N'Gai Croal
|
Jan 8, 2008 05:31 AM
Regular readers of our daily High Score posts know that GameSetWatch
is a blog that we here at Level Up very much enjoy. So it is with
something approaching great reluctance that we take issue with its
January 2nd post, titled "GameSetChat: How Do Wii Judge Fun For
Mainstream Gamers?" In it, site editor and man-of-many-hats Simon
Carless (who also serves as the publisher of both Game Developer and Gamasutra, chairman of the Independent Games Festival and organizer of the Independent Games Summit at the Game Developers Conference) shared an IM exchange with Joel Reed Parker of Game Of The Blog
discussing the quality of Wii software and the perceived inability of
game reviewers to distinguish between good and bad casual games. Here's
a snippet of what they said:
Joel Reed Parker: Man, Wii third-party software really is
bad...a friend got a Wii and was asking me for advice about party
games and good games and such. According to the aggregate scores sites,
not much.
Simon Carless: But I will say that conventional reviewers do
a poor job of differentiating fun casual games from bad casual games--or just bad games, in my opinion.
JRP: I agree wholeheartedly. Same goes for kids' games also.
SC:
Like Mario Party 8 has a 62 average on Metacritic's Wii chart, and so
does...Heatseeker? Blimey. OK, we definitely need write something about
this.
JRP: I didn't even seen the Rayman Raving Rabbids games as
high as I thought they would be. It's all the predictable stuff--Mario, Metroid, Zelda.
SC: There's definitely a problem here--Elebits, Korinrinpa,
and Dewy's Adventure are all worth checking out, and are lost in terms
of scoring with markedly inferior games--even/especially from a 'mainstream' gamer perspective.
It's understandable that in an IM chat, Carless and Parker would use
Metacritic averages as evidence of a disconnect between reviewers and
consumers when it comes to non-core games. But how truly make a case
without examining the text of the reviews? By our lights, the text of a
review is where a writer should, in part, attempt to
weigh his or her own experience against that of the game's intended
audience, be it tween girls or military shooter fanatics. The score, on
the other hand, should measure the game against both others of its ilk
and
against games in general.
Carless and Parker, however, appear to
have assumed that the consumer guide aspect of a review (what does the
writer believe a typical player might think of this game?) is more
important--or somehow separable--from the critical assessment aspect of
a review (what does the writer himself or herself think of this game?)
when it comes to casual games.
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