As far as game reviewers, what exactly constitutes being good at games? We've all seen the clearly incompetent examples, such as dean takahashi's cuphead abortion or the polygon preview footage of doom 2016. Is that the only definition of being unfit to review a game, or do you have to have some demonstrable skill, and how exactly do you demonstrate it? Does someone have to beat X or Y hard game/mission/etc. to prove they are worthy? Do they need to just show tons of hours logged in a specific game, or do they also need to show completed files, trophies/achievements, IRL score attack/speedrun/tournament results? And how do you deal with the fact that different games will sometimes have vastly different knowledge and skill sets, and how would you accommodate the fact that not everyone going into the game will be an expert, but might just be somewhat experienced with that series or genre, or might not have any experience at all? Finally, how do you expect the people doing this work to fund their efforts so that the whole thing doesn't just go down in flames for lack of money?
Game Journos - What would YOU do?
support the people that you think are worthwhile and ignore the rest. or, you know, just learn how to make your own conclusions.
How would you recommend that someone go and find these people, so that you might form opinions on them?
"Imagine if movies were reviewed like video games:
>I sat down to Schindler's List not knowing what to expect. As a guy who mostly watches buddy cop comedies and Disney movies, I wasn't a huge drama movie aficionado, but I had heard that List was a solid entry in the genre by my friends who watch more drama than I, so I was tentatively excited.
>For a movie about such a simple premise, a list, the movie takes a lot of dialogue to get across the point. I couldn't really follow all the conversations, especially because some of them were in some other language (I guess the director never heard of dubbing?) and I had to read along on the subtitles. This makes the movie less visually appealing, and it's already skirting the boundary with it's lo-fi black-and-white art style. 3/10.
>While Memento had some great action scenes with drama enhanced by the basic premise of the film (the protagonist can't remember anything besides what he tattooes on himself), the story was impossible to follow. I couldn't tell when or in what order anything happened. I guess I must be too used to movies like Avatar where everything happens in order.
What if the most-followed film reviewer on Twitter watched movies next to their boyfriend, asking him what was going on every 30 seconds, asking who everyone was, etc.?
Would this be acceptable?"
>As far as game reviewers, what exactly constitutes being good at games?
Being an expert speed-runner who also has autismal attention to detail in the process and an extensive knowledge of many other games to compare the current product to in order to create comparative references as one of the objective methods to review how much effort and quality was put into the game's various aspects.
In other words nothing that reviewers can do today.
Professional critics are obsolete and should be erased and slandered and insulted off the Internet.
Only user reviews and their consolidation matter, and i honestly believe that there should be a "top reviews" sorting so uservotes can uplift quality reviews as your "professional" reviews.
Let the Demos decide its representatives, not the faggot shill corporations and companies.
My expectations are low. Literally just finish the game. I'm not asking you to S rank the EX dungeons, or collect all 500 flags, or anything autistic like that, literally finish the main game on Normal difficulty.
I assume your last point is from a game reviewer who actually does that, or are you just suggesting something that would be too ridiculous to take seriously?
I assume you don't read movie reviews, 90% of them are literally generated by bots or read like what you wrote. They're almost as bad as game reviews.
Only reviews I trust is from nobodies that have similar tastes to mine and have zero incentive to fabricate or insert themselves in to things since they're not paid.
Youtube, none of the gaming “news” websites are worth shit, but there are at least a few good reviewers on YouTube.
Do enough people like that even exist to be reliable sources of information? Furthermore, doesn't being a specialist in speedrunning one game really only make you very good at that one game? Like, is a speedrunner of Mario 3 going to necessarily be a good source of information on platformer beyond Mario 3? Even their opinion on Mario World might not be valid, as someone that obsessed with playing Mario 3 might just reject everything different in World as a negative change no matter what it is.
>literally finish the main game on Normal difficulty.
>"Nier Automata was very short and you end up with more questions than answers by the ending."
Why do people give a shit about reviewers? How hard is it to never open up Polygon or whatever, go to YouTube and watch some gameplay footage and figure it out from there? It takes less effort to ignore a reviewer than it does to reach your own damn conclusions.
I mean don't tell me you only want to like games that are popular do you? Dont tell me you're looking to a publication to tell you what all the cool kids are playing. You wouldn't play a game just to look popular would you?
It sounds like what the answer is commonly turning to is:
1. Anyone doing freelance stuff on their own is possibly reliable, but see if your opinions on things align with theirs
2. Ignore anyone at a formal company, they are most likely just riding a paycheck and couldn't support their own work if their lifestyle depended on it
oh yeah, some games do lock the ending behind hard or above.
>Do enough people like that even exist to be reliable sources of information?
Yes, but they have to give a fuck to review games and most don't.
>Furthermore, doesn't being a specialist in speedrunning one game really only make you very good at that one game?
Nope. Training response and focus is training response and focus, the general ability will project onto other games while the game-specific part is the memorization of its elements (and memorization is also a base trait which is trained and can project onto other games).
I remember pre-poz gamespot had a really nice way of reviewing games. They’d say what the developers had said they wanted the game to be, break down if it accomplished this, talk about bugs and replay value, talk about if the game was worth the money, THEN give a few subjective things at the end on if they were having fun with it and if that meant you would or wouldn’t have fun with it.
Also, a big thing is that reviewers desperately need to figure out among their staff is who is good and well versed in genres and give those genres to them. There’s nothing more annoying than having some RTS fan jump into DMC5 and talk about how he doesn’t understand the plot or mechanics.
>Why do people give a shit about reviewers?
Herd mentality and using products as a part of their identity
People take it like a personal attack.
Reviewers are fucking retarded, but the people who attack them are also fucking dumb (most of the time).
Nier Automata locks the ending?
What's the real ending then?
tl;dr lol.
I thought about that, and does hiring people specific to a genre mean you end up with some people doing too many reviews while some others don't do many at all? Or do you need to just hire many more people to handle more popular genres? I would fear otherwise you end up with not enough time for good reviews, and the result is a rushed product, while games in genres that come out more rarely would probably receive much more in-depth coverage.
Also on your subject of gamespot, I wonder if that was something more feasible when people actually bought magazines. I can't imagine revenue streams are too high when most of your reader base is both online and web-adept (meaning they probably have adblock).
I was referring to stuff like Contra 4, as for me, I haven't played Tomato much at all. That said, I think the real one is ending E if I heard correctly.
>Why do people give a shit about reviewers?
I wouldn't care about reviewers if publishers didn't, but that's not the fucking case
Don't you remember that mass effect was dumbed down because of the exact same retarded faggot from the OP pic who went trough the entire game without levelling up (or something like that)
Game reviewers have the ears of publishers, and they affect game development. Trying to ignore them is like putting your head in the sand.
That's true, but what's the alternative? Tell them to go read hundreds of user reviews, any of whom might be just as incompetent or have even more bizarre and useless opinions? i.e. Imagine asking Yea Forums for advice on how to fix anything.
You have to be able to produce a viable and simple alternative. More complicated still, the publisher probably still expects someone who reviews their game and acts as any kind of mouthpiece to the developers to also suck their dick and gargle their cum "or else" (blacklisted or don't get to have the game early or who knows what). Publishers can't trust independent reviewers to always give them good scores, you see, so they will go with the retards that promise good press over the people with legitimate concerns.
Thinking about it, this would all be very much improved if the market at large could be encouraged to never again buy games on launch day, instead letting independent reviewers get it, play it, and offer quality feedback. But then, that wouldn't help the fatbacks who want their investment back. It's all a rather unfortunate scenario.
Which is why complaining about retarded reviews and trying to get them not be as shit (and maybe making the publishers stop listening to the most retarded ones like the one in the OP) has its use.
Ignoring the issue completely will not make it go away.
At least if people make a loud enough stink on social media maybe the publishers will notice and go "we shouldn't change something just because 1 reviewer is retarded"
I dont think you need to show any previous success, just demonstrate compentence when playing the first time. Its okay to die or get shit on, but use critical thinking skills. My holy grail of reviewers has always been 90s-mid 2000s Electronic gaming monthly. They always put in a good number of hours into actually playing a game, even if it wasn't much fun, and wrote amusing articles about it. Reviewers today are just clickbaiting basedlets, they have nothing on seanbaby.
this
A reviewer should either approach the average player in terms of skill, or have enough awareness to understand how different they are to said average player. Though being too good at the game is still better than being too bad at it, because with the former you can complete the game and go "that was easy for me but I understand it will provide an adequate challenge to the average player", while the latter essentially locks you behind whatever challenge you get walled by and you cannot judge all or most of the game.
Why do people use that website when youtube is faster?
I get almost all my vidya news and suggestions from this place. Most of it is shit, but other sites are even worse.
Games are very niche and tend to aim for specific audiences.
There's a higher bar to entry due to genres being so vastly different and focusing on different skills.
Journalists who try to review everything are usually pretty garbage, at it.
I wouldn't trust a review from someone who evaluates forza horizon 4 the same way they do 2k20 and Final Fantasy VII.
Sure there might be some production qualities you could look at like visuals and audio, but past that things become very specific.
If you're reviewing jrpgs then use only those games as comparisson, same for other genres.
But you have to know your shit.
You cant just play a handful of racing games and think your opinion weighs the same as the guy who has been autistucally studying simulations for years.
can you really know that when anything you get is filtered through whatever a random user's opinion says is worth mentioning?
Do you think it would pay to have a team of reviewers, where one was expert and the other(s) were less so in degrees (a veteran but not expert, someone new to the genre, etc.), or would that be wasted resources?
Perhaps gaming needs to be treated like alcohol, in that specialists become trained in a specific field and are considered trustworthy on that style of game, but defer to other experts for styles they don't have experience/training in?
And to go a step further, could it be possible to put together a decently agreed-upon standard for what a "training" would consist of for becoming genre-experienced?
Also want to add on that some reviewers dont even focus heavily on gameplay.
There are some that spend most of their time talking about story and let that weigh in heavily in their opinions.
Not all games need a story emphasis though.
For example in a game like Ace Combat having a good story is great, but the main focus here is the gameplay. Conversely in the walking dead the story is the only reason to play, the puzzle mechanics are mediocre.
It helps that I've been playing video games for over 20 years. If you're just syarting you're shit out of luck. Gaming bloggers are all bought, random people here and on other sites can easily be shills or just attention whores. Some years ago someone linked a review site called christcenteredgamers. If you ignore the morality score the reviewer is pretty good.
>Perhaps gaming needs to be treated like alcohol, in that specialists become trained in a specific field and are considered trustworthy on that style of game, but defer to other experts for styles they don't have experience/training in?
This would be ideal.
As for agreeing on a standard that could be a bit harder.
There are definitely touchstone games across each genre, those could definitely be used for reference.
I think that's the closest you could get to finding a standard for quality.
>game has 100 hours of content assuming average skill level
>reviewers often forced to bring out review on day 1 having played 12 hours at best
This is a particular practice that needs to cease
There will be no standard if quality as long as publishers favoring reviewers giving out good scores. You can have someone that gives accurate and objective scores, but what good is he if he can only post reviews weeks after release.
I think Dean gets a lot of shit for basically nothing. Everybody has been playing a game and got to a point where the way forward is obvious but you're just not getting it. Then you slap your head and think "I'm fucking retarded."
I feel like if there was a good general consensus on touchstones, then that would form a good foundation. From there, I really like the ideas givne here about how gamespot used to do their reviews The reviewer reaching out to the creators and asking what they intended would be very helpful to frame your work, so that you weren't shitting on an apple just because you expected it to be an orange.
Now I'm wondering if you could make a decent list of touchstone games in different genres without it just becoming a marginalized popularity contest about whether or not a game was good enough to be considered. It definitely doesn't help that games are by far the longest medium to consume (vs. music, movies, books, maybe only TV and long-running comic series can compete).
It's a tutorial level, there is no excuse.
I dunno, I feel like it's a really strange thing to screw up so much. But to be fair, you are right that it's hard to judge what someone did in a moment as we can only really base it off of imagined perfect versions of "what we would have done". It just comes off as being something extremely simple to screw up. I get being bad at the first level, but to not even be able to follow the simple instructions? Just seems like we're being too nice to give him a pass there.
Games already are dumbed down for mass market as standard practice. If you have any difficulty whatsoever with any game released, it's safe to say that you are too bad at games to review them.
And yes, that's a thing. You can't review books if you're illiterate. You can't review movies if you're blind. You can't review music if you're deaf. And you can't review games unless you can play games.
>I think Dean gets a lot of shit for basically nothing
It's the fucking TUTORIAL.
If you struggle with a fucking tutorial for fifteen minutes your only excuse is that you're either so drunk that you can't see anymore, or you're less than three years old.
I agree with you but dealing in absolutes is retarded
Everyone should do a test: Boot up Cuphead's Tutorial and have one or both your parents play through it. Post results.
HARD MODE - Don't teach them the controls
You need to be as good as is required to beat the game. If you can not and/ or have not beaten the game, you shouldn't be reviewing it. If you started reading a Shakespeare play but quit halfway through because it was above your reading comprehension level, do you think you'd be qualified to review it?
>w-why are you doing this son?
>you have to beat all levels mom
some people treat cinemasins as a measure of movie quality
And why there was such a hard transition to other people curating them in a way in youtube and other places.
I think the last remnant of good golden age late nineties journos are digital foundry and only because they focus on the tech side and remind me of the tech sections of old magazines.
If nothing else, I admire your strong sense of empathy even to the point of extremes.
ALL THE EGGS
ALL THE EGGS
don't forget
>rotten tomatoes
Or worse, they judge something's quality on ticket sales/albums sold/profits earned.
Just like some people here use twitch viewer numbers.
>Dean Takahashi
Shitposters aren't people.
The reason? Politics. Workplace and regional politics.