Another installment of Pointless Endeavors, another old story that is barely relevant anymore. I meant to write this a few weeks ago, but it wasn't anymore relevant then, so here I am now.
Battlefield Heroes is one of the latest installments in the classic Battlefield franchise. It's currently sitting at (and this is unfortunate) 69 over at Metacritic. This unto itself is unremarkable, but here's the thing, Battlefield Heroes is free to download and free to play.
"So?" you might ask, "It's a video game, it has to scored and tabulated and set within a table". Well, I respectfully disagree. Here's why.
I think it was within a very old issue of Official PlayStation Magazine that one of that publications editors gave the most compelling justification for the critics existence that I've ever heard. He said something to the effect of:

Games are expensive and we know you don't have an infinite budget to spend on them. Our goal with our reviews is to help you make an informed purchase. It's the reason we pack in a demo disc, it's the reason we leave the full review archive in the back on every issue.

At the height of OPMs popularity, Games Journalism scarcely resembled the dark empire it is now. This was before the widespread popularity of blogs, the living monolith of IGN was still getting it's shit together, people still went to UGO. Most importantly, there was no Metacritic, and Print Journalism was still the number one way of communicating this information.

What an idyllic era that was! Now there's a cornucopia of sources for you to get ostensibly the same information, and the Sauron-like Metacritic that each of them is wired into, spitting out a decisive and ultimately meaningless number. It seems like reviews have just become something you do if you're a media outlet, your local paper probably reviews games. The guy who does it is probably bald, wearing glasses, and described as tech-savvy and on the cutting edge (which just means he has to explain what Twitter does to his friends and family). What happened to consumer advocacy? To making an informed purchase? It's given way to a culture that critiques for the sake of critiquing.

But at least with 99.9% of mainstream games, this still can be used as a means of making an informed purchase. If 44,000 of the 45 000 reviews say you should check it out, it's probably worth checking it out. But what if the game is free, what if there is no informed purchase to make?
Well, they're still going to review it. Because that number between 1 and a 100 NEEDS to be on Metacritic, so badly it HURTS.
The worst Battlefield Heroes review came from GameTrailers, which contains this doozy of a sentence.

While Battlefield Heroes may not cost money, your time is certainly valuable

No it's not! I'm playing video game, clearly I'm treading on spare time here! You know, the time left over after all the important shit I have to do everyday!

If Battlefield Heroes is free, that means I can treat the whole game not unlike a demo, where I can download, play a match, determine whether or not I want to continue spending time with it, and then not have to spend a dime to do that. So it's actually better than a demo, where I have to buy the full game at $60-70 to continue playing. So if we want to make crazy assumptions, GameTrailers is therefore telling us not to play demos, and just to wait for the full game so they can tell us whether or not it's good. If we're not going to make crazy assumptions, we can all recognize the futility of reviewing a free game. You can give your impressions on Freeware, like most sites and magazines do with demos, please do, that's interesting, that's a welcome feature. But for the love of God, don't review it, don't give it a score, you might as well start reviewing demos at that point, and it will be at that point where you may as well spit in our face and tell us we're too stupid to formulate our own opinions on the media we consume. You understand why I would consider that a problem.

On the other hand, Summer's been pretty slow, so maybe I shouldn't be so hard on them... they were probably just bored and looking for something to write about.

-Rico