Venetica is looking like a pretty rad RPG experience, and I'm really looking forward to giving it a go. It's a unique game set in Venice and starring a woman called Scarlett, who finds out she is the daughter of Death himself. While chatting to creative director Jan Klose, I asked exactly what kind of heroine Scarlett would be. He answered, because he's polite like that.
"We put much emphasis on a strong and unique character with lots of different facets," he tells us. "In the beginning, Scarlett thinks that she is an ordinary woman but that changes when her heritage becomes apparent, and enemies she did not know of attack her home and her world is turned upside down. Or, in Scarlett's own words, 'My adolescent view onto this world has vanished, since that dreadful midsummer night tore apart all that was dear to me.'
"As the game progresses, the player can shape the way Scarlett grows. She needs to accept her role as the daughter of Death and as the only one who can recreate the balance of powers. This is her final goal, but how she gets there is up to the player to decide. He can play heroic or villainous, keep his promises or betray people. This will shape Scarlett's character and also influence the ending of the game."
I never knew before now that players could choose what kind of character Scarlett is. Just goes to show you how little coverage there is of this game. Very odd indeed, considering it's looking more and more promising the more I hear about it. We'll have some more Venetica stories coming soon, so you better get interested!
Contest:
12:00 PM on 10.02.2009
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Will Death SPEAK IN ALL CAPS like Death in the Terry Pratchett novels? LoL
Forget the reviews, they're pretty useless for determining quality. The reviews always favor whoever sponsors the site that puts the review up, and the early ones tend to come out at the cost of being inflated by demand of the publisher. You'll just have to rent a game to know if you want it, as there is no other way to really tell how good a game is anymore.
Better yet, don't even bother buying a game unless it's a hit that came out of nowhere (without hype). Those are always the best games. Hurray Sims!
Reviewers being paid off is far less common than you think. The vast majority of professional reviews out there are perfectly legitimate opinions. It's easy to bitch and moan about any given X out of 10 point score, but if a reviewer gives good reasons, explaining the positives and negatives of a game, that review can tell you a lot. Much moreso when ten other reviewers say the same thing. To say they're "useless for determining quality" is just BS.
This Venetica sounds alright. I hope the good or evil mechanic isn't one that really hurts the game like Dante's Inferno does where it's more of a gameplay style preference and not actually about the choice. I point once again at Mass Effect as an example of doing the good or evil thing right.
But wasn't the GS editor fired because he refused to give out the higher score? So you can definitely argue that there are still plenty of honest people out there otherwise those stories would've never been exposed.
I can understand if you say you've gotta pick and choose but I agree. You do. There are a few sources who I think get paid off and even more people who I think are just blinded by hype sometimes. But you can't generalize and call reviews useless. That's a pretty paranoid perspective.
Think about it for a minute. The honest GS editor was fired for refusing to give out a higher score, due to issues with sponsors. No other publication is having these issues with sponsors. Therefore, none of the editors can be honest, as the honest ones are purged when they give low scores due to sponsor disputes.
In other words, I think your point proves that all video game publications fudge scores.
And I say you can't use reviews because I myself found myself betrayed by a combination of reviews and previews at least 3 times in the past 6 months. Once with Conduit, once with Little Kings Story, and once with Mad World. It turns out that most reviewers grade higher for artistic style while I do not.
To be fair, I am the ideal customer in some ways. I get a game, have a lot of fun, fail to see that the replayability is lower than I perceive it to be, and then feel burned a week later when I find the games aren't as fun as a week ago. The reason I say rent is that when I praise a new game, I have no idea how long I will have fun with it. If you were to go by me, you could have already bought the game before I had the opportunity to realize how low the replayability is.
By the way, if you want a high quality game that two weeks of playing tells me is highly replayable, I advise downloading "The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil". Zun's work makes World of Goo look like nothing in comparison. Unfortunately, his games are extremely hard to purchase in disk format; they are never on ebay or amazon and need to be imported if you want a disk. They are fairly easy to find downloads of though.
It sounds to me like you just seek something else out of a game than what reviewers praise a game for in which case I would say that's your own discretion.
That's partially why I view reviewers as worthless. Although I don't think the lack of parallel interests only affects me.
In fact, I would say near any highly reviewed game that doesn't sell well is an example of when reviewers are wrong and fail to understand their audience. Although in that case, I think the reviewer is probably out of touch due to reviewing a game without considering how niche or generally unappealing the content is, in spite of the gameplay itself being good.
Reviewers don't try to appease any audience. They review a game and give their opinions and you take what they say and can help make a decisions. A review is not supposed to be the end all be all. It's just another resource.
There's no "audience."
Gotta keep an eye in this and Risen.
Do you have a link to these reviews that criticize the port? As I've read one and it got a 84 on the 360...
Your view that reviewers should be pandering to their audience and telling them exactly what they want to hear is why I don't read reviews. That's what they're ALREADY DOING, and it's why the hype machine works the way it works.
No, a reviewer that does that is WORTHLESS.
A GOOD reviewer tells the audience what games it will most likely have an interest in. They don't "pander". They help the audience make an educated decision by telling us what is done well and poorly in a game, and ideally a good reviewer should be in tune enough with the audience that the review score is a prediction of how the audience will receive the title.
Right now, the review system is broken beyond repair. It did not help 15 million people pick up Wii Fit. With Okami, it failed to reflect the interest of the audience in the game. However, the customer tells us with his purchases that Wii Fit is much, much more worthy of purchase than Okami. THAT is why game reviews are out of touch with the audience.
You know, the Wii Fit audience needs reviewers that match it's tastes pretty badly. I'm sure there is a lucrative market if, say, a Destructoid editor decided to review those types of games within the context of what the people purchasing Wii Fit want.