Comments on: Unfair Criticism

By: gregl

gregl — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 18:30:22 +0000

Damn you for reminding me about how sad I am that Games Domain Review is gone. They used to be a pretty reliable source of careful, comprehensive, reviews.

But now they’re gone.

GONE.

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 01:32:53 +0000

I’ve always been confused as to game reviewers’ apparent inability to use any number out side of the 70 to 100% range. Why base your score on a percentage if you’re never going to use the whole spectrum? Movies get away with a 5 star system, where five is great, one is poor, and three is average. yet game reviews treat 95-98% as great, 80% is average, and 70% is poor.
Which brings up another point: why are games rarely rated at 100%? 100% seems to be regarded as a ‘perfect game’, where all visuals, sound and gameplay elements are without flaw. yet how can you rate this? What about games with more abstract visuals, or games that excel in gameplay but have only better-than-average sound(yet not outstanding). As mentioned above different audiences will rate games differently, so an exact multi-digit score is inaccurate at best, and perhaps not necessary at all.
Not all moves 5 star rated movies are flawless, but they are awarded 5 stars because they are great movies. Perhaps games should try a similar approach – if a game achieves everything it sets out to do, and delivers entertainment far beyond the price of the game (i.e. outstanding value for money), shouldn’t it recieve a 5 star score? a 100%?

Though perhaps rating games, essentially from 1 to 5 (or 1 to 10 if you use half-stars) is not accurate enough for rating something that costs a lot more than a movie – It’s not enough to say rate two games 3 star, they need a grater range to rate exactly how much better game A is than game B (3.8 vs 3.2 for instance). People need to know exactly what they are getting when spending so much money. Yet, again this fails due to the differences in audiences.

I know i would gain a lot more from such reviews. I have read reviews (Half-Life 2 for instance) where it recieved a 98% or something score, yet the review focused on the technology and features. It told me nothing what it was like to play the game, and even with a near-perfect score – that still doesn’t meant that i will actually like the game.

What’s the answer then? well, the point of your article I think: more emphasis on gameplay and what it’s like to actually play the game. Surely that’s more valuable than an arbitrary and inaccurate ‘specific’ percentage. And then apply a five star raring to the end to judge the overall quality of the game: poor, below average, average, good, great.

By: rlink

rlink — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 23:26:36 +0000

This one of the benefits of being about a year or more behind the gaming curve. I can just ask friends for their opinions of games that are almost guaranteed to have made their way to the used stacks at local game stores. If I ask people whose taste in games I know are similar to mine, and they still have good memories of a particular game a year later, I can be pretty sure I’ll enjoy it.

I’ve only ever returned one game I’ve purchased in this manner (Metroid Prime) because it did something no other video game has ever been able to do: give me motion sickness.

By: psu

psu — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 13:52:27 +0000

I do not think the scores lack value. I just think that in the end, it’s the only thing that most reviews have to offer. So, almost all reviews can be boiled down to a single piece of information representable with 4 binary digits.

By: Dhruin

Dhruin — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 23:14:46 +0000

I have divided feelings on this. There are indeed a truckload of bad amateur reviewers out there (perhaps I am one of them) but there are some good professional journalists – it doesn’t take too long to find specific writers or even sites that are in tune with your way of thinking. For *professional* reviews (as opposed to amateur websites) I think the emphasis on the technical is probably overstated but of course, it does vary.

The scores thing is interesting…I think you imply that scores are of suspect value – but then what would be the point of visiting Metacritic?

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 07:58:35 +0000

I tend to agree with you, although I don’t tend to read reviews for games very often these days. I personally find two problems: Firstly that game reviews do not take into account the diversity of the audience very well (the very process of assigning a numerical score presupposes all games can be judged by equivalent criteria). Secondly, there are no critiques of games. The latter isn’t wholly suprising, since the media of games is not taken very seriously yet, but the former is a little disappointing.

I suspect the problem is that many (but by no means all) game reviewers are in it because they want to be paid to play games, not because they want to be paid to review games. (And many internet reviewers are unpaid fans, I suppose).

That said, I have met several members of the games press who I felt were exceptional – but many of them wrote for European magazines that weren’t published in English.