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Nuvendil on 21 April 2017
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Johnw1104 said:
SuperNova said:

 

 

Yeah and I actually like Jim, I've discovered cool games through him and is Jimquisition series can be very well reasoned and insightful.

That being said his Yooka-Laylee rewiew was gibberish for the most part. His main critism seemed to be that it did what it set out to do, namely being an N64 style collectathon. 

I've heard the argument made that Playtonic missed out on the opportunity to do, what Yacht Club games did with Shovel Knight and make the game that people THINK they remember instead of staying true to all of the design philosophies (and fallacies) of the original. That's a legit criticsm to make. It's not one that should put the resultig game into DigiHom territory of badness. Yooka-Laylee runs. It isn't unplayable. It isn't detestable. It doesn't crash. It's not a 2/10.

Regardless we'll have to wait until after release for his MK8D rewiew because Nintendo doesn't send him rewiew code.

That's why I find Jim to be very frustrating sometimes. The man's reviews are often superb, as he's clearly quite intelligent and well spoken (or written), but that's why some of his bizarrely negative reviews irk me; he frequently contradicts himself within said bad reviews, offers opinions that run counter to those presented in most of his other reviews, and in general comes across as someone writing a hit piece as opposed to giving the game an honest chance. 

They seem to pop up from time to time, and one is forced to wonder if he stubbed his toe moments before sitting down to right the thing. It wouldn't bother me if he wasn't included within metacritic, as I prefer the reviewers in metacritic to establish a consistent pattern of reviewing, whereas he seems to be willing to drop a game to "broken" at a whim.

I think it is best described as a lack of professional distance.  His reveiews are more or less just an unfiltered expression of his feelings on a game.  Which sounds fine but can lead to things like the Yooka Laylee review.  I have no doubt he detests that game.  But someone with more professional distance can step back and say "I don't like this, but it's not *that* bad".  Case in point, ProJared's review of Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker.  He's not a huge fan of it, you can tell in the review.  He finds it kinda dull cause it's not for him.  But he still stepped back and recognized the puzzles are well done and the presentation good and it's worth the price.  Did he give it an 8 or 9 like those who loved it?  No, he gave it a 7.  But that's probably higher than his personal ranking which sounds like it would have been more like a 5 or 6.  That's a good thing though, recognizing that at least a portion of one's dislike is just personal taste.

Jim reminds me much more of Yahtzee.  The issue of course is that this style stands in stark contrast to his more serious and thoughtful stuff he does with articles and most of his Jimquisition videos so it is annoyingly inconsistent.