UnlovedJew said:
Hilary Goldstein of IGN's review of Sonic Unleashed. He gave it a lower score than Sonic 06'. The video review and his criticisms are complete BS as well. He says the controls are broken and the video review shows him deliberately walking and jumping off an edge. -__-
No, I'm pretty much with the writer on this one. Sure, I would argue that Unleashed deserves to be put in contrast to the previous game, giving it a kind of 'redeeming value', but ultimately, you probably wouldn't be playing this for sheer fun.
What sucks is that "4.0" is considered 'low enough' when Sonic 06 really is that game that deserves the last two digits of its year of release to be its score.
It's not even a real game. Like pinokkio really, except here the toy stays a toy and breaks too, ya know? :')
A bad review would be something like Dean Takahashi's Mass Defect. This really was a clear-cut case of 'playing it wrong' after all. Even if he wrote the piece to the best of his writing abilities (I do not pretend to know), it's still embarassing for himself and unfair towards the product.
However... he might also, by accident, have given a lot of casual players a voice if they too forgot about upgrading.
That isn't something that is usually taken into account in reviews. The fact that clarity of design, interface and sometimes blatant handholding also factor into the average consumer opinion and can be the source of great difference between the experience of 'core' and 'casual' gamers (an ill-defined distinction, I admit). I am always left to wonder a bit whether professional writers take this aspect in consideration and whether or not they realize "whom they are writing for" in a particular article. Because even if they do, and I would assume that professional journalists are well aware of this, there appears to be no room or time for them to clarify in particular where they are coming from and want they were looking for during their time with the game / product. This probably doesn't need to be done in the review itself, but without those out and in the open, it's always going to be anyone's guess which way the wind happened to be blowing when they were playing and writing about the game. Which, to make things even more complicated, are usually also two completely separate events.
Even EDGE switches between these two (extreme) positions between different editors, even though the 'core' voice is clearly dominant in that magazine. Which one of those gave 10's to Halo 3 and GTA 4? To make things seem fair and even, Edge favors design as the basis for its writings. And I can get behind this for Halo 3, for which it is well deserved from either perspective. I don't think many people would contest that. But the GTA 4 review interestingly chose the cultural aspect of the design and cheared it on from that angle only. It seemed to forget that beneath all that shiny stuff, there is also a set of mechanisms that count as design and are ultimately the ones that decide (for the core voice at least) what makes a game fun to keep playing.
This topic would simply call that last review 'bad' because it failed to observe GTA4's shortcomings when played longer. The same thing happened, despite in a different manner, with IGN's and many other reviews. But are they really simply 'bad'? We learned afterwards that the process by which these reviews were made, was highly manipulated to ensure good results.
What were the writers supposed to do in this case? Come clean to the audience? I don't think that was even possible (legally) at the time. And when it was, the reviews were out already and the point of coming clean was rendered moot.
Practical process aside, I consider the IGN God Hand review to be a case where a game that "demands" a core voice (it is unfortunately designed that way) got reviewed in the casual 'voice'. And from that same voice, I personally honestly found God Hand to be... well, as that review described really.
I do not believe that these reviews are fundamentally 'wrong'. More often, I think that the 'needed voice' doesn't match either the product (god hand was obviously not intended for foolish mortals such as myself) or the audience the writer believes will be interested in reading that particular piece.
to summarize to some extend:
1. the reviewer's starting position in terms of desired challenge or experience remains largely unknown. Casual or core expectations of a game resulting in a review "voiced" in those terms, results in near-instant conflict between the two perspectives, unless a game caters to both in a convincing manner, like Halo 3.
2. the reviewing process is not made public and it is not possible to know how balanced (average thoughts and feelings after many sessions or hours) the opinion in reviews is. Not only that, the time to get there is by and large unavaible to all who write professionally.
3. it is not possible to say whether a review is actually bad ór good in a manner approaching some sense of objectivity without knowing the status of the previous two points.
one additional point:
4. the belief that quality is inherent to a product and can be measured in a lineair fashion across multiple, almost mutual-exclusive consumer perspectives may not serve the industry to balance the needs of its producers and consumers and may blind them to 'would be obvious' problems with that balance.
Some would go as far as saying that metacritic is indeed a destructive force within the industry, but that ignores the fact that metacritic provides a service based on a belief that is widely shared by consumers, most certainly in this particular thread. What else decides that a review is "wrong", if not the score given?
