re: A Symposium On Game Reviews. Topic 1: Review Scores, Part I

Etchasketchist — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 22:44:53 GMT

I gotta say, I cringe whenever I hear people complaining about review scores or snobbishly rejecting them. I love metacritic. It has saved me lots of money and steered me toward amazing games. N'Gai's preference for more literary, scoreless "criticism" would be awesome if videogames were like books and we could borrow them from the library for free (i've heard there are some websites where you can do something similar, but I wouldn't know anything about that...) but in reality, videogames are $10 (xbla) to $180 (rockband) pieces of software and it helps to know if they're good or not. The review score helps me with that. I go to metacritic and pick out the most reputable high score and the most reputable low score and see if the high-scorer loves the things I love and if the low-scorer hates the things i hate. In an age of 1-click online shopping, I need a quick and reliable way to get to this kind of information. And the people who provide it should be proud of their work and should not feel inferior because they're more Roger Ebert than Pauline Kael. Roger Ebert's dope. And don't worry about the arbitrariness of it all. After years of reading Nintendo Power and EGM and Gamepro, I have developed a good intuitive sense for what a score a means. And that's part of being a gamer. That's our culture. Leaderboards and high scores are a part of it, and just because movie people don't do it (even though a lot of them do) doesn't mean it's bad. It's what we do: We play games and we rate them. We're weird like that. And that's awesome.

re: A Symposium On Game Reviews. Topic 1: Review Scores, Part I

Cynic04 — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 19:20:05 GMT

Having had an account with a online video game rental service for the last few years, I have gotten in the habit of reading a few online review scores after I get through the latest game I rented. I have to say after doing this many times now I almost always agree with the sentement of the reviewer, and can always, at least, relate to what they are saying. I think where the majority of reviewers go wrong is when they start trying to judge the effect any part of a game may have on the player. STALKER: Clear Skies is a great example of this (as was the first one). Any reasonable person who played that game knows there were major issues, but for some those issues ruin the experience, while for others they get forgotten amongst all the rest the game has to offer. I think that a lot of the variation of STALKERS review scores can be explained by reviewers deciding how the bugs in the game, for example, might effect the player. For some the resulting frustration might ruin the whole game experience, while for others the bugs almost become a non-issue when considering all that the game did right. So is there a correct answer? Yes, definitely, but it only applies to ones self. As for game journalists trying to do their job, I'd say take some of the emphasis off the score (a highly subjective measure) and place more on the content of the review (fanboy's would have a harder time getting worked up about the statement "this game is buggy" than a 6.0 staring them in the face). If users need a quick idea of the quality of a game, a small summary would be much better served than a number imo.

P.S. Awesome work on the new site Jeff!