We know Jim Sterling, don't we? We expected him to review Final Fantasy XIII the way he reviews all games: with a tad of enthusiasm and a lot of rocks ready in case of disturbance. In the end, the result was less than satisfying for a bunch of people, who immediately turn back on the writer of the article.
That was all well and good and in the regular standards of internets protocol number 665. Right beside the one where trolls are given their rights. What we didn't expect, At least I did not, was to see him somewhat dismayed when writing the article about the job he has and how he sometimes feels bad for giving bad review scores to games of people he might actually, personally, know.
After reading his article and noticing my comment was becoming WAAAY to long, I decided to answer to it here.
First, about the contribution of a review editor to society: Never underestimate the power and the responsibility a critic holds when reviewing a game Jim. NEVER. What happens when you slap a review on this website is that you are potentially swaying tens of thousands of people to spend their most important resource of their existences: time. Even if we ignore the consequences of spending money on a bad game, to me, most importantly, and to pretty much everyone who has a job and a family and has very scarce time to play, is the certainty that when I load that disc into my console or computer, I'm not wasting my fuckin' time on a worthless piece of shit. No, wait, check that. I'm not spending the little time I have on a less than phenomenal product. So Jim Sterling, take your job seriously, you're saving millions of hours for gamers worldwide when you say that Assassins Creed II sucks, when you say that Final Fantasy XIII isn't worth my time, or anyone's. Thank you for being honest about. It's somewhere in the headlines of this site. Honesty, brutal, if necessary.
This leads to the second point, the consequences of giving games bad review scores: if I just said that a critic determines, to some degree, how will people spend a part of their existences with videogames, think of how damaging can it be when a game is badly reviewed. The answer to the developers can be pretty drastic, but to the player? Not really. In the worst sense, you're losing a good chance, but with the amount of good games being launched per year, you're hardly missing that much. Sure, no one wants to be left out of the God of War bandwagon, or miss the Modern Warfare of each year, but if you DO miss it, pretending it was a review score that made you do it, you sure as hell will still play a lot of good games in their place. Some of them even similar to it.
Now take the opposite idea: Having a bad game be given a high review score. You know what that does? That kills the game's length in hours of your lifetime. When you finish it, you will have wasted a good portion of your existence into something not worth your time and money. You will be a little dead inside and possibly angry at the person who wrote that review. As a gamer, I'll take low scores in my most awaited franchises anyday over high scores who make me waste my gamertime, which, as you grow older, becomes scarcer each day.
With that said, I think Jim is too forgiving, I'm waiting for him to slap a 0 on a game. I mean, how the hell can I trust in someone's 10 scores if I've never seen him give a 0 to something. Give me my Subject Zero, Jim! I'm waiting.
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This is simply statistically false. It is impossible that every reviewer who gave it its deserved score of 8.5 ish did so because they felt bad.
I'm sorry but here, I believe Jim is wrong, and I'm a little shocked that, being a professional, he would compromise his honesty for shock value. Either that or he genuinely believes what he's saying and has become too jaded to trust as a reviewer
So, the only way Jim would have been safe is if he gave it an 8 or above and said everything was fine. Regardless of his wording, whether it was supposedly evil or intended to offend, which I didn't see myself, the truth is they simply won't settle for any score or review that doesn't tell them what they want to hear about this new great game which will make their lives so much better.
I have to make a counterpoint to this one. I don't see any point in my article where I even touched the quality of other reviews. My only possible open flank to your critic of "other reviewrs giving Final Fantasy XIII a good score means they're unreliable" was a little sting at IGN's score.
With that said, I think you thoroughly missed the point of my commentary. I'm not saying other reviewers are incompetent because they rate games high. What I was trying to imply is that rating a game high has direr consequences than rating a game low. I also never mentioned any other reviewer besides Jim Sterling, which serves to illustrate a point.
This point is meant to answer your second question: Jim doing this for "shock value". A point that is both negated by history and by the general tone of his reviews. This point is negated by the fact that he didn't try anything on games like Modern Warfare 2, who got 9.5, he also didn't try any shock value with Heavy Rain, which got a 7.0, he also didn't try it with pretty much any game except for the Assassins Creed II of fame. There is no search for shock value, and if you read carefully each of his reviews, you may find points to disagree with, but never a cheap attempt at capturing your attention.
What I implied throughout my whole article, however, was that I agree with Jim Sterling's general take and taste on games, and that is why I chose him as my reviewer of games. That makes me come to Dtoid in search for gaming reviews and not going anywhere else. In the end, it's what we should do: find someone with the time to do the job of reviewing and at the same time somewhat represents our tastes.
That is, hopefully, all.
I'm glad to see that there are others out there who understand the weight of Game reviews, especially low ones.
I don't want to doubt, that the game might deserve a perfect score but seeing other reviews, there is a high chance, you will feel like you wasted your time with the game.
Reviews are meant to be the opinion of the reviewer. It's nothing objective and shouldn't be treated as such.
I think I can agree with that. I admittedly just skimmed your article myself; I was a little soured by Jim's review and am not Jim's biggest fan myself, a little bias of my own.
The first one, is that you defined Deadly Premonition by it's production values, and therefore completely lost the point to Jim's way of reviewing games (at least, that's what I think he looks for in a game, and that's why I follow him). You see, the most important thing is not production values, graphics, or anything that can be stripped from a game. All we care is the bare bones, the very core and essence of a game, hence, it's gameplay and the things that accompany it, like the soundtrack and the pacing and the story. So, production values were nothing in the SNES age, but we had terrific games there.
The second point is that reviews should, in fact, be objective. Of course the reviewer is entitled to serving his own tastes when he writes, which I touch on the article itself: Choose your reviewer based on your personal liking for games as much as it similarizes with your taste. BUT, the way a review is put together must be COMPLETELY objective, or as much as possible. You need to satisfy the curiosity of many different types of people, and you cannot hope to appeal to every single one of their subconsciousness. You need to focus on the solid material of the game and give an opinion and a score accordingly. That's the reason it's still possible to have someone who hates platforming games review a platforming title and say it's GOOD, even though he doesn't like it.