How broken is the current Game Review process? - Blu-ray Forum

caliblue15 · 02-03-2009, 04:16 AM

Should you really be taking any notice of Game Reviews anymore?

Is the whole game review system not giving us what we want, a non biased review of the latest, greatest game of that time?

It probably is looking back at some previous reviews. Lets take a look back in time.

We dont have to go back far do we to see the reviews and scoring for Rockstars GTA4. Some 99% (ok maybe 98) gave the game 10/10, 100/100, etc, ad nauseum. Lets face it this is the moment that the game review system become corrupted and a standard for scoring was set. The general consensus over GTA4 is not too good afterall with failings pointing to lack of story / bad story, some call the graphics into question and others have faults based on their own perception of the game. It is certainly in no position to sit back and revel in the review scoring it was given.

Lets also take a look at one of the greatest FPS (for the majority) currently available, the Call of Duty series. Its safe to say that COD in its latter offering (4+W@W) are the current king of online rambo type games and why not, Its fantastic in nearly all aspects on and offline, we will leave it up to you to review the review scores for this. While you are also reviewing old reviews take a look at some of the reviews for Gears of War 2. Again by all accounts another fantastic game and was well recieved in the game community, faultless.

I think we can safely assume that great games get great reviews and bad ones get properly beaten to the edge of the internet forever, a bit like the review for Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing Review. It scores 1.0 by the way and here is a couple of quotes :-

“Just how bad is Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing? It’s as bad as your mind will allow you to comprehend.”

“It is so disturbingly bad that even its budget price tag seems like a slap in the face. It really makes you wonder if the company that put out this dreck even took so much as a half minute to glance at the game that it was releasing. The game’s readme file does assert that the game was thoroughly tested on various PCs, but the end result seems to suggest otherwise. The fact is, even if you tried, you couldn’t play Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing the way it was seemingly intended to be played, and even if you could, you wouldn’t want to. “

See thats a review, reading that does it justice and you would not buy it.

So do you the reviewer want to create a loyal group of readers that trust your input and reviews, do you want them to read about future game reviews on your site? The name of the game says yes, you need the loyal to come back.

So the challenge is this, Can you really justify giving a game such as GTA4 10/10 and GOW2 10/10 or COD4 10/10 and then give KILLZONE2 a 9 or future title less? When you said that GTA4 will blow you away and that GOW2 is the what you need to buy an xbox for did you also remind your readers that they didnt have a good story or that multiplayer was serious broken and that some games were missing CO-OP and thus marking them down for it? No, didnt think so.

Please do your fans a favor and provide them with a real review based on real things that we need to know and at the same time keep the fluidity and scoring system the same across all games no matter what platform they come on. A real gamer knows that a good game is a good game no matter what platform it is on. Your broken review systems only fuel what is meant to be an “enjoyable experience”, one of “entertainment” into a festival of hatred for one another. Remember this, when checking out a review always look back at some of the previous big titles and see what they had to say about them as well.

Thanks for reading.

http://www.vgwatchdog.com/?p=21215

TomHoang · 02-03-2009, 04:20 AM

The only reviews that I trust now are X-Play's, well said BTW

X-Ninja · 02-03-2009, 04:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TomHoang

The only reviews that I trust now are X-Play's, well said BTW

X-Play? Are you kidding? ...I stopped watching that when they repeatedly went and flamed the PS3, and wrote a song involving throwing a PS3 in the garbage - which also included a PS3 box in a trash can and Morgan smiling with her thumbs up.
How anybody could go near them anymore is beyond me...

But hey, to each his own i suppose.

Oh, and stop the Big Rig's dissing.

That game is amazing.

Me and my buddies spent a good half hour driving around in that game.

ThePhantomOak · 02-03-2009, 04:33 AM

What reviews do you trust?

Seriously... JD Power? SAG? Hookers and Handguns? Cnet?

They are all garbage.

Twankies08 · 02-03-2009, 04:34 AM

I have to agree, x-play does suck!! I stopped
watching it years again when Morgan Webb joined
because I thought she was annoying!!

air_max · 02-03-2009, 04:34 AM

i agree that the review system is broken, and its because there is not a unified reviewer in most cases. it increases the amount of subjectivity in a review. it makes it harder to compare games when game A was reviewed by "bob" and game B was reviewed by "steve." each individual reviewer has his/her own biases and thus will apply them accordingly. bob might not care about co-op and may be willing to over look it if the rest of the game is great, but steve lives and dies to play co-op, and if his game doesn't have it, it will get knocked.

i found that i am most likely to agree with the reviews that ign publishes. that is not to say i won't have any disagreements. i hated GTAIV and i liked lair, both opposite feelings than their respective reviewers felt.

caliblue15 · 02-03-2009, 04:34 AM

If you guys want good, non-biased reviews, psxextreme.com is a very good website.

papaholmz · 02-03-2009, 04:34 AM

Reviews don't mean much to me because a review is someone's opinion and rarely if ever does someone's opinion always line up with mine. The one exception is if a game gets something like a 3 out of 10 or a 4.5 out of 10. When a game gets a bad review I usually won't play it, but if it gets a good review (8.0 plus out of 10) then I might buy a used copy from Gamestop, that way I can always return it if my opinion doesn't line up with the reviewers opinion and I hate the game.

-papaholmz

ThePhantomOak · 02-03-2009, 04:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by X-Ninja

X-Play? Are you kidding? ...I stopped watching that when they repeatedly went and flamed the PS3, and wrote a song involving throwing a PS3 in the garbage - which also included a PS3 box in a trash can and Morgan smiling with her thumbs up.
How anybody could go near them anymore is beyond me... :shrugs:
But hey, to each his own i suppose.

Oh, and stop the Big Rig's dissing.

That game is amazing.

Me and my buddies spent a good half hour driving around in that game.

Funny, I actually stopped watching X-play because the slam the PS3 so much. They dont try to pretend to be unbias...

Thinking about it now, I avoid that network now because of that show. No ninja warrior "pipe slider" or anything for me

too bad...I enjoyed it at one point in time.

iamgosu · 02-03-2009, 05:51 AM

GameSpy.com is my favorite source of reviews. (unbiased, and mentions a LOT of small technical details that other sites don't mention)

EuroGamer and Videogamer.com are pretty good too

Gamespot and IGN have definitely lost their touch...

Awesome McCool · 02-03-2009, 05:56 AM

I think that at this point in time people should be able to read a review without having a magical number at the end to make you decide whether you like the game or not. The system itself is flawed only because most of the reviewer's scales don't start until 7(it IS the new average after all) and a lot of reviewers just like to throw out perfect scores for games that do not deserve them(I won't name games, but there are quite a few that do not deserve a 10 and it's almost impossible to even give a game a 10 due to visible flaws and whatnot).

I remember reading the MGS3 IGN review(yeah, I actually read all 3 pages without killing myself) and the guy was just complaining about how slow the game was and how some textures were off. This, that, and the other. He ends up giving MGS3 a 9.5. Ok......So you sat there and wrote a review about a game you seem to have disliked for the most part and you gave it a near perfect score.

I don't read reviews anymore for that simple reason. I'd rather just take the risk and throw my money out to see whether or not I like the game. Luckily, we're in a digital age of demo downloads, so we save more money that way.

doctorD · 02-03-2009, 06:23 AM

Yeah, X-PLAY is played out. I stopped watching because it just seemed to me like they kept trying to promote certain items like they and disrespecting others like they were being paid to do so. The one site that I trusted their reviews went up in smoke when they canned the reviewer for giving a bad review to a game that was a sponser to their site. That site is no longer the same. I miss you Gamespot.com.

Santeria · 02-03-2009, 06:50 AM

just go to metacritic, they take the avg of like 20+ game website reviews.

pretty legit imo.

gametrailers is okay, but they rated halo 3 higher then mgs4 based on story LOL halo 3 has no story compared to MGS4

Mxr5150 · 02-03-2009, 07:48 AM

I think I can safely assert that all of us have had numerous experiences reading gaming reviews that felt less than credible. I can't help but feel that the reviewers try to hard to be like film or book critics and spend more time coming up with ways of sounding witty with extremely polarized reviews, either almost perfect or very low. Reviewers too, I think, don't understand that books and movies aren't videogames in that it's an interactive medium yielding an experience that is subjective from gamer to gamer. I, like the rest of you, don't bother with them and only go to those sites to see when whatever is coming out and the possible features of X product.

Sorry to ramble so much. Yes, I agree that the game review process is broken.

mophious · 02-03-2009, 09:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mxr5150

I think I can safely assert that all of us have had numerous experiences reading gaming reviews that felt less than credible. I can't help but feel that the reviewers try to hard to be like film or book critics and spend more time coming up with ways of sounding witty with extremely polarized reviews, either almost perfect or very low. Reviewers too, I think, don't understand that books and movies aren't videogames in that it's an interactive medium yielding an experience that is subjective from gamer to gamer. I, like the rest of you, don't bother with them and only go to those sites to see when whatever is coming out and the possible features of X product.

Sorry to ramble so much. Yes, I agree that the game review process is broken.

I agree. Very good article with explain.
Thank you!

Marquoz · 02-03-2009, 09:43 AM

The only reviews I pay close attention to are from people that have similar tastes to me. There are a few people on here that I've noticed play a lot of games that I play, and so I pay more attention to what they say about a game. If I know somebody doesn't like the games I play, I don't pay as much attention to their opinion. I do the same with online reviewers, I look at the history of games they've reviewed and see how their tastes mesh with mine. This gives me a better feel for how they will review future games.

This is probably the best gauge I've found for getting better reviews. People will let their innate biases shade their review of a game no matter what.

Maximus · 02-03-2009, 09:58 AM

In Edge we trust!

It's a shame EGM went the way of the dodo, but 1up are (well, were) pretty good. I hope UGO don't tear 1up apart and turn it into IGN mk.II...

As for the article, well yes, the review system for games has been broken for a very long time, exclusive reviews, exclusive previews, exclusive hands-on - all of these things lead to less and less objectivity from the reviewers.

I would also like to add that reviews should move to standard grading system like they have for movies; whether it is out of 5 or 10 doesn't matter.

Personally I would rank IGN as the most inconsistent reviewers in the industry atm.

bajor27 · 02-03-2009, 10:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Marquoz

The only reviews I pay close attention to are from people that have similar tastes to me. There are a few people on here that I've noticed play a lot of games that I play, and so I pay more attention to what they say about a game. If I know somebody doesn't like the games I play, I don't pay as much attention to their opinion. I do the same with online reviewers, I look at the history of games they've reviewed and see how their tastes mesh with mine. This gives me a better feel for how they will review future games.

This is probably the best gauge I've found for getting better reviews. People will let their innate biases shade their review of a game no matter what.

That's definitely the way to go. Find a reviewer with similar interests or taste in games and you should be fine for the most part. This is a big part of why I love the advent of podcasts. Really helps to get to know a reviewers personality, which in turn, helps me judge how much I can trust their reviews.

I also highly suggest just reading the review and ignoring the score completely. This usually gives you a much better idea if you'll actually like a game. The score is pretty meaningless IMO.

FinalEvangelion · 02-03-2009, 10:10 AM

I definitely know for anime-styled jRPGs, I need to add 10% to the metacritic to get the real score. Tales of Vesperia got 81% and Valkyria Chronicles got 87%. They were really 91% and 97% games, respectively.

Terjyn · 02-03-2009, 11:58 AM

I pretty do what Final does, except for all games. I start with metacritic then apply scoring changes based on how I feel reviewers review vs. reality

JRPG? +10
Big name studio? -10
Traditional multiplayer FPS? -5
PS3 Exclusive? +2(It boggles my mind that the metacritic score for Killzone 2 is currently below Halo 3, the most overrated piece of crap game this gen)
360 Exclusive? -2
Wii game? -10 (it's absurd that they give out close to 10s for Wii graphics on anything)

02-03-2009, 04:16 AM	#1
caliblue15 Blu-ray Knight Member since:Dec 2007 Home Theater Gallery:12 Blu-ray collection:85 Blu-ray reviews:1 Trading Score:6	How broken is the current Game Review process? Should you really be taking any notice of Game Reviews anymore? Is the whole game review system not giving us what we want, a non biased review of the latest, greatest game of that time? It probably is looking back at some previous reviews. Lets take a look back in time. We dont have to go back far do we to see the reviews and scoring for Rockstars GTA4. Some 99% (ok maybe 98) gave the game 10/10, 100/100, etc, ad nauseum. Lets face it this is the moment that the game review system become corrupted and a standard for scoring was set. The general consensus over GTA4 is not too good afterall with failings pointing to lack of story / bad story, some call the graphics into question and others have faults based on their own perception of the game. It is certainly in no position to sit back and revel in the review scoring it was given. Lets also take a look at one of the greatest FPS (for the majority) currently available, the Call of Duty series. Its safe to say that COD in its latter offering (4+W@W) are the current king of online rambo type games and why not, Its fantastic in nearly all aspects on and offline, we will leave it up to you to review the review scores for this. While you are also reviewing old reviews take a look at some of the reviews for Gears of War 2. Again by all accounts another fantastic game and was well recieved in the game community, faultless. I think we can safely assume that great games get great reviews and bad ones get properly beaten to the edge of the internet forever, a bit like the review for Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing Review. It scores 1.0 by the way and here is a couple of quotes :- “Just how bad is Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing? It’s as bad as your mind will allow you to comprehend.” “It is so disturbingly bad that even its budget price tag seems like a slap in the face. It really makes you wonder if the company that put out this dreck even took so much as a half minute to glance at the game that it was releasing. The game’s readme file does assert that the game was thoroughly tested on various PCs, but the end result seems to suggest otherwise. The fact is, even if you tried, you couldn’t play Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing the way it was seemingly intended to be played, and even if you could, you wouldn’t want to. “ See thats a review, reading that does it justice and you would not buy it. So do you the reviewer want to create a loyal group of readers that trust your input and reviews, do you want them to read about future game reviews on your site? The name of the game says yes, you need the loyal to come back. So the challenge is this, Can you really justify giving a game such as GTA4 10/10 and GOW2 10/10 or COD4 10/10 and then give KILLZONE2 a 9 or future title less? When you said that GTA4 will blow you away and that GOW2 is the what you need to buy an xbox for did you also remind your readers that they didnt have a good story or that multiplayer was serious broken and that some games were missing CO-OP and thus marking them down for it? No, didnt think so. Please do your fans a favor and provide them with a real review based on real things that we need to know and at the same time keep the fluidity and scoring system the same across all games no matter what platform they come on. A real gamer knows that a good game is a good game no matter what platform it is on. Your broken review systems only fuel what is meant to be an “enjoyable experience”, one of “entertainment” into a festival of hatred for one another. Remember this, when checking out a review always look back at some of the previous big titles and see what they had to say about them as well. Thanks for reading. http://www.vgwatchdog.com/?p=21215

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02-03-2009, 04:20 AM	#2
TomHoang Member Member since:Dec 2008 Home Theater Gallery:4 Blu-ray collection:37 Blu-ray reviews:15	The only reviews that I trust now are X-Play's, well said BTW

02-03-2009, 04:33 AM	#4
ThePhantomOak Blu-ray Guru Member since:Nov 2007 Location:Reno, NEVADA. "Battle Born"	What reviews do you trust? Seriously... JD Power? SAG? Hookers and Handguns? Cnet? They are all garbage.

02-03-2009, 04:34 AM	#5
Twankies08 Senior Member Member since:Mar 2008 Location:Panama City, Florida Blu-ray collection:168 Blu-ray reviews:8 Trading Score:18	I have to agree, x-play does suck!! I stopped watching it years again when Morgan Webb joined because I thought she was annoying!!

02-03-2009, 04:34 AM	#6
air_max Special Member Member since:Jan 2008	i agree that the review system is broken, and its because there is not a unified reviewer in most cases. it increases the amount of subjectivity in a review. it makes it harder to compare games when game A was reviewed by "bob" and game B was reviewed by "steve." each individual reviewer has his/her own biases and thus will apply them accordingly. bob might not care about co-op and may be willing to over look it if the rest of the game is great, but steve lives and dies to play co-op, and if his game doesn't have it, it will get knocked. i found that i am most likely to agree with the reviews that ign publishes. that is not to say i won't have any disagreements. i hated GTAIV and i liked lair, both opposite feelings than their respective reviewers felt.

02-03-2009, 04:34 AM	#8
papaholmz Senior Member Member since:Mar 2008 Trading Score:22	Reviews don't mean much to me because a review is someone's opinion and rarely if ever does someone's opinion always line up with mine. The one exception is if a game gets something like a 3 out of 10 or a 4.5 out of 10. When a game gets a bad review I usually won't play it, but if it gets a good review (8.0 plus out of 10) then I might buy a used copy from Gamestop, that way I can always return it if my opinion doesn't line up with the reviewers opinion and I hate the game. -papaholmz

02-03-2009, 05:51 AM	#10
iamgosu Member Member since:Jan 2009	GameSpy.com is my favorite source of reviews. (unbiased, and mentions a LOT of small technical details that other sites don't mention) EuroGamer and Videogamer.com are pretty good too Gamespot and IGN have definitely lost their touch...

02-03-2009, 05:56 AM	#11
Awesome McCool Member Member since:Jan 2008 Blu-ray collection:67	I think that at this point in time people should be able to read a review without having a magical number at the end to make you decide whether you like the game or not. The system itself is flawed only because most of the reviewer's scales don't start until 7(it IS the new average after all) and a lot of reviewers just like to throw out perfect scores for games that do not deserve them(I won't name games, but there are quite a few that do not deserve a 10 and it's almost impossible to even give a game a 10 due to visible flaws and whatnot). I remember reading the MGS3 IGN review(yeah, I actually read all 3 pages without killing myself) and the guy was just complaining about how slow the game was and how some textures were off. This, that, and the other. He ends up giving MGS3 a 9.5. Ok......So you sat there and wrote a review about a game you seem to have disliked for the most part and you gave it a near perfect score. I don't read reviews anymore for that simple reason. I'd rather just take the risk and throw my money out to see whether or not I like the game. Luckily, we're in a digital age of demo downloads, so we save more money that way.

02-03-2009, 06:23 AM	#12
doctorD Blu-ray Ninja Member since:Jun 2007 Location:Redmond, WA Home Theater Gallery:47 4K collection:397 Blu-ray collection:1723 Blu-ray reviews: 12 Trading Score:1	Yeah, X-PLAY is played out. I stopped watching because it just seemed to me like they kept trying to promote certain items like they and disrespecting others like they were being paid to do so. The one site that I trusted their reviews went up in smoke when they canned the reviewer for giving a bad review to a game that was a sponser to their site. That site is no longer the same. I miss you Gamespot.com.

02-03-2009, 06:50 AM	#13
Santeria Special Member Member since:Oct 2007 Location:San Diego Home Theater Gallery:14 Blu-ray collection:20 Trading Score:4	just go to metacritic, they take the avg of like 20+ game website reviews. pretty legit imo. gametrailers is okay, but they rated halo 3 higher then mgs4 based on story LOL halo 3 has no story compared to MGS4

02-03-2009, 07:48 AM	#14
Mxr5150 Special Member Member since:Mar 2008 Location:Indiana Blu-ray collection:74 Blu-ray reviews:10	I think I can safely assert that all of us have had numerous experiences reading gaming reviews that felt less than credible. I can't help but feel that the reviewers try to hard to be like film or book critics and spend more time coming up with ways of sounding witty with extremely polarized reviews, either almost perfect or very low. Reviewers too, I think, don't understand that books and movies aren't videogames in that it's an interactive medium yielding an experience that is subjective from gamer to gamer. I, like the rest of you, don't bother with them and only go to those sites to see when whatever is coming out and the possible features of X product. Sorry to ramble so much. Yes, I agree that the game review process is broken.

02-03-2009, 09:43 AM	#16
Marquoz Blu-ray Samurai Member since:Jan 2008 Location:New Orleans Home Theater Gallery:4 Blu-ray collection:167 Trading Score:2	The only reviews I pay close attention to are from people that have similar tastes to me. There are a few people on here that I've noticed play a lot of games that I play, and so I pay more attention to what they say about a game. If I know somebody doesn't like the games I play, I don't pay as much attention to their opinion. I do the same with online reviewers, I look at the history of games they've reviewed and see how their tastes mesh with mine. This gives me a better feel for how they will review future games. This is probably the best gauge I've found for getting better reviews. People will let their innate biases shade their review of a game no matter what.

02-03-2009, 09:58 AM	#17
Maximus Super Moderator Top contributor Member since:Nov 2006	In Edge we trust! It's a shame EGM went the way of the dodo, but 1up are (well, were) pretty good. I hope UGO don't tear 1up apart and turn it into IGN mk.II... As for the article, well yes, the review system for games has been broken for a very long time, exclusive reviews, exclusive previews, exclusive hands-on - all of these things lead to less and less objectivity from the reviewers. I would also like to add that reviews should move to standard grading system like they have for movies; whether it is out of 5 or 10 doesn't matter. Personally I would rank IGN as the most inconsistent reviewers in the industry atm.

02-03-2009, 10:10 AM	#19
FinalEvangelion Senior Member Member since:Nov 2008	I definitely know for anime-styled jRPGs, I need to add 10% to the metacritic to get the real score. Tales of Vesperia got 81% and Valkyria Chronicles got 87%. They were really 91% and 97% games, respectively.

02-03-2009, 11:58 AM	#20
Terjyn Blu-ray Knight Member since:Jul 2007 Blu-ray collection:122	I pretty do what Final does, except for all games. I start with metacritic then apply scoring changes based on how I feel reviewers review vs. reality JRPG? +10 Big name studio? -10 Traditional multiplayer FPS? -5 PS3 Exclusive? +2(It boggles my mind that the metacritic score for Killzone 2 is currently below Halo 3, the most overrated piece of crap game this gen) 360 Exclusive? -2 Wii game? -10 (it's absurd that they give out close to 10s for Wii graphics on anything)

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