-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Who Will Review the Reviewers?
- Thread starter xir
- Start date
Icanplaythat
Member
gprime said:
I wouldn't say we do it objectively.
Zombie James
Banned
"I care not for hats of money."
Joe Molotov
Member
How would that even work?
"My calculations prove that, mathematically, Neverwinter Nights 2 is a 7.6333333 repeating out of 10, with a +/- 5% margin of error. QED"
"My calculations prove that, mathematically, Neverwinter Nights 2 is a 7.6333333 repeating out of 10, with a +/- 5% margin of error. QED"
Tim the Wiz
Banned
:lol Kyle Orland?
Icanplaythat
Member
xir said:
The best thing you can do is use gamerankings.com and metacritic.com as a reference. Any reviewer who is grossly out of line either has a vendetta, is involved with moneyhats, or is just plain crazy*.
* - You know who I'm talking about.
A Link to the Past
Banned
I am totally objective!
But I won't tell where my reviews are because you'll tell me I'm not.
:|
But I won't tell where my reviews are because you'll tell me I'm not.
:|
buckfutter
Member
I'll do it. Everybody gets an 8.8.
Azelover
Titanic was called the Ship of Dreams, and it was. It really was.
Joe Molotov said:
If someone was to do it it would probably have to be a professor, not disagreeing with the opinion of the reviewer but judging the way it's presented and the arguments used to gauge the level of professionalism involved and overall quality of the writting. It's kind of pointless, but I would be lying if I said I didn't think gaming journalism needed some better standards. I don't think reviewing reviewers is the best way to get there though.
Greenpanda
Banned
explodet said:
beat me to it, you jerk
A Link to the Past
Banned
Me
Icanplaythat
Member
mj1108 said:
Jesus or White man.
also, re: gamespot's zelda: 8.8 on its side would be infinity dot infinity.
gamespot review is actually a good example. How was the text of the review sans the numbers? Also, they use a weighted scale, and Jeff did give a tilt of 10. If audio hadn't been a 7 it would have floated into happy 9+ land.
People seem to argue scores not text. I didn't agree with a lot of god hand reviews, personally, but liked reading lots of them, gamespots' for example
gamespot review is actually a good example. How was the text of the review sans the numbers? Also, they use a weighted scale, and Jeff did give a tilt of 10. If audio hadn't been a 7 it would have floated into happy 9+ land.
People seem to argue scores not text. I didn't agree with a lot of god hand reviews, personally, but liked reading lots of them, gamespots' for example
Icanplaythat
Member
xir said:
You're absolutely right, most people don't care or aren't familiar with the intricacies of the gamespot review system. If you go by his "tilt", Gertsmann wanted to give the game a higher score, but was restricted by the scale. However, I won't really know if 8.8 is off the mark until I play the game.
Icanplaythat
Member
makaveli said:
Maybe he really likes skateboards, things could have been different if Zelda had a more intuitive trick system.
Reviewing reviewers would imbue them with far more significance than they deserve.
People already take reviewers far too seriously. They are only guides, if written well. If written poorly, they're just a glorified opinion - a messageboard post accidentally transposed to a decorated webpage.
The only important opinion is your own afterall. You're the one who buys the game and plays it.
People already take reviewers far too seriously. They are only guides, if written well. If written poorly, they're just a glorified opinion - a messageboard post accidentally transposed to a decorated webpage.
The only important opinion is your own afterall. You're the one who buys the game and plays it.
Icanplaythat
Member
Scrow said:
EXPLOSIVO
I was answering someone else's contention that gaf should be the one's to review the reviewers. Any review is subjective, any review of a review would be equally subjective and so on.
makaveli said:
GameRankings is an amalgamation of reviewer's opinions. Yes, it's a good resource to get a general feel for the overall "quality" of a title - but it's not the final say by any means.
If you can, you should choose games based on trying them out yourself. Or consult people who have very similar tastes and genre preferences to your own.
Of course, if a game is getting panned by every reviewer, and has a really low GameRankings score - sure, chances are it's crap. But all those games that come out with 60's - 70's scores... Those games simply might appeal more to some, less to others. And every now and then, you might find a 90's rated game that bores you to tears. So it works both ways.
Gamerankings is very usefull for understanding how different sites tend to score things. I think someone pounted out earlier that 2/3 of Play magazine's reviews are above the average score. While some sites like 1up actually try to use the whole scale, so 5 is average, whereas a game of similar quality should score a 7 at a site like IGN.ProphetZG said:
I own and love many games that got sevens and sixes on average; the trick for me is to find a handfull of reviewers that I trust. Sometimes I go by the concensus, but get burned. For example, theres a review of Fable out there which gave is a 6/10, meaning it's not recomended. In retrospect, that's the one I agreed with, though the average score is MUCH higher. That's a game I think most reviewers did a disservice on the public with, but that's just my opinion.
Demos are now a deciding factor for me - if there's a demo out there, and it sucks, that's a deal-breaker regardless of reviews.
Pellham said:
I agree.
In fact, I would go so far as to suggest there is no such thing as pure objectivity in any form of journalism. The human mind is innately subjective. We experience everything internally, and unavoidably filter experiences in a personal way. It's not even so much what you write/report, but also what you don't write about. A lot of journalistic subjectivity is manifested by what gets left out - which is why reports might appear objective to an untrained audience. Which is one reason I have little faith in "news" media. But now I'm really rambling...
I'll stop.emomoonbase
I'm free 2night after my LARPing guild meets.
Reviews of reviews? Seriously WTF? How about getting off the damn internet for a while and actually playing some games.
Chairman Yang
if he talks about books, you better damn well listen
Reviews should become completely objective. We can easily break down a game into its component parts, and then rate each part according to quantitative factors. For example: you can measure the quality of music by the number of instruments, number of tracks, etc. You can measure graphics by the number of polygons pushed on the screen, and the postprocessing effects applied, and so on. You can measure "fun" by measuring players' brainwaves (using something like an fMRI machine).
Once we can achieve this, we will enter a new golden age of gaming.
Once we can achieve this, we will enter a new golden age of gaming.
desperate times call for desperte measures and i think reviews of reviews would be perfect and they should also form a cousle of all the top reviewers from the gaming sites to make a review that is fair pure unbias so we can have 1 good standard and then we will have reviewrs like gerstman fired