themagicalkitsune
Member
I say someone should. I'm sure people would like to know this.
Since no one else pulled the trigger, here it is.
I say someone should. I'm sure people would like to know this.
If I was a professional reviewer I would be objective as possible. There certain genres of games I don't play personally like party games, MMO's and sports games etc. If I had to review an NFL game for my job I would give it a positive score if it was well made, played well and had good graphics. A review has to be useful to different kinds of people including fans of the genre. It would be unfair for me to knock the game with a bad review score simply because I dislike the sport.nah. reviews are subjective. press releases are objective.
I think at that point it needs to show that for someone who never plays those games that they can get into it and enjoy it within reason. You'd try to give the game a fair shake, maybe see if there's something you need to keep in mind as someone unfamiliar with the genre that'd make it enjoyable, and if you really can't get into it then perhaps it deserves a mediocre score for not being something people who normally don't play that can get into.If I was a professional reviewer I would be objective as possible. There certain genres of games I don't play personally like party games, MMO's and sports games etc. If I had to review an NFL game for my job I would give it a positive score if it was well made, played well and had good graphics. A review has to be useful to different kinds of people including fans of the genre. It would be unfair for me to knock the game with a bad review score simply because I dislike the sport.
On the Playtonic forum i read that it's likely backers will receive a code before the 11th. One person said it might happen today. Anyone know more?
When do digital game rewards dispatch?
Digital Game Rewards for Steam, GOG and Xbox One will be sent out this week so that backers on those platforms can pre-load the game in time for release day. PS4 codes will be dispatched and immediately playable on Monday, April 10 in time for Yooka-Laylees first worldwide release in Australia and New Zealand.
Codes will be fulfilled via platform specific codes which can be collected from each users BackerKit pledge. Backers must have access to their BackerKit pledge, using the email account registered on the BackerKit system. Digital Codes will not be accessible via Kickstarter.
http://www.playtonicgames.com/a-thank-you/
So I understand that even if we receive the codes we won't be able to play before reale, except for PS4 player. Also the codes will be retrieved from backerkit.
Cool. Had no idea this site existed.Worth noting that the critical average of the main stream press doesn't quite align with a broader spectrum of critics. N4G has 127 reviews logged right now, and aggregates the game has having a 8.0 score.
http://n4g.com/channel/yooka-laylee/reviews
With that said, people really have appeared from no where to review this game. It's clear that a lot of people were invested in this game being a success. I would say that the positivity reflected by more independent blogs may be partially attributed to the cognitive dissonance that backers may feel hearing the game doesn't live up to expectations, as well as the differences in expectations that may influence the perception of someone nostalgic for the platformers of old.
Cool. Had no idea this site existed.
A 7 is pretty fair for Bayonetta 2. It's worse than the first game, the fluctuating frame rate aggravates the garish effects that eat up the screen (which causes a lack of focus on the central action), and almost everything outside of the actual combat and some character designs is either average or plain bad.
The rest of your post is ridiculous for reasons already outlined.
The millions who buy those games love them for exactly what they are, and the reviews on mainstream gaming sites reflect those opinions.
I have a friend who couldn't stop talking about Far Cry 4 pre-release and during the launch period. Few weeks after release, I visited him and he told me it's amazing and I should try it. So I play from the start, pick normal difficulty and I'm like 1 hour into it I ask him about a certain part I couldn't figure out and he says he doesn't know, because I'm further into the game than he is. As I started questioning it he eventually said "I got what I wanted out of the game, it was worth it" and then I realized he buys many of these AAA titles but never actually plays them.
Reagrding the discussion on objectivity: Of course a review cannot be 100% objective, because weighting of issues and successes will always be a great subjective factor. But a review is not the same thing as "I enjoyed this game this much" - and if a review boils down to just that, it has no journalistic value as a review from my point of view.
Let me discuss, for instance, Dark Souls 3, which I have reviewed. I gave it no score, because we don't give score on that website, but I would have rated the game at least 7/10 in my review, whereas personally, playing it was supreme torture. I'd much rather have played Sonic 2006 a second time, which would have trouble reaching a 2/10 from me. So why, if I hate Dark Souls so profoundly, would I not rate it abysmally? Well, the reason is clear: The game does a lot of things really well. It has a well thought out level design, the enemy design largely is very delicate and perfectly fits the gameplay mechanism. The gameplay mechanisms work as intended and the progression of the tasks is well-suited to keeping the player engaged. The thing just is that I cannot stand controls that are not 100% immediate, that I hate games that are slow in their mechanics. That I feel that the disrespect the game has towards the player's time, making the player repeat very simple tasks upon defeat just to have a second chance of attempting the boss, is significantly impeding any enjoyment I can get out of the game. That much of the perceived challenge just comes from the brutalness of having long fights, unforeseen developments and harsh punishments for failure. These issues are tentamount to me and make Dark Souls 3 a devastatingly horrible experience for me. But as a critic, rather than a mere commenter, I have to keep in mind what the game does well, where it fails and what its goals are. As a reviwer, it is my obligation to outline the strengths and weaknesses in a fair way and to not punish a game for being of a kind that I personally do not enjoy much. Of course, the 7 I would probably have given to Dark Souls 3 would have been a negative outlier for that game, but I feel I have well-explained what issues lead to this.
It would definitely not have been fair, had I rated the game 1/10 just because I personally hate what it sets out to do. But I feel that this is exactly what Jim has done in his Yooka-Laylee review. This is fine in a mere comment, but as you can see form his ratings descriptions, his ratings do not mean "I enjoyed it this much", but, instead, "this is how I think others will enjoy it". The extend to which he describes the meaning of a 2/10 may be exaggerated, but nevertheless it is clear that his review scoring system is not intended to purely measure his personal enjoyment of a game. Indeed, this is how he uses it, as evident by not only this game, but also the Warriors reviews, but <i feel this is not what a review is supposed to be or what he sells his ratings as.
well you deprived people who think like you and have similar tastes, of your viewpoint, in favour of a review that probably said the same thing as everyone else
well you deprived people who think like you and have similar tastes, of your viewpoint, in favour of a review that probably said the same thing as everyone else
Reagrding the discussion on objectivity: Of course a review cannot be 100% objective, because weighting of issues and successes will always be a great subjective factor. But a review is not the same thing as "I enjoyed this game this much" - and if a review boils down to just that, it has no journalistic value as a review from my point of view.
Let me discuss, for instance, Dark Souls 3, which I have reviewed. I gave it no score, because we don't give score on that website, but I would have rated the game at least 7/10 in my review, whereas personally, playing it was supreme torture. I'd much rather have played Sonic 2006 a second time, which would have trouble reaching a 2/10 from me. So why, if I hate Dark Souls so profoundly, would I not rate it abysmally? Well, the reason is clear: The game does a lot of things really well. It has a well thought out level design, the enemy design largely is very delicate and perfectly fits the gameplay mechanism. The gameplay mechanisms work as intended and the progression of the tasks is well-suited to keeping the player engaged. The thing just is that I cannot stand controls that are not 100% immediate, that I hate games that are slow in their mechanics. That I feel that the disrespect the game has towards the player's time, making the player repeat very simple tasks upon defeat just to have a second chance of attempting the boss, is significantly impeding any enjoyment I can get out of the game. That much of the perceived challenge just comes from the brutalness of having long fights, unforeseen developments and harsh punishments for failure. These issues are tentamount to me and make Dark Souls 3 a devastatingly horrible experience for me. But as a critic, rather than a mere commenter, I have to keep in mind what the game does well, where it fails and what its goals are. As a reviwer, it is my obligation to outline the strengths and weaknesses in a fair way and to not punish a game for being of a kind that I personally do not enjoy much. Of course, the 7 I would probably have given to Dark Souls 3 would have been a negative outlier for that game, but I feel I have well-explained what issues lead to this.
It would definitely not have been fair, had I rated the game 1/10 just because I personally hate what it sets out to do. But I feel that this is exactly what Jim has done in his Yooka-Laylee review. This is fine in a mere comment, but as you can see form his ratings descriptions, his ratings do not mean "I enjoyed it this much", but, instead, "this is how I think others will enjoy it". The extend to which he describes the meaning of a 2/10 may be exaggerated, but nevertheless it is clear that his review scoring system is not intended to purely measure his personal enjoyment of a game. Indeed, this is how he uses it, as evident by not only this game, but also the Warriors reviews, but <i feel this is not what a review is supposed to be or what he sells his ratings as.
I don't really understand this logic. You're saying that reviewers should review games based on how well it does what it sets out to be rather than just how enjoyable it was for the reviewer...but that is part of what Jim did and why he gave it such a low score. He didn't give it a low score just because he didn't like it, his low score was because it makes the same sort of mistakes the original games in the genre did and doesn't seem to learn from those at all. It wasn't just a case of "I don't like it, 2/10" his complaints were specifically about how he thinks it does everything wrong and doesn't improve on the original games despite the issues those had supposedly being solved. He clearly likes games in the genre, he even backed this on Kickstarter and liked what he played of the pre-release stuff, his low score was because he felt it was a very poor example of the genre.
I'm still not entirely convinced, having read his review, that he knew what the game was going for, even when he backed it. The fact he outright does complain about the game being "archaic" and "outdated" and that "the world kept spinning but this game is from '97!" is not, perhaps, the best excuse he could have done for the game's shortcomings (and to be fair, he is more articulate in other areas, but complaining the game feels like the era it came from is something they were marketing and promoting at the very beginning).
Another thread has already exhaustively covered this, whether "old" inherently means "worse", just as the critics and public moved away from 2D fighters for a time, turn-based JRPGs with random battles, tank-controlled survival horror with fixed camera angles, shoot-em-ups, etc.
I guess when I see "this game made the same mistakes as the original games", a huge part of me is going "well, GOOD. I LOVED those original games, and some of those "mistakes" are actually the reasons I enjoy playing them." Collectathons grew a very sour reputation right around the time DK64 came out, and gamers moved away from them. They were taboo and caustic and frowned upon, while someone like myself, who grew up with them, loved tracking down all the collectibles for no other sake than to find them all. The games were glorified easter egg hunts with cool acrobatics. That's what I wanted, and that's what I got.
And Yooka-Laylee is the same thing. Finding "the easter egg" IS the reward, and for some that's the worst thing a game can do. It's boring. It's outdated. It's unsatisfying. It's repetitive. It's dumb. It's poor design. They want something more substantial in this day and age, and finding something just for the sake of finding it isn't enough.
But for someone like myself who lived and breathed that N64 era madness, this is heaven. The very complaints levied against the game (barring camera controls and performance issues, and, hey, those are getting patched) are THE reason I backed the game, THE reason I'll play the game, and THE reason I'll keep playing the game.
If Jim didn't like the game, no one can tell him different. That's his opinion. But having read his review, and God knows I actually agree with him the majority of the game and defend most of his opinions, I think this was more a case where the game was simply not for him, less than the game inherently has legitimate "2/10 it's broken beyond repair" problems. As I said in another thread, I'm curious what his current opinions are of Banjo-Kazooie and Conker and DK64 in this day and age, because I get the impression he'd be rather cold to them as well, while these are the games Yooka-Laylee branches off from.
It's like making a tank-control, fixed camera, limited saves, clunky survival horror game today that's exactly like Resident Evil 1. Some will always hate the controls, hate the camera angles, and hate the game for not being easy or enjoyable to play, while OTHERS will understand that many of the issues are deliberate, by design, and work incredibly well with the creators' intended vision. Hell, this happened with Yahtzee (and myself) with Demons's Souls, where we both hated the game and felt it was poorly designed, unfair, unbalanced, unintuitive, and poorly paced... until we figured out that it wasn't trying to be a "normal" game. It was doing its own thing, and it didn't care to adapt to modern sensibilities. WE had to adapt to IT, not the other way around.
I'm discovering this with Yooka-Laylee. It's old-school, from a different era, but I'm finding the muscle memory from Super Mario 64, Banjo-Kazooie, and Conker coming back to me. I'm finding myself able to play it as I used to play with that stupid three-pronged N64 controller. It's like slipping on a pair of very old shoes; worn around the edges, sure, but familiar and comfy. And, most importantly, it just fits. The shoes won't fit everyone else, but for me, it's just right.
the early years of 3D gameplay were riddled with troubles – developers hadn't yet worked out how third-person cameras should work, and the intricate jumping challenges found in earlier software were often recreated with annoying results thanks to inferior controls and archaic platforming that stumbled through a whole new dimension.
faithful recreation of a 1998 experience without any consideration or concessions made for the many advances in gameplay that have occurred since then.
Pagies are Stars from Mario 64, the things you keep visiting worlds to unlock to so you can visit fresher worlds. Except, y'know, Stars were fun to get.
It's everything wrong about the formative years of 3D platforming and it somehow retained none of what made the genre's highlights endure.
A 7 is pretty fair for Bayonetta 2. It's worse than the first game, the fluctuating frame rate aggravates the garish effects that eat up the screen (which causes a lack of focus on the central action), and almost everything outside of the actual combat and some character designs is either average or plain bad.
The rest of your post is ridiculous for reasons already outlined.
Haha no. Also worse than the first game? on what platform? on PS3 ?
It being a 90s-style platformer isn't really the problem he seems to have with it. It's that it's a 90s platformer that makes the mistakes as those early games and overall does things poorly compared to other examples. His complaints aren't about the genre itself, but how it ignores the improvements made since those early games. It makes the same sort of mistakes those did at the time - camera, controls etc. He knew what the game would be and makes several references to other games and how what Yooka-Laylee does isn't as fun. I don't see anything that suggests he says it's bad because he just doesn't like that style of game, he says it's bad because it has the same problems the early examples in the genre did even though those shouldn't be there.
Mechanically speaking, Bayonetta 2 is inferior to Bayonetta. I would say structurally as well.
Easy Allies Review (3/5): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiuYNE5dKhQ
Easy Allies Review (3/5): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiuYNE5dKhQ
Good review.
I thought Damiani would be a bit harsher on it.
The words definitely sound harsher than the score imo
Good review.
I thought Damiani would be a bit harsher on it.
The words definitely sound harsher than the score imo
The words definitely sound harsher than the score imo
I think that's just because the review takes time to focus on a few of his gripes in a bit more detail and in a less broad way (like the quiz part).
It also helps that they were reviewing the PC version, but hopefully the console patch brings the other versions closer to it's performance level.
The words definitely sound harsher than the score imo
I think that's just because the review takes time to focus on a few of his gripes in a bit more detail and in a less broad way (like the quiz part).
EditL Apparently 3 on their scale means "Decent." How is "mediocre" decent?
and a 2 is "inferior", and mediocre doesn't mean inferior either.
Inferior sounds a heck of a lot closer than "decent," seeing as literally every comparison they made was about how the game was inferior to past efforts.
Gotta agree with people, that sounded like a 2 or 2.5, but I suppose some of those complaints could be considered nitpicks so I guess 3 is still in the ball park.Easy Allies Review (3/5): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiuYNE5dKhQ
By being having the same meaning?EditL Apparently 3 on their scale means "Decent." How is "mediocre" decent?
Easy Allies Review (3/5): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiuYNE5dKhQ
Man, that quiz mechanic is so stupid. What the hell. I'd google that every single time.
But yeah, definitely passing after this review.
Not really, it made more of a case that they were exactly like past efforts, for better and for worse by modern standards.
The opening section briefly conjures up memories of Spiral Mountain, but it's sprawling areas with hidden secrets and passages don't quite capture the same magic. Playtonic Games compelled squanders the opportunity to show what Hub Worlds are capable of, instead delivering a dull and uninspired effort.
Everything here feels like it's not only been done before, but it's been executed much better too
When similar games in the past have more than double the amount of worlds,
the inconsistent quality here is hard to overlook.
By being having the same meaning?
http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/mediocre?s=t
Man, did we watch the same review? The review literally opens with the question: Can Yooka-Layye possibly live up to its lofty pedigree? They then answer that question throughout the review.
There's just as many mentions of it being exactly comparable to the Rare games of the past. None of those quotes mention it being inferior, but instead not learning from the past, or building on the past.