The Gamer's Quarter

[aderack]

[dhex]

they give you a personality type by which to judge the review. it's just another guideline to throw into the soup. not quite as handy as word of mouth, if you have mouths you can trust or at least understand.

"replay value" is a warning sign, i think.
_________________

[aderack]

Well, what do you typically have after you apply that filter?
_________________

[ajutla]

Warcraft III has a lot of replay value.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

Yeah, what dhex said, mostly. I haven't really read a "Nutritional Label" review and learned something about the game it was covering that I couldn't have learned by just looking at screenshots and talking with people who played it. More and more lately I'm beginning to trust gameplay videos more than traditional reviews, as I can see what the game looks like in action. However short video clips are no way to judge the merits of a game so word of mouth still rules the day.

To answer your question more specifically, aderack, they have given me an idea of what the game plays like physically. As in the technical merits and whether a game is too difficult or not. However, in recent years with games like Silent Hill 2 that style of review doesn't really hold up any more. It's getting to where the experience of a game can be more complex for more people than something a few paragraphs rating its technical merits can compete against. I only trust a few people in recommending me games, and even then they aren't always on the money because my own tastes are so specialized, and yet varied at the same time. In short, I know what I like so really the only person I can trust in regards to recommending games is myself.

This is true of most people. They'll play what they want and what suits their tastes, regardless of number scores. I imagine most gamers go by the gut on deciding what to play, much like myself.

Getting back to your questions again specifically: I haven't really had any experiences with typical game reviews. Sometimes I find that the score doesn't accurately reflect the game in question, as in Scratchmonkey's case, but I've learned this is typical. It will happen, as it has before. Most of the time I get a good enough idea as to what a game will be like, say a 70/30 chance(most cases even lower) of how it will actually turn out as I'm playing it. Then, this is only due to my own tastes, which I try to take into account as I'm looking up information on a potential game purchase. So in some ways it really is more about the player than the games merits on its own. Any word on if that Batteo guys books are out in english yet?

[Mister Toups]

I got burned by Kingdom Hearts and Starfox: Adventures, as advertised through Metacritic. This was before they "recentered" the scoring system; they both had above 80 and thus were ranked as "universal acclaim". This was in the heady days when I had faith in the critical consensus.
_________________
where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

[dark steve]

I can't read an Old Journalism review without suffering a panic attack from trying to second guess it.

[aderack]

Well, I mean. Grading an NES game on its technical merits leads to the same problems.

It's not a new phenomenon. There always have been bad games that are works of unbridled genius (like Silent Hill 2), and good games that lack any sort of lasting substance (like, well, take your pick). A superficial list of observations -- even, say, a very long clip of the game -- isn't enough to sort out issues like this.

The reason is somewhere in Pongism: in that the nature of videogames is in the interaction between the game and the player. And when you step away and instead, just look at the game for its own sake -- well. You've only got half the picture. You know the story about the blind men and the elephant.

This is the sort of dilema which results in Roger Ebert giving a really good example of a really bad movie a four-star review and a mediocre example of an excellent movie maybe two, two-and-a-half stars. Commentary and criticism.

Explore! What good is commentary? Surely it must have a use.
_________________

[friedchicken]

[seryogin]

Good commentary is when the writer takes a work, analyses it slightly and uses his analysis as a starting point for discussing an idea.

Or if he tells me something about a work that I have not noticed before.

[dhex]

[Szczepaniak]

I gave up on game reviews after seeing Halo get 10 out of 10 across the board, only to buy it and hate it bitterly. Seriously, I dispise that game, for multiple reasons, mostly stemming from just plain shitty design.

For me, it has nothing to do with the way a review is written, or who is behind it, I just have bloody strange tastes in games. The best game for me on PS2 after KD I would say is Skygunner. Magazines regarded it as average, I'd vote it as game of the year. (when it was released)

Seriously, I am so out of touch with mainstream gaming that the majority of reviews in commercial mags are useless to me. Tbh, if I could find someone whose thoughts were precisely like mine, I'd settle for a single sentence from them saying either buy it or ignore it.


One good example though, is Edge magazine who gave Steel Battalion a 6/10, citing poor AI, a lack of adaptive gameplay, and things being too scripted for the low score. They basically slated the whole game, and many people were put off. But they totally missed the genius of the game: the fact that it deletes your save file when you die, making it the most realistic war game of our time.

I've actually had about 5 people now, tell me that my feature on it made them rush out and buy the game, unlike the Edge review. Which is guess is another point for more descriptive reviews....

Actually, I have no idea where this post is going. Make your own conclusions from it.

[dessgeega]

i think numbers are useless when discussing games, or any works - detrimental, in fact. the "nutritional label" approach attempts to view a game's elements in isolation, rather than as a cohesive whole. it also perpetuates the notion that all games can be placed on a linear continuum.

which has better graphics: rez or tetris? they both have the graphics that they require.

i don't generally purchase contemporary games, though. so i don't really have much reason to read reviews.

i bought gradius v after reading aderack's piece on it. though that's largely because all i had seen of the game was ben shinobi's superplay, and i decided it must be impossible to recover from death in the game. ben shinobi is best known for no-death runs. when i read aderack's piece i learned that options can be immediately recovered after death.

so that was useful.
_________________

[TOLLMASTER]

I get the distinct feeling that I'm not intelligent enough to rule in on this debate. However, like a United States congressman, I'll give you my opinion anyway with the full knowledge that I'm not knowledgable on the subject matter.

I doubt few of you will argue with me that new games journalism sprung up from the realization that video games are extremely relative experiences. There is no mathematical equation that will allow you to rate the merits of a game since there is no definition of what a good game is. Our use of numbers came about as a way to try to say how good a game was in relation to another, but the numbers we arrived at were always wrong. Either one of two things happened: 1) The reviewer rated the game based on his own opinion of it, meaning it was biased and only useful to people who shared a common ground with the reviewer, or 2) the reviewer balanced the score between people who would like the game, and people who would not. Either way, the number was useless to the vast majority of readers.

I remember Chrono Trigger getting a high 80s and Earthbound getting a high 70s by the same reviewer in Game Players. The fact is, those numbers are completely useless to everyone. The numbers would have you believe that Chrono Trigger was a better game than Earthbound, whereas the two cannot be compared numerically. We could have a flame war on this very forum about which is better, and we tend to think more alike than the average gaming population. The only way to really get across the merits of each game is not a numerical rating, but a personal one. A review has to give us an insider's look at the reviewer as well as the game being reviewed. That way, we can understand the conclusions the reviewer reached, and whether we agree with them or not.

In aderack's "review": of Gradius V, I got a very distinct feeling on "where he was coming from." He didn't simply say "this game is quite difficult" or "this improves upon the Gradius style" but he explained the why and the how. By the end of the feature, I knew I would not enjoy the game as much as I had R-Type Final. A numerical rating of the two games by aderack would have led me to believe the opposite, I think, but since he was so good at explaining where his feelings came from, I could make my own judgement.

So. In my opinion, "nutrition label" reviews are rather useless. They're good for determining the genre and "general feel" of the game, but the numbers show no real information. You could give a game like Ogre Battle 64 anywhere from a 0 to 100% using the old style, based upon what baggage you bring with you before you start playing, and nothing has really been conveyed. Tell me why you like it or hate it, and what you're basing your opinions on, and I'll be able to understand that. Gamer's Quarter, as well as being a wellspring of innovative ideas about the functions of gameplay, succeeds well in this area, even when they're not doing actual reviews. In closing, I'd like to say thank you to aderack--you saved me a lot of time and money with your feature on "options" in Gradius V.

[Mr. Mechanical]

I think good commentary is being able to recognize what a game is doing or trying to do on a technical, structural, and personal level and then judging it to see if it succeeds or not.

[aderack]

Just for contrast, how would you define criticism?
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

For games? I suppose I'd take the commentary part and put it up against the scrutiny of a more established rubric. Problem is, though, that one doesn't really exist on that level at the moment.

[aderack]

What sort of a rubric? Give some analogies.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

Okay. Let's see. Look at, say, music. How is it usually judged? You've got your component parts(like lyrics and such), song structure(and how it sounds), production(technical stuff), and history(what came before). There's also a personal aspect, like how a song makes a person feel, but I don't see this very often. Then, I also don't read many music reviews. People combine all these things together to form a simple rubric to judge current music against.

The same could work for games, though the way I see it we've only got the production part(technical stuff) figured out, but nothing to add to it. It's just there. We don't see too often how the component parts of a game(like level design and play systems, to give an example) are put up against how well they work within the structure(the design of the game). History only really ever gets a mention, it seems, in how much a current game is similar or dissimilar. Never any real study seeing how the current game got there based on what came before or anything like that.

Then you get something else entirely to throw into the mix that doesn't really come with music: the play experience. It can be different for anybody, and anybody can either enjoy or not enjoy any given game accounting for their own personal tastes and such. It's like how you can hear a song and think "That's a good song, even though I don't really like it.", except you don't really see that with games. People play something they don't like and say "I'm not enjoying myself therefore this is a bad game.". The closest you can get is saying "I don't really like this game, but I can appreciate it on a technical level.".

So, to recap, an example of a decent rubric for criticizing a game could be: Component parts(the levels and characters and systems and such that make up the game), Structure(how all that crap is designed to make a game), Production(technical stuff), HIstory(how it all relates to what came before), and the Subjective(the actual play experience).

[ajutla]

Good game criticism is using the filter of personal experience to look for meaning in a videogame, and to come to a subjective understanding of what the game is trying to accomplish, and whether this is effective or interesting.

Otherwise you lose that meaning and the point.

Or some kind of shit like that.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

[ajutla]

I really don't know what the hell to think about music reviews.

I guess in a way they represent the worst about New and Old Games Journalism.

Or at least that review does.
_________________

[Mr. Mechanical]

Well, like I said, I don't really read music reviews anyway.

[Shapermc]

I would not recommend Silent Hill 2 or 4 to just anyone. It would take a certain kind of interest to get me to recommend it. I would recommend them SH3 though. It is an amazing game.

I would not recommend A Clockwork Orange to just anyone. If I was going to recommend a Kubrick film I would have to go with Full Metal Jacket (which most people ignore the second half of the film) or The Shining. ACO is still better than the others.

Speaking on these terms, based on the Rear Window reference in a SH4 review (noted in TGQ issue 1) and also based on a certain film thread that was based on older film, I am going to go watch (in about 10 min) Rear Window (which I even purchased) even though I find most Hitchcock to be lacking in thrill or suspense (The Birds excluded). I hope I like it.

[nICO]

[Szczepaniak]

[dhex]

[Szczepaniak]

I could be drunk on scrumpy, you never know!

Why though would there be corruption regarding a historical feature on a 15 year old series of games? A lot of companies don't even exist anymore, and places like Nintendo and Sega don't give a damn what you write about their old stuff. They also ignore most emails.

I really do not see how coverage of something that is not currently commercially active can be corrupted. Mistakes can be made due to sloppy research yes, but I've yet to see evidence of the tom-foolery that is lamented about in the current climate.

Even if someone writes a feature on the previous installments to currently big franchise, like Zelda, do you honestly think said retro writer can get away with lying about it? Thanks to the benefit of hindsight, you'd have swatches of people lambasting you on forums if you slated a classic title or claimed something rubbish was great.... actually, even when you tell it like it is, forums lambast you. Though mainly because you didn't cover some ancient title that was specifically special to them.


Also, I said "mostly devoid", which was my cunning way of covering my tracks should my statement prove wrong.

The only thing I can see problems with, is when companies actively set out to obscure the true facts behind the development of something. Such as Nintendo who never talk about the fact that SMB2 in the USA was actually a graphically altered version of Fuji TV's Famicom Disc System game, Doki Doki Panic. But even then, retro writers dig deep and reveal these hidden stories, it's not as if some PR rep is trying to persuade them to change their story.


Actually, maybe Im missing what you were aiming at....

[dhex]

it was the word bias that threw me off. self-righteous fandom - as glorious a phenomenon as can be, of course - is as strong a wiggling factor as any amount of schwag.

and i regard nostalgia as a corrupting factor, mind you, just not in the sense you mean it.
_________________

[Szczepaniak]

Fair enough, I should have probably left that word out.

It can for example be very annoying trying to talk about a game that has developed a reputation for being awful, when in actual fact it is borderline average/good. ET on the Atari for example is not as dire as other Atari 2600 games Ive played. Then again, I like FMV games, which I am unsure of what it says about my tastes in games.

[dhex]

as am i.

2600 et is good if you're a little kid and its the early 80s, but damn that was a terrible concept.

which also sums up the 2600 library.
_________________

[disneyland]

[dessgeega]

[disneyland]

[dessgeega]

[dark steve]

[disneyland]

[Mr. Mechanical]

[Sushi d]

[disneyland]

[Shapermc]

[dessgeega]

[Mister Toups]

[nICO]