GTA 4 Shoe in for GOTY? Best game in History?

[Sullla]

Sqrl said:

As someone who loves the GTA series and has been looking forward to GTA IV I can honestly say you're not the only one....the sheer amount of ass kissing this game has received so far is impressive and most of the reviews sound more like endorsements of a political candidate than a review. A lot of so-called professionals have let themselves get wrapped up in the hype.

With that said I pretty much expected it and you really have to just step back and let them have their day in the sun. A lot of people have waited a long time for this, and once the hype dies down and the "Z0MG Z0MG Z0MG" mentality chills out a bit towards the end of the year we should be able to get a fair GoTY ballot. The game is definitely worthy of consideration, and possibly a shoe-in for most other years, but this year it will have competition.

What Sqrl said. But I'll add a little more for some context.

Big game releases have pretty much reached the point where they're identical to big movie releases. Media blitz campaigns, product tie-ins, "midnight launches" for the diehard fans, and so on. I've come to expect this, and while it can be irritating at times, I can live with it.

The HUGE difference between big-budget games and movies is that there's still no kind of objective review system whatsoever for evaluating games. Professional movie critics usually have their salaries paid by newspapers, and thus can be counted on to stay (relatively) neutral in evaluating their subject matter. If the reviewer from the New York Times writes that "Pirates of the Carribean 3" is an overhyped pile of garbade, he's not going to get fired or demoted from his position. And we've come to expect that from reviewers, the ability to trust that they will give us an honest opinion not influenced by money contributed by movie studios.

But "gaming journalism" (and I use that term loosely) is a complete joke by comparison. The same websites that review games are dependent upon the big game publishers for advertising revenue. How can you possibly get an objective review score for Halo when Gamespot depends on ad money from Microsoft to stay in business? (Quick answer: you can't.) Everyone has known for years that big publishers exchange favors to gaming websites in return for good scores, and several of them have actually gotten caught doing it recently. The ridiculous number of perfect scores that Grand Theft Auto is receiving is merely the continuation of the trend that's been going on for years now. This is of course why the review averages have been steadily increasing over time, as everyone is afraid to give out bad scores to their clients. It's not even that GTA4 is a bad game (I'm sure it's a very, very good game). The problem is that we can't possibly trust any of these scores, since the same "reviewers" are writing preview after preview screaming that we should buy/preorder the game immediately.

Until gaming journalism can secure independent, outside sources of revenue to eliminate their dependance on publishers, their scores can never be taken seriously. And I mean that for ALL games, not just Grand Theft Auto.