Game reviews need to mature more. They are getting less and less relevant.

[Kantor]

MontanaHatchet said:

Kantor said:

MontanaHatchet said:

The gaming industry is fucked up in general. I mean, without Vgchartz, there would be pretty much no sales data for videogames that's available to the public. It's pathetic. As for reviewers, they're just giving the gamers what they want. "Gamers" are really just big babies. No one really wants integrity from reviewers. They just want to see their favorite games get high scores. Just look at how much hate Gerstmann got for giving Twilight Princess an 8.8. Yes, an 8.8. A perfectly good score.

When gamers stop sucking, I'm sure the reviewers will follow suit. We also need to stop thinking of game reviews as being a percentage of 100, and rather as "positive" or "negative" (similar to what Rotten Tomatoes does). 

The Rotten Tomatoes system is thoroughly useless. I loved Big Momma's House 2 (5%) and was almost bored to death by Another Year (100%). No review will be agreed with by everyone.

That's not the point though. RT doesn't allow for a middle ground. Either you liked the movie, or disliked it. Opinions aren't that simple. You will probably have liked some parts of the movie, and not liked others. You may have disliked the movie, but appreciated that others will like it, or vice versa. You may be recommending the movie to people who like a certain type of film.

It just about works with film, because you sit in a hall for two hours and watch. There isn't a lot of scope for subjectivity, really. What makes a good film? Good writing. Good acting. Good special effects. Good cinematography. With a game, it's different. Shadow of the Colossus looked like crap, had useless controls, was thoroughly incomprehensible, and involved climbing on giants and stabbing them until they died...sixteen times. And yet it's one of the greatest games ever made. Why? Because it just is.

Couple things I found wrong with this post:

1. You liked Big Momma's House 2?

2. How does liking a bad movie and hating a good movie mean that Rotten Tomatoes' system is "thoroughly useless?"

3. The reason the Rotten Tomatoes system works so well is because you weigh all of the different factors into the movie before saying whether you approve of it or not. You might consider all the good and bad points in the movie and give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. And even if you think that's imperfect, how could anyone possibly weigh all the different points of a game into a scale out of 10 or 100? That's far more illogical.

4. You didn't actually explain the difference between what makes a good film and a good movie. Big Momma's House 2 had crappy acting and crappy writing, and I doubt it had much in the way of special effects or cinematography. Yet you still say you loved it. Or is that you recognize it's bad and still like it? And from what you described, SotC sounds really bad.

1) Yes. Yes, I did.

2) That was just an observation. I was pointing out that Rotten Tomatoes' scoring system was no more useful than any game scoring system.

3) Middle ground. There's no "average" on the RT review scale. What if it was an average movie? What if the acting was decent, but the story was atrocious, and overall it was just something of a timepass? Is that good or bad? I could say that perhaps it's a 6/10. Is that good? What about 6.1? 5.9? Similarly, 60% positive reviews makes a movie "fresh", but with 59%, it's rotten? Because a decimal score has so many more score captions (one word descriptions, I suppose), the jump resulting from a 1% increase in score isn't anywhere near as significant.

4) I do recognise that it's bad and still like it. A movie can be bad and still be enjoyable. A game can't. Shadow of the Colossus wasn't a bad game, as well you know.