Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Hiiri]

Reviews are and always will be opinions. As such someone will always disagree.

This!

Personally I like Gamespot reviews and dislike IGN or Gamespy.

[Graven]

I despise Gamespot reviews, ever since the Kane and Lynch ... situation. Not to mention they're just freaking wrong on way too many occasions. I do read the website a lot, though - to check up on what's out and what's on its way

I've always, always heard good stuff about the Edge's reviews, mostly that they're the most objective ones out there, though I'm not sure if that's about the actual physical magazine, or the website, because I've never checked it myself. Anyone have any experience with them?

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

I trust you people here at Bay12 more than any game reviewer. Other Games is a wounderfull place to find out about games and not just the high end games but the strange and the rare as well. The biggest problem I have with game reviewers is that they are professional game players in general. I am nowhere near pro level at playing games so how can they tell me whats good or bad? Also Yahtzee may rant a lot but he tells the truth straight and honestly I prefer a true negative review over a false positive one.

So to wrap up I trust you here on Bay12 to be my reviewers because you people like things that are similar to what I like.

[Farseer]

The biggest problem I have with game reviewers is that they are professional game players in general.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.

Sorry, man, that's just hilarious. :p

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

Not profesional as in they do it very well but professional as in they do it for a profession/job and I find that for me doing anything for fun for a job unless its your one true love of a hobby it sucks a lot of the fun out

[Graven]

See, that's something I have trouble comprehending. How does one "game for a profession" apart from the ...odd... people competing on WCG and other vidja game competitions? You can bet no reviewers are playing at the level of having a professional personal trainer for any given game. They're just people who got lucky in being selected to write for a media, honestly. There hasn't been a single review where I go "Oh damn good thing this dude played through the game, I never could've done it the same way!". The great majority don't even write that well; hell, the most entertaining and funny reviews I've read have been on fan forums.

You read game reviews to see how the game is on a mechanical, basic level, without actually spending time. Unlike, say, vehicle tests, or even computer hardware tests, where the guys reviewing need to have certain skills to do the review in a competent way.

And I'm still waiting for an opinion on the Edge, you guys! x]

[nenjin]

See, this is what I think professional gaming journalists SHOULD be doing.

They should be putting in the time to really deconstruct a game for consumers. They'd be professional in the sense that they put the time in to truly understand a game before they talk about it. (And they have actual writing skills, a sense of decorum, journalist integrity, and all that shit too.)

There are a few reviews I've read when the reviewer zero'd in on a really awkward point of the game that made it hard to call the product fun or successful. (And I mean beyond "this game has performance problems.") Insight like that only comes from putting in the time to experience it, think about what it means and how best to articulate it to the reader. That's why I would pay someone to review video games. And as I read over the 1-page previews for stuff coming out....most of what these guys are doing is just rephrasing the press release bullet points and adding their own cheeky humor to the piece. It's no wonder no one takes gaming journos seriously.

[chewie]

I'm not really a reader (or viewer) of game reviews, but I recently got interested in Frozen Synapse (also bought it ) and, you know, they have this game review from a website called Giant Bomb on their homepage and I really enjoyed those guys, since they told you about most aspects of the game while playing it. It's like a let's play but they just tell you how the game works, if it's fun and so on. And of course they're commenting their own gameplay.

You can watch that review here under "giant bombs quick look" or here on their official website (where also tons of other game reviews are uploaded).

Eidt: Watch this review too. I likes it

[Graven]

Nenjin, that's a good point, but one that can, for now, be safely considered "impossible". If reviewers take too long to write a single review, then they aren't spending the time doing reviews of other games, thus actively hurting the website they're employed by. If there were a single, large site that only deals in reviews maybe this could be done, but then comes another element - subjectivity. Every review is subjective, and there's really no way to be subjective of a game, apart from the very basic mechanical elements - game engine, graphics (but even then comes the problem of style - some people prefer simplistic and stylized graphics, other - detailed realistic stuff and so on), controls. Everything else, the stuff we as gamers care about - game play, atmosphere, emotions evoked, plot, dialogue - every single one of these elements is subjective. And consequently every attempt to evaluate these elements is suitably subjective.

As a direct effect, that one, big website is starting to fracture, people start cherry-picking reviews based on the author and it all goes to hell

Anyway, because of that subjectivity there can really be no journalistic integrity when reviewing, especially games, simply because though it's easy to say "this game sucks because of X, Y and Z" there's bound to be people who disagree on at least one of these. Thus it's easier to swoosh through the game in a couple of days, write a completely basic and simplistic review, mention graphics and gameplay, name a few bugs, praise the dialogue and move on.

And I still maintain Yahtzee as the only reasonable critic. Because, as hilarious as some of his complaints about games are, he keeps mentioning every single tiny bit that could annoy you. It's then up to the person to decide if he would agree.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

A game reviewer can not trully give an indepth game review because they review game"s" not a game. Think of how long you would have to play Dwarf Fortress to see even half of the creatures in game. How could a reviewer even start to comment on Dwarf Fortress unless they not only play the game a little but look at the rest of everything to it?

[nenjin]

I went to school for journalism. I know about deadlines, and I know what kind of a monster deadline they have to face, where they're "reporting" involves 5 hours sitting on their ass in their office. Seriously, compared to what actual news people have to do, gaming journos have it fucking easy. There's no excuse other than a budget for not giving these games, and more importantly, the writing the time it deserves. If a company can't allow a reviewer more than an hour with a game before they ask them to review, the problem isn't the fact they have to review games. The problem is the constraints they're operating under.

And seriously, look at Gamespy. These guys spend hours online researching memes from the past, finding pictures and throwing together junk humor articles. Can you honestly tell me that time couldn't be spent really treating video games like they're worth playing seriously and writing seriously about?

Every review is subjective, and there's really no way to be subjective of a game, apart from the very basic mechanical elements - game engine, graphics (but even then comes the problem of style - some people prefer simplistic and stylized graphics, other - detailed realistic stuff and so on), controls. Everything else, the stuff we as gamers care about - game play, atmosphere, emotions evoked, plot, dialogue - every single one of these elements is subjective. And consequently every attempt to evaluate these elements is suitably subjective.

Not to get heated, but....BS. Everything is subjective, even the facts. That's the first thing you learn about modern media. You can't use the excuse that everything has a subjective interpretation stop you from doing the work. And in fact, it doesn't. It's not really a defense. Plus, there are PLENTY of factual elements that they can describe. They have the luxury over real journalists of being allowed to have an opinion.....so why not put some meat on the bones of that opinion?

I'll admit my bias. I'm a reader. I like reading. I like consuming information that way. I know I'm in the minority there when it comes to modern media. But, still, every journo has to deal with the subjectivity problem, even the ones that deal purely in "facts." Gaming journos are not an exception.

The problem, to me, is that they take all the liberties that the media is afforded without any of the underlying  principles to guide them. So to me, Yahtzee is like a big punch in the face. Not only does he say fuck it to professionalism, not only are his "reviews" as slanted as they are infotainment, but many people think HE'S doing it the right way. If you criticize a gaming journo for the lack of journalism in their work, all the controls and scruples and stuff, they'll say "Oh we're a different kind of media." In the same breath they'll ask you put the same stock in what they say as people that work to a far higher standard of quality.*

*Yes, even today's mass media is working at a higher standard than gaming journos.

A game reviewer can not trully give an indepth game review because they review game"s" not a game. Think of how long you would have to play Dwarf Fortress to see even half of the creatures in game. How could a reviewer even start to comment on Dwarf Fortress unless they not only play the game a little but look at the rest of everything to it?

Way to pick the game that bears absolutely no relation to anything reviewers deal with.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

I used it because this is Bay12 so most people know it and know that it is very indepth. It is a very extreme example that a real game review will probably not be seeing any time soon but the facts stand. A non-specific example would be any game that has more content after you beat it.

[nenjin]

Sorry, no game has been in constant development for 10 years at the scope of DF. Not WoW, not any MMO, no epic rogue-like. It's simply not the kind of game reviewers will probably ever be confronted with reviewing. (Although I know just about all of them are aware of DF.) It's just not relevant to this discussion, until we start seeing an entirely different kind of game become popular. At most, 40 hours will tell you everything you need to know about a game coming out today by mainstream publishers. And you don't even need 1/10th of that in most cases.

Hell, I reviewed DF for another site, and I think after 20 hours and 4 pages, I'd still barely scratched the surface. If there were more games like that coming out now, I'd say you have point. But there aren't. There's just DF.

[Virtz]

A game reviewer can not trully give an indepth game review because they review game"s" not a game. Think of how long you would have to play Dwarf Fortress to see even half of the creatures in game. How could a reviewer even start to comment on Dwarf Fortress unless they not only play the game a little but look at the rest of everything to it?

How does number of encountered creatures have anything to do with it? They're supposed to be reviewing gameplay, not writing a guide.

[nenjin]

So might say I'm asking for guides rather than reviews. That's not it though. Were a mainstream reviewer to do an article about DF, I'd expect "it has several dozen creatures. They all seem pretty unique. Too bad there's no animations." That's the level of depth I think reviews get done at these days, for products far, far simpler and easier to tease apart than DF.