[General Discussion] Video game review reform idea.

Really, you can't expect that kind of sensibility on the part of gaming journalists...Ethical debates like that take away from their gametime.

What I don't like is when a higher profile game is reviewed with a thorough emphasis on its' high points (or half the review is talking about how much they enjoyed playing it) and a lesser profile game is reviewed and the review spends most of the time talking about 1 or 2 nit-picking flaws or just throwing fluff against the wall. Really, if you see Growlanser Generations get a small 100-150 word review and more than half of that is discussing the premium package and very little of the actual content in both games, you have to wonder how much the reviewers played the thing (sup, Game Informer) and it doesn't aid your buying decisions at all. Likewise, you can see Halo 2 get 2 full-2-page reviews for BOTH the 1P game AND multi-player, then wonder how they complain they "didn't have enough space" for other games. Yeah, fuck you EGM.

As for games that stay the same...I don't think you can really regulate it. I just think it happens naturally when a genre becomes less popular (or in some cases, more popular, as the case with Xtreme Sports games). I think it'd be impossible for a Megaman game to score significantly high marks nowadays, since they don't really mess with the formulas of the games. I think the concentration is more on who the maker of the games are and how much weight they hold...Realistically, you're not going to see large franchises from EA or Square get the same kind of treatment a lesser franchise/publisher would. Too much money involved to notice the encounter rate or jaggies you would in lesser-profile games.

Game reviews have always been a joke, but the lines are much more clear-cut nowadays that they're not even worth reading for the entertainment value.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by RABicle

The other probelm is that games that arn't any fun and fail at most things get a score like 6.5. Again, that's fucking bullshit. If the game FAILS at being fun then it deserves a FAIL mark, ie. something below 5. A score like 6.5 implys that 6 or 7 out of every ten things in teh game are good! That's not true. They're shit. Give it the score it deserves.

Agreed...But again, normally the games that get these types of scores never belong to the really "known" makers. Dirge of Cerberus and even Crystal Chronicles got a LOT of 6-7's, which was basically a nice way of telling Square "Okay, we enjoy your business...This is the lowest we can give your game without breaking the agreement". Hardly anything positive was written about them. Meanwhile, a good game from a lesser publisher is lucky to get a 6-7, due to the reviewers not really caring about it or the minimal amount of adverstising dollars they'll lose...Not hard to just harp on the one or two things a game does wrong, then knock its' score down just for the hell of it.

So figure a 6-7 for Suikoden V or Ys: Ark of Napishtim is more akin to an 8 or 9 IRL, a 6-7 for DoC or CC would be more of a 4 or 5 IRL.

A game's status probably plays more of a role than anything in these situations...

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by JackyBoy

I can sympathize with these guys. Their job is to sit up until the early hours of the morning playing every game under the sun. If I had to play poorly made budget game #382919183 when I really want to be playing Twilight Princess I would probably write a three sentenced review aswell. "Yeah, the game sucks. What did you expect." It really ought not be a surprise when a game like FFXII get's a 5 page review.

I wouldn't say it should be a surprise, but a lot of the "mainstream game" reviews read like "Okay, you know this game is getting a good score, I know this game is getting a good score, the publisher knows this game is getting a good score...So dammit, we're giving this game a HELLUVA good score and a real wordy description, while minimizing what it does wrong and overblowing what it does right" One of the more blatant examples is Gamespot, where they just take long reviews and break them into "pages" to make them seem longer and more descriptive.

In the case of Final Fantasy XII (and other "high profile" RPG's that generate a heated discussion over certain aspects), I find it hard to believe that the majority of journalists come to the objective agreement that each game is well done, when they're so heatedly discussed in basically every gaming community. They've gotten burned for "premature" reviews as well...The EGM one for Final Fantasy Anthology makes no mention of the various emulation issues which are blatantly obvious to anyone who plays the game (especially since most of the staffers mentioned playing FFVI on SNES...A scenario where you will definitely notice a difference).

A distinction should be made between a budget POS (like, say, Bode Miller Alpine Skiing) and a quality, but low profile game (Growlanser Generations). You can play Bode for all of 2 minutes to see it is a shitfest made solely to capitalize on Olympic Fever...There's enough crap to rag on for a short review in a single playthrough. But I'm not convinced you can do the same with something like Growlanser Generations, which is made up of two individual games with a lot of depth to them and was all but ignored by the mainstream gaming press (most reviews were puny and useless). Or even Suikoden V, which has a full-length Game Informer review that wastes half of the space yacking about FFVII.

I remember the "old" EGM, where all reviews were 1/3 of a page and all games were treated equally (four reviewers). Metal Gear Solid and Zelda: OOT getting their all 10's was well and good (with say-nothing-descriptions, I might add), but it was also nice seeing games like the original Guilty Gear and Magic Knight Rayearth getting the same type of face-time. It made for more of a parity factor and didn't make the "mainstream vs smallstream" thing so blatant. Also, unlike the current EGM, they didn't read like a poor man's message board trolling. Most were informative, with just the right hint of satirical humor when needed. That whole mag has gone to hell since Dan Hsu took over. I seriously just want to slap the taste out of that guy's mouth everytime I read something of his.

*Sigh*...I miss the "good" EGM.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.