a hell of a lot, like better graphics, bugfixes, better controls, more game modes, a longer story, a broader story, and hell, why not multiplayer", here's a hint, it doesn't deserve a score in the 70s.  That puts a lot of fun, quite-replayable, small-budget games in the 60s.  (But not Iji, which is great.)


So, in summary.  NO.  Standards are NOT slipping.  Modern big-budget games, when compared against all the other games out there, are pretty darn good.

[Krumbs]

I have noticed games now seem to get a much higher score than they should. Edge gave Bayonetta a 10, the game looks like utter shite. All games seem to get high scores now, and when a truly good game comes along there's no way to distinguish it from the shit usually as they all get the same high scores.

Plus the games themselves are getting worse, it's always graphics over gameplay and I miss games packed with easter eggs and good story. Indie games are usually pretty good because a lot of the time they aren't doing it for money, and when they are they need to prove to the player that it's worth them parting with their cash for it. Big game companies can now seem to release any old shite and make millions, so long as it has guns, explosions, 'realistic' graphics, and tits. Anything else like a game based around building or a game with a different art style are usually labeled 'gay' or for children. It's a disgrace.

[Pathos]

<snip>

I still don't get why you're saying you shouldn't compare modern games to older games.

[Virex]

I actualy think standards have been going up the past few decades. People are still rating on bugs, sound, gameplay, graphics etc. but games nowadays have to score very high standards on nearly all cirteria to get good marks. And most actualy do.

Problem is that reviewers review in a technical way. They don't ask if a story is fun, they look at the tropes used, the structure. That gives an entirely different view of things. One could make a game that's incredably fun yet technicaly utter junk. Players will love it, but the reviewers will hate it, because reviewers don't look at the fun factor. This is true as well for other genres. Films, for example. Some of the best scoring films are mind-numbingly boring, because they are perfect in a technical way only and the reverse is true as well.

You'll usualy only agree with reviews if you look at games as an art who's techniques have to be considered. Nobody nowadays rates for fun alone, probably because reviewers try to mimic book and film reviewers, who often suffer the same problem. Only those two have had more time to refine things.

[Sowelu]

<snip>

I still don't get why you're saying you shouldn't compare modern games to older games.

I'm saying you should!  I'm also saying that older games were not very good.  Also, that a modern score of 95/100 today is a higher standard than was physically possible back in the 90s, when storage space, dev teams, and effects were more limited.  The scale has changed.  As much fun as you remembered them being, the Commander Keen games were probably in the mid-80/100 range at best in their own time...and they just don't stand up to modern games that deserve that same rating today.

[Grakelin]

Standards seem to be slipping because we don't spend our time thinking about sucky games from the SNES era. Go to a flea market and see how many of the SNES vendor's games you would actually want to play.

[3]

Of course, there's always the issue of whether or not a modern alternative to an outdated game actually exists - this might be a surprisingly common problem, considering how the games industry has become exponentially more risk-averse over the last ten years or so.

In fact, I'd go so far to say that there is so little variation in the general structure of the vast majority of games that've come out in the past twenty (possibly more, technological constraints nonwithstanding) or so years, that there are tons of games that are entirely unique... that doesn't sound right. I'll put it another way. If I looked at any entertainment industry older than video gaming, I'd probably be able to see that there aren't any truly original stories left to tell or themes left to explore - it's just a matter of which ones are more commonly explored than others. Because the chance of a theme being utterly unqiue is so minute, there's a very good chance that if I look at the oldest known use of whatever theme, I'll be able to find a more up-to-date alternative (of course, it might not be better than the original, but that's beside the point for now). The trend in the gaming industry over the past few years has effectively been that the only ideas which get recycled are market-friendly ones, which in itself is a product of the industry being risk-averse, thus making the market staler, and so on unto infinity.

What I'm trying to say is that this means there's a decent chance that if a game stood out from the pack at one point, chances are you'll be hard-pushed to find something that could be considered a "true" update of that game's content, unless of course the themes in said game have been accepted by the risk-averse industry and therefore feature in a large proportion of commercial games released.

How I think this ties into what's being said is that by saying that older games don't stand up to the games of today (which is almost completely true, of course), you're forgetting that the games industry is and (as far as my knowledge goes) has been, for the vast majority of its life at least, so self-derivative that games which scored highly in the first place likely haven't been effectively reproduced in the form of another game, and maintain unique elements. Whether they have any relevance today - there's supposedly no reason for the themes of yesteryear to be revisited, after all - is another matter entirely.

[GlyphGryph]

Review standards are slipping everywhere though, not just game reviews.

A 9 out of 10 just isn't what it used to be.

Maybe we need to start dialing it up to eleven so the really good stuff can still stand out?

[Sowelu]

A 9 out of 10 just isn't what it used to be.

Are you kidding me?  A lot of 9/10 games over the last two decades have been remarkably average.  Today's 9/10 games have more features, give longer playtime while usually being less repetitive, and have better graphics/sound etc.  Yeah, yeah, go ahead and argue that graphics aren't important, but you might as well take advantage of improvements there.

Lots of folks say that modern games aren't very original.  But a gamer who grew up on modern games, then played older ones, would probably say that the older games aren't very original.  I argue that if the timeline was reversed, people who saw modern games first, then retro games afterwards, would ALSO argue that "a 9 out of 10 just isn't what it used to be".

[nenjin]

Some good points in this thread.

1. Nostalgia. You can't get around it.

2. The phenomena of games we play for evar is a new thing. Square, Nintendo, Sega....many of these games were one-shot titles. Yet we played and replayed them because a) we were young and b) they were the pinnacle of gaming at the time.

3. The nature of the relationship between gaming journos and the industry.

That said, I think people are too hard on reviewers. I read Gamespy frequently. Not because it's top notch gaming journalism, but they do two things well. They inform people of what's coming out, and they do describe a game's faults and its high points. Granted, that isn't always reflected in the final score...but I get the impression people don't read Gamespy ect.. articles so much as they skim them to confirm what they already believe; that they're on the take.

Which, if you're up on your media, you realize this is par for the course. Game reviewers are in the exact same position as movie critics, except that game reviewers have a much closer relationship with developers. It would be like Ebert spending the last 10 minutes of his show talking about movies that haven't come out yet.

So I cut them some slack. And I try to read beyond my own cynicism when it comes to the industry.

And let's not forget, in terms of relative dollars, gaming is far more profitable, and costly than it used to be. That always changes the landscape.

But let me put it this way. I'm a huge retro junkie. I relive games, books, whatever constantly....and I have not YET finished an emulated title in the 10 or so years I've been doing it.

It's the curse of the older gamer that we will always be seeking that same fulfillment we found in simpler times.

[BigD145]

It's the curse of the older gamer that we will always be seeking that same fulfillment we found in simpler times.

Simpler times?! Modern games are far simpler than their older counterparts. Yeesh, just look at the Anno line. Stuff has been largely dumbed down.

[EuchreJack]

Beside that. There are some things to keep in mind. The video game industry is still kinda of young. Reviewing part of a media takes time to become impartial.

Uh, video game have been around for 30 years.  That excuse was maybe valid in 2000.  Although, video games have started entering the mainstream in the past 5 years, leading in a shift from harsh critics to cheerleader types on review staffs.  Maybe, as I haven't really read reviews in the last few years.  Or bought a game, for that matter.

I actualy think standards have been going up the past few decades. People are still rating on bugs, sound, gameplay, graphics etc. but games nowadays have to score very high standards on nearly all cirteria to get good marks. And most actualy do.

Problem is that reviewers review in a technical way. They don't ask if a story is fun, they look at the tropes used, the structure. That gives an entirely different view of things. One could make a game that's incredably fun yet technicaly utter junk. Players will love it, but the reviewers will hate it, because reviewers don't look at the fun factor. This is true as well for other genres. Films, for example. Some of the best scoring films are mind-numbingly boring, because they are perfect in a technical way only and the reverse is true as well.

You'll usualy only agree with reviews if you look at games as an art who's techniques have to be considered. Nobody nowadays rates for fun alone, probably because reviewers try to mimic book and film reviewers, who often suffer the same problem. Only those two have had more time to refine things.

To add to this point, consider that a reviewer has many games to try out.  Thus, the replayability factor is unlikely to be truly considered.  Most games can entertain for 40 hours.  But reviewers simply do not have the time to determine which games will still be fund over the course of years.  Besides, if they ever reviewed Dwarf Fortress, the reviewers would be out of a job, lol.