I wanted to make a thread about Tom "I hate everything" Chick on 2.45, but being a new member i obviously couldn't.
His review of TLoU bought him to my attention and after reading how so many gafers think he is one of the most respected and honest reviewers in the gaming community makes me slightly mad.
I know mainstream sites like IGN and GT is all hype machine, eg rating games like CODMW3 highly even though it was clone of MW2, but Tom Chick really comes off as a egotistical and pretentious critic and shouldn't be included in metacritic.
Yes, his reviews are actually pretty positive for most games like TLoU etc, but lines like
The Last of Us is the most emotionally resonant game you will ever play about plank, ladder, and pallet management. To be fair youll sometimes scooch dumpsters around. At one point, you scooch a piano.
Statements like the abovemakes him come up as arrogant and haven't paid attention to the game or (havent even finished the game). I mean yes there were lots of ladders and planks but a lot of times the game played on players expectation and made the player go "OH, lol". He also goes on to criticize the gameplay, calling it "pedestrian" which is far from the truth if he even bothered to notice the amazing job ND has done the balance between stealth and gun-play, compared to many games where you get discovered and you are plunged into a dissatisfying shoot-out where you just either die immediately or are forced to gun down every enemy as fast as possible, and the transition between stealth and being discovered as suddenly Joel becomes overwhelmed before turning the tables again to become the hunter is a unique aspect of the game as well. The game also allows you to approach an engagement in many ways, using bomb traps, smoke or the bow or all of them.
And onto the scaling of Tom itself, which he claims to be how much he liked the game. If everyone could just review games by how much they liked a game, then amazing RPGs would be getting low scores because the reviewer simply wasn't into RPGs, like how im not into fighting games and is probably not in a position to make a judgement on the latest Tekken.
Rating a game on purely how much you like it also means you don't take into account the value of the game itself, for example Tom rated Star Wars Pinball a 5 while TLoU and Bioshock Infinite a 3. SW Pinball mightve achieved the pinnacle of Pinball gameplay, but it doesn't take into account the artistic merit of games like TLoU and BI. Its like rating the latest American Pie an 8 while a movie like The Godfather or Children of Men gets a 7 rating. Does that mean American Pie is a better movie just cause it was the best movie in its genre? Games like TLoU are crafted with a lot of thought put into it, its a marriage of visual art, music, gameplay, acting, story telling and a whole mire of other things, and obviously flaws like shonky friendly AI walking infront of enemy LOS is going to be more glaring, and a score system where its all about HOW MUCH I LIKED IT doesn't really do it justice.
It seems where a lot of Tom Chick is coming from is cause ya' know, games suck these days and are over hyped and dumbed down, so im just gonna go in with no expectation and no hype even though what im really doing is going in with my mind already made up, that is that if a game is getting rave reviews, its probably overated and im gonna nitpick it.
this is the BS he spouts in the BI review comments section
Why is it unprofessional? A review is an attempt to articulate your experience with a game, movie, book, or what have you. The rating is simply shorthand for how much you liked it. I don't know how you get this silly idea that a rating "isn't your own choice". What an absurd comment, but hardly unexpected coming from someone who wants me to kill myself.
If you expect a rating to somehow magically reflect the quality of a work of entertainment, you're expecting something they don't provide. A review is never going to be an objective measure of the quality of an inherently subjective experience. What you want is quite literally impossible.
I mean what the hell? He is going all philosophical BS on us? "A review is never going to be an objective measure of the quality of an inherently subjective experience."
Journalist have a responsibility in their reviews to reflect the quality of the work being reviewed. Let me just quote some random off the comment section on the EGM ACM review
What are you people talking about? "It' just his opinion, and everybody can state their opinions as they please..." now, this really is bulls**t! This is a matter of journalistic responsibility, it's not "just an opinion" to review a game only to his own liking, fandom or paycheck. Would it be "just an opinion" to you if a consumer journal would rate an unhealthy peace of fast food junk as a gourmet fitness meal perfectly suitable for your kids? No? Why not, it's just an opinion after all..
SO NO TOM CHICK! A review is not simply a shorthand for how much you like a game, you are simply twisting things because you are old and cynical. And this is coming from a PC gamer who plays "hardcore gamez" like IL2 and Eve online
/ RANT
