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Reviews that were totally 'off'

Eurogamer's RE4 Wii Edition review was way off. The Wii edition contained everything the PS2 version had, but with Gamecube assets and graphics and a new great control scheme, but it scored much lower than all other versions. Even if you hated the pointer controls (which pretty much everyone except that reviewer found to be superior), you could play with a Gamecube controller, so the Wii edition is objectively the best version. Trash review.
 
Basically any review involving European developed RPGs and Space Sims.... mainstream sites usually gives them anywhere from 6-8, but most of the time they are 9s in my books (e.g. Divinity, Risen, Gothic, X2 and X3 etc)
 
Here's one that will set off us Dreamcast fans

Virtual On

For those that haven't seen it the guy goes on and on about how VO:OT on the DC is unplayable. Turns out he just didn't know how to play the game at all. (I'm terrible at that game and even I know about jump/cancelling.)
 
That american review for Football Manager (I believe) that gave it 2/10 or something due to the fact you couldn't control the players.

http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2008/1...eful-uninformed-football-manager-2009-review/

“As far as traditional gameplay goes, there really isn’t any. Apart from managing your roster and coaching your team, there isn’t anything to do at all. It offers little to nothing that would appeal to a casual fan of the sport or to the average videogame enthusiast. I couldn’t imagine why anybody would prefer Worldwide Soccer Manager to FIFA 09 or Pro Evolution Soccer 2009.”

http://www.unigamesity.com/ign-misses-the-point-with-football-manager-2009-review-removes-it/

http://darkzero.co.uk/game-news/ign-removes-210-football-manager-review-and-apologises/
 
Just searched this entire thread for "Vanquish." Found nothing. Apparently everyone but me knew that when Jim Sterling reviewed it it was "Give Games Half the Score They Deserve Day?"
 
duffyside said:
Just searched this entire thread for "Vanquish." Found nothing. Apparently everyone but me knew that when Jim Sterling reviewed it it was "Give Games Half the Score They Deserve Day?"

Your mistake was reading anything Jim Sterling writes... the guy is a joke and an attention whore. He purposely gives some games lower (or higher) scores than they deserve just so his name is in the discussion.
 
duffyside said:
Just searched this entire thread for "Vanquish." Found nothing. Apparently everyone but me knew that when Jim Sterling reviewed it it was "Give Games Half the Score They Deserve Day?"

I remember him saying the controls suck, which is absurd. There is also making a stink about melee attacks, but that just how the game works(it is a TPS). I think he attacked length too, which is fair I guess. I get the feeling he isn't very good at videogames.

Yeah, Jim Sterling is a joke as a reviewer. He is not an artsy-fartsy dude, so I like that, but he just doesn't know better.
 
KevinCow said:
Sonic '06 is broken in plenty of objective ways, most notably its tons of glitches. Like, you can just be running along, and you'll fall through the ground and die.

Unleashed has plenty of issues, but it's easily one of the most polished, least glitchy 3D Sonic games, whereas '06 is pretty much just an alpha that they rushed out without playtesting. Unleashed works properly, '06 doesn't.

Game reviews are subjective, yeah, but this is a whole thread dedicated to complaining about reviews we feel were "wrong," and the post you picked to bring up this argument is probably the closest thing possible to an objective example.
No it's not. Even these "objective" things you talk about aren't objective when it comes to a person's opinion about the game/product. From wholly ignoring said "objective" fault or even enjoying said "objective" fault, it is ultimately up to the individual player to determine whether or not things are enjoyable to him/her.

The whole idea of "objective" aspects to video games has arisen out of a need to "put my game on top." People argue this shit in music and movies too. Taste culture. People want to have "higher" taste than another, and claiming objectivity is a way to put your taste above someone else's taste for all time. You're trying to make it a truth.

Try and tell me a qualitative statement about a game that is also objective. I dare you.
 
RurouniZel said:
SonicGSReviewsWTF.jpg

To be fair, different reviewers might have covered those games. The guy who did Sonic '06 might have given Unleashed a higher score. If it was the same reviewer that did both then yeah, that's way "off".
 
Every review that gave MGS4 a 10/10.

I can understand liking the game, but these moneyhatted journalists glossed over every single negative aspect of the game.
 
jett said:
Every review that gave MGS4 a 10/10.

I can understand liking the game, but these moneyhatted journalists glossed over every single negative aspect of the game.
Probably because MGS4 is so much more than just a game.

It's an unforgettable emotional roller-coaster of an experience that transcends the boundaries of the virtual medium. All thanks to the Cell processor.
 
snap0212 said:
That's not true and you know that. You can finish the game without killing a single person and you can also play through the whole game without being seen once.

Running and sneaking past enemies /= Steal Action gameplay.

Chuck Norris said:
Blatantly untrue, you can play it stealthily as I did and it was much more fun for it. But I agree that the emphasis on guns was the wrong direction and made it far too easy

MGS should always be procure on site and ammo should be limited IMO

No not at all. MGS3 for example was designed for stealth action gameplay. I could spend hours just screwing the NPC's and finding new ways to unleash tactics.

I couldn't do that in MGS4. And I played MGS3 right before and after MGS4.

To put it in simpler terms. MGS3 was designed to infiltrate the areas and mess with the enemies, MGS4 was designed to progress linearly through an area.
 
Dance In My Blood said:
Probably because MGS4 is so much more than just a game.

It's an unforgettable emotional roller-coaster of an experience that transcends the boundaries of the virtual medium. All thanks to the Cell processor.

wow,this is the one of the suitable part to promote MGS4.... in the end of 2007.

In the field of overall opinion,MGS4 is one the the most polarize game in GAF now.
 
Clear said:
Nier's largely luke-warm critical reception really highlighted for me what I feel is wrong with reviews generally these days.

A lot of the time it seems like a beauty pageant, its primarily down to how pretty and superficially "flawless" the title is - vapidity and superficiality is no barrier to great success, just make sure any rough-edges are smoothed off first.
This post perfectly sums up my feelings on "professional" reviews.
When your game tries to do a lot of things not all of them are likely to be perfectly polished. But in my book, setting out to do 100% and achieving 60 is better than setting out to do 40 and achieving 39.

Zinga said:
Basically any review involving European developed RPGs and Space Sims.... mainstream sites usually gives them anywhere from 6-8, but most of the time they are 9s in my books (e.g. Divinity, Risen, Gothic, X2 and X3 etc)
Those games fall victim to the rule above.
 
Shurs said:
You have that post bookmarked or something?
Nope, but I get annoyed by his MGS4 whining. If you're ready to give a game GOTY award six months after the launch, don't be surprised that other people liked it enough to give it a 10 score.
 
SykoTech said:
To be fair, different reviewers might have covered those games. The guy who did Sonic '06 might have given Unleashed a higher score. If it was the same reviewer that did both then yeah, that's way "off".

Also, once you get that low on the scale, all bets are off. Reviewers will simply bin it as 'Shit' and not really care whether it comes out to a 5, 4, or 3.
 
Many gamers will pretend to have played a game when they havn't touched it, or played it and liked it but then pretend to have done otherwise. In reality they are just allowing themselves to be washed along with the flow of popular opinion, which is often only so much bullshit.

elrechazao said:
Every review for Too Human that gave it less than an 8 equivalent.

rezuth said:
Ah, didn't know it was opposite day.

acidspunk said:
Huh? They were right.

I bought Too Human not too long after release. It really is an underrated title and deserves more recognition than it got.
 
The original Game Informer Okami review. They shat all over that game and voiced all kinds of doubts about it and said they just didn't feel it's art would cover for all it's "failings".

Then the game hit a gameshow and it got best in show and everyone loved it and they released a much bigger review doing nothing but praising it and acting like they had always felt that way.

This is why game informer sucks. They have no idea what a good game is and will simply repeat what they see. Okami was great and if they couldn't see this on their own then they were already a lost cause, but bandwagon jumping so blatantly like this was pretty offensive considering they already voiced they hated the game until all the cool kids loved it.
 
SykoTech said:
To be fair, different reviewers might have covered those games. The guy who did Sonic '06 might have given Unleashed a higher score. If it was the same reviewer that did both then yeah, that's way "off".

This is one of the largest problems about reviews and big sites. IGN, Gamespot, etc etc. A person has an opinion, not their website. It is made worse by Metacritic(as usual) because they ignore the focus on personalities put forth by GiantBomb and in magazines(not sure if magazines do it like EGM anymore).


Foxtastical said:
No it's not. Even these "objective" things you talk about aren't objective when it comes to a person's opinion about the game/product. From wholly ignoring said "objective" fault or even enjoying said "objective" fault, it is ultimately up to the individual player to determine whether or not things are enjoyable to him/her.

The whole idea of "objective" aspects to video games has arisen out of a need to "put my game on top." People argue this shit in music and movies too. Taste culture. People want to have "higher" taste than another, and claiming objectivity is a way to put your taste above someone else's taste for all time. You're trying to make it a truth.

Try and tell me a qualitative statement about a game that is also objective. I dare you.

Where to begin... everything is subjective. Everything. Through reasoning we can create rules, even on taste. Without these rules on taste you cannot properly explain why you like something. To do this in the first place requires a lot of introspection and the ability to articulate your feelings(or why you feel a certain way). Higher taste is obtained from experience because you have more to work with.

In general, we've had enough of this "it is subjective" nonsense. Saying something subjective is like saying something exists. A complete waste of energy to read.
 
Nintendo 3DS - IGN Review:
When paired with the added thickness of the unit, the odd angular screen casing definitely impacts the overall portability of the device. (...) The bulky build limits portability.

Here's a Nintendo DS Lite x Nintendo 3DS comparision, I mean, it's the same fucking size!

zdrNS.png
 
Boerseun said:
I bought Too Human not too long after release. It really is an underrated title and deserves more recognition than it got.

It deserved less hate from the get-go and it was ambitious in terms of its context, but it wasn't a good game. Far too forced on its life and death theme for it be actually fun in any spontanious sense.

I've had this talk before, and with the same people. Only time on this forum I felt inclined to specifically add people to the ignore list. I guess the feeling is mutual, but with the difference that I'm a reasonable person. If the game was good in some aspect (its ambitions where certainly not small), I would not hesitate to tell you. But that's not how it turned out.


I did note in the Dragon Age 2 demo that the 'slide to enemy' attack has been duplicated in that game. Without the stick controls, obviously, but the comparison is easy to see.
Obviously, Too Human wasn't all bad, but nobody has claimed that it was. Duckroll and other gaffers maybe, but certainly not professional reviewers.


The Sonic Unleashed scores were a major fuckup in terms of playing and reviewing a game on its own. Unless we want to pretend that Sonic 06 was never released as a full game, thereby negating its scores. I certainly want to believe I never played that piece of shit.
I have no such issues with Unleashed, even if Eggland certainly was something of a 'fuck you' to players who don't play for hours at a time. Longest single level in a platform-genre game ever.
And the final boss was meh.

Still, solid 6 / 10 game from my perspective. Well, as long as you figured out that the werehog's jumps were "off" in terms of timing. If you didn't, you probably couldn't play the game past one particular point. Which might account for some its scores though.



Other "off" scores are GTA4, MGS4 and pretty much a lot of the launch-of-the-gen or high-profile games of this gen. Things have gotten a little better after the severe GTA4 backlash though, I think.
 
SykoTech said:
To be fair, different reviewers might have covered those games. The guy who did Sonic '06 might have given Unleashed a higher score. If it was the same reviewer that did both then yeah, that's way "off".


Well, but not every IGN-reviewer sits isolated in his own cubicle. There should be consultations or else you could forget the whole review crap..
 
moniker said:
Eurogamer's RE4 Wii Edition review was way off. The Wii edition contained everything the PS2 version had, but with Gamecube assets and graphics and a new great control scheme, but it scored much lower than all other versions. Even if you hated the pointer controls (which pretty much everyone except that reviewer found to be superior), you could play with a Gamecube controller, so the Wii edition is objectively the best version. Trash review.

But it also used the PS2 rebalancing, which I found slightly less enjoyable than the original Gamecube balance. And even if you used a Gamecube controller (which you should because the wii controls absolutely shatter any semblance of the pitch perfect balancing in the original two versions), the button prompts in the menus and QTE events were still for the classic controller (which is a shitty controller). The graphics also looked fairly blurry because they simply zoomed in on the original 4:3 letter box style of the GCN version. Owning both versions and having compared them back to back, the 4:3 letter box GCN version looks much sharper, and in my opinion better.

So nope. You're wrong when you say objectively. It's only objectively the best version if you ignore some of the differences.
 
I'm sure I'm not the only one who has said this, but I'm very glad I have stopped bothering with reviews. I used to get all worked up when I game I liked got a bad review. Now, I just say fuck it, and find out for myself. Now, if a game gets all around negative reviews, then I can use that a decent judge of quality.
 
Deadly Premonition 10/10 review from Jim Sterling and Destructoid ( yeah I know the guy and his site are big jokes) but still, that game is so boring, outdated in everything and so broken it's just insane to give it score like that even as a joke.
 
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