Grumblings have been rife on the internet recently (What’s new?) about reviews and reviewers in the video game industry. Where has the unrest come from?
The trend seems to be that fans will not let their favourite franchise be tarnished in any way by reviewers on websites and printed press. A prime example is the low review scores of Resident Evil 6 on Metacritic which had fans up in arms and crying foul from reviewers judging the game too harshly, they seem to forget that this is an aggregation of all review scores and some will be higher than others.
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Kevin writes: "Multi-GPU gaming was one of those things that seemed like a good idea for as long as it lasted. I mean honestly, the idea of a modular approach to graphics upgrades – be that SLI or CrossFire – was brilliant. I repeat, the idea was brilliant."
Im old school... when i hear the term SLI, I immediately think of 3dfx. I still have a pair of 12mb Monster V2's in an old rig. I never tried out the more modern take on SLI or Crossfire for that matter.
I mean, it was mostly for bragging rights. It was a very temperamental tech that improved with newer iterations, for sure. But folks like myself, who have used it, probably recall that troubleshooting was an integral part of the experience and the value that you got out of the setup was really low.
However, none of that mattered because it looked sick as hell on a well-built PC.
I remember doing my research at the time 😂 I got 2 GTX 460's, as they in SLI were meant to be better than the 480 at the time. Not all games were optimised at the time, which meant some games meant setting them up for 1 card alone. Never forget the time I came home from night shift, turned on my computer like normal, went and made a cuppa, come back and it was still off. Tried to turn on again, and one of the 460's caught fire... good times.
I just think this article is pointless...
For example... I love Halo.
Even if the next game sucked... I would still love it like it was the best game ever.
Its just fanboyism.
Decent point, but I disagree with a lot of it. I think a LOT of people forget that reviewers go into every game with an objective. By this I don't mean personality, but how they want to go about the review. Lets look at Biohazard 6.
If you look at it from a "how it works" mindset, it should score pretty high.
If you look at it from a "fans point of view" mindset, it will score low because it's not the game you use to love.
If you look at it from a "*@$! Capcom" mindset, you really have no creditability and thus don't matter.
In the end, people will disagree with any opinion they don't agree with, which is perfectly fine. However, I think some people should reveal how much time they had with the content. All of the high scores with Borderlands 2's DLC made me think a lot of reviewers didn't get very far and just reviewed it after 10 minutes. A lot of people forget that just 1 problem is enough to ruin the game or content. I doubt anyone would say Master Gee in that DLC didn't make them enjoy it less and I'm sure the ending to inFAMOUS sold them on the game. In the end, I always tell people to find reviewers they agree with and stick to their work.
Reviews SHOULDN'T be an opinion. They should review what works and what doesn't. Things can be judges objectively (such as frame rate, UI choices, control sensitivity, and so on).
If someone is in a bad mood when they review a game, it can skew the score. The opposite is also true, and it's not right.
I'm also a huge believer that $$ has a lot to do with it (advertising on a site, for example).
Totally objective reviews are hard to accomplish, and regardless of how fair and balanced you try and be, someone is always going to be unhappy. It's just important to remember that a review is one person's perspective, and reviews should be a guideline, but not the standard, by which one buys games.
Most ratings systems are fundamentally broken anyway. People tend to view 5's or other mid-line scores as a "bad" score, instead of what it should be – middle-of-the-road or mediocre. I think the letter grade rankings work much better, because most people associate a 'C' with being 'average.' It's a shame that so much emphasis is placed on metacritic ratings, even determining bonuses and pay for developers. It's just an incredibly flawed system.
Finally: I think that it would be better for reviewers to be familiar with, or even a fan of, the genre of game they are reviewing. I don't watch sports, nor do I know much about sports, so I wouldn't really have any business reviewing a Madden title. I also don't know much about the higher mechanics of fighting games, or what desirable attributes of fighting games are, so I would just rather leave that alone. By that same token, I see people all the time reviewing, say, JRPGs, and it seems like they went into the review already deciding that they wouldn't like the title, because they don't generally like or play JRPGs. That's rather unfair, in my opinion.