[Disclaimer: I've been writing this whilst trying to watch Golgo 13, starring Sony Chiba: damm it's cool]

I've been looking at comments and reaction to the Flower review (and others) and I've read see agreements and disagreements with what's been written, but usually it's the disagreements that seem to shout louder. It's amazing to think there's such disagreement on what appears to be such a simple game. But why are we so pissed off, both at the game's initial review and the reactions that followed it.



It's all the inter-tubes' fault

Is it the fault of the Internet? I mean, when I was a teenager (back in the day), there was no Internet. My opinions and feelings towards games (and other) were formed by things like magazines or TV shows, but I think they were mainly formed by my friends and peer group. We all read the same mags, watched the same TV shows and absorbed criticism on a fairly balanced plane. But I think what's more, we talked between ourselves and discussed games as people do; we didn't summarise the points and gave things scores. Because of this, I can't really remember bad feelings being generated towards a review of something or us all feeling "that review was full of shit and just wrong". These days when a high-profile game is released, you can find untold numbers of reviews online that will give a variety of verdicts, both positive and negative. I'm not going to pretend that these reviews are all worth taking into account (let's face it, any prick can write a review despite having an IQ in lower double figures), but the amount of them just seems to me, to create a kind of noise; a kind of Internet consensus. Metacritic does that as well, but I look at Metacritic purely as a mathematical tool. It takes all the reviews, adds them up and churns out an arbitrary number that people seem to cling to as an absolute judgement, a concrete indicator of whether a game is good or bad. That's fair enough (although the idea of distilling criticism down to a single number just doesn't make sense to me); Metacritic generates the score but we're the ones who have to absorb that information. We are the ones who have to decided whether or not a review has convinced us to purchase or not purchase a game.

To buy or not to buy

Because yes, that's what a review is; a recommendation by someone as to whether or not to spend money on a title that you haven't played. It is not, and I repeat NOT, a piece of writing that tells you, with 100% accuracy, whether a game is good or bad and whether or not you will enjoy a game. That's not what it's for: the reviewer plays the game and writes down his or her impressions on said game, good and bad. Yes, reviewers write with an audience in mind: Destructoid is a hardcore gaming community website (however I have to wonder how hardcore, because I'm hang about here and I'm shockingly mainstream) and as such, the writers will write reviews with the hardcore gamer in mind. If you're reading a games review in the Daily Mail or FHM, you're not going to get the same level of writing, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the reviews are any less valid. Well maybe the Daily Mail one....

Thinking back to when Jim wrote up the review guidelines, I realised a lot of magazines and/or websites do the same thing. One of the few gaming mags I read, PC Gamer writes up it's review guidelines with every issue. Good Game (a rather good Aussie videogames TV show) gets two reviewers to individually score the game (like Destructoid) and engage in a discussion to flesh out what each of them thought. These all work well, but I feel that the problem is that people are simply skipping to the end to see the score given and then use this as their guiding light, as opposed to the actual meat and bones of the review. But there seems to be something that stops people from doing that...

You've made up your mind

I think part of the problem with people's reactions to reviews is that by the time a title has been released or we've read a review, most people have their minds made up on a title. I can totally understand how this can't be helped: a deluge of trailers and info make games seem like dead-set winners. But there's things we can never tell until we play the full game and experience it ourselves. Do the controls feel natural and responsive? What about the level design, does is break the flow of the game? Are there too many (or too few) cutscenes? Does the combat get repetitive? These are things we won't know until we play the game or read a good review that brings these points up. I was looking forward to Mirror's Edge, but the reviews I read all seemed to mention the poor level design which seemed to frustrate the person playing it. But the videos and previews all made it look so good....

Innovation or success

There's been another bit of a storm whipped up as to whether games should be granted a certain amount of slack when it comes to innovation. My feeling is that games should be judged on their merits, not their goals. A reviewer can only (and I feel) must only review what is in front of them. Lost potential or a glimmer of an idea, either half-executed or not executed at all shouldn't garner extra marks or cover up other poor aspects of the game. That being said, I don't feel a game should be marked down for being either unoriginal or lacking new ideas. Grand Theft Auto IV and Gears of War 2 didn't really do anything new, but these two games did what they set out to do excellently, I feel. Alone In The Dark made some innovative moves, but didn't execute them well and were included in a game that was clunky, un-intuitive and for me at least, just not fun. Leigh Alexander over at Sexy Videogameland wrote a piece about Silent Hill: Homecoming which I feel hits the nail on the head: give games credit where they are due, but at the same time still be critical. (Interesting to see at the bottom, the initial critical reaction to Silent Hill 2)


So....

What's the final thought? Well I feel game reviews are as well written as they've ever been. I think it's down to us, the game-buying public to learn how to distill this huge amount of information that's online, into our lives properly. Our collective ego needs to understand that other human beings feel differently about certain things. Get over it.