Serious..I had a fight today with that magazine who is the Belgian guy you know?

*Jealous*.

That person presents what is basically gossip as fact. I mean what's to stop me from getting a yahoo account, pretending to be someone else, and feeding her bullshit information?

This happens in all journalism. CNN, FOX news will skew stories to reflect the views of their sponsors. This magazine learns the hard way that that is the danger of running negative ads.

Soriku said: konnichiwa said: Serious..I had a fight today with that magazine who is the Belgian guy you know? *Jealous*. Don't be jelaous of Jan

 .... I hate that Jan, he used my words to send it to you and to send it to SG....  I was fighting whole day on OPM...Guess who they will suspect if they see this...Yes me of course...Pffff....

Jan I hate you X_X.. Any emailaddres of him?  

Wow, that's nasty. Didn't David Jaffe explode on reviewers when Calling All Cars reviews it?

General Rule: When you see a review score for anything look at the magazine/website/etc. and count the number of large (expensive) adds that are for the product or for the company that produced it; if there are a lot of expensive ads don't trust the review ...

It looks like as more gamers tend to place more importance on game review scores, the more the big corporations will notice and "buy" good scores for their games. I know this didn't necessarily happen in this case, but I'm sure most of the major review sites do on a fairly regular basis.

Perhaps the time has come for me to really stop paying attention to the reviews...

As a counterpoint, here's Gabe of Penny Arcade saying that he thinks that Assassin's Creed is being rated too harshly:


I want to talk about Assassins Creed but first I need to get something out of the way. I have a lot to say about the game and I want to talk about some of the bad reviews it's getting but I want to make sure everyone understands I'm not saying this because of the comic we did for them. So I'm going to link you to an old set of news posts about Prince of Persia 2. Feel free to read those and come back if you like.

Now I'm going to tell you how advertising on PA works. Every other game site out there takes ads for whatever game they can get. It doesn't matter if it's a pile of crap, if the publisher pays for the spot IGN or Gamespot or whoever will run the ad. That's fine but that's not how we do it and the news posts you just read are part of the reason why.

We were huge fans of the first Prince of Persia game so when Ubi came to us and wanted to run ads for the second we said yes. We had no idea they were going to completely fuck it over. So from then on we started demanding playable copies of games before we'd agree to advertising. No matter how early the build we tell the publishers that unless we can see it played in front of us or play it ourselves we won't run ads for it. Obviously a lot can still go wrong during development but we make the best decisions we can. We do not think of the ads you see on our page as ads. They are recommendations and we try extremely hard to insure that anything we put over there is worth your time. When Prince of Persia 2 came out and we saw that it was crap we said as much on the site. Ads for the game appeared right next to those news posts slamming it. Needless to say Ubi wasn't very happy and Robert got some angry phone calls but our loyalty is to our readers not the people paying the bills. We explained to Ubi that the reason our ads perform better than any other site out there is because our readers trust us and that means we have to admit when something we advertise doesn't turn out as good as we hoped. Obviously they understood because we're still advertising their games but like I said this isn't the way other sites operate. I actually give Ubi a lot of credit for not just telling us to fuck off and buying more ads on IGN and Gamespy with the extra money.

I'm telling you all this because I want you to understand that if Assassins Creed actually was a 7.0 game I'd tell you. I also want you to know that when I tell you it's fucking incredible I'm not bullshitting you because we're running ads for the game.

There are about four or five reviews of the game with scores in the low to mid 7's. I want to cover some of the common complaints these reviewers had in case anyone out there is worried about them.

Many of the reviews say that the ending is bad. Obviously I don't want to give away any spoilers but I will say that the final confrontation was exciting and gratifying. It was an extremely satisfying ending to this chapter of the game. Chapter is the important word here. This is a huge story, probably a trilogy at least. The game does end with a cliff hanger and it certainly sets up the rest of the arc but that's how the first part of any multi part story ends. If Star Wars had ended with Luke jumping into his X-Wing to go take on the Death Star that would be a shitty fucking ending. It doesn't though, Luke destroys it and then we get hints about what's in store for our heroes. I'm telling you right now Altair destroys his Death Star.



I also can't be 100% positive but I'm guessing that some of these reviewers didn't let the credits role. Again, I don't want to spoil anything but wait for the credits to end. Until reviewers start posting their Gamertags along with the review we'll never really be able to tell how much of a game they played. But I'd be willing to bet some of them are missing the "Visions of the Future" achievement. I'm not gonna say why but If you don't have this achievement you can't say jack shit about the ending.

I think the biggest complaint I saw was that the missions become repetitive and boring. I actually didn't understand this complaint at all until just the other day. I had gotten an early copy of the game just like everyone else in the media but I was just playing it for fun. I'd cracked into it over the weekend and when I got into the office on Monday I started seeing these negative reviews. When I saw the low scores I was actually really upset and I wanted to talk about the game here on the site. I wanted to tell everyone that these guys were full of shit. However, since so many of the complaints were based on the ending I wanted to beat it first so I was sure I wasn't missing anything. I attacked the game again but this time with the goal of beating it as fast as I could. I was determined to get a post up on Tuesday and I was pushing through the game as fast as I could. I went from finding every high perch in a district to only getting the ones I needed to advance the story. I stopped saving every citizen and avoided any unnecessary confrontations. The informer missions that I had really enjoyed before, I now avoided because I knew they took too long to complete. I did the bare minimum of missions to progress the story and anything that "hindered" my progress was frustrating. Monday night after skipping over another combat (something I used to really enjoy) I stopped myself. What the fuck was I doing? I wasn't playing the game because I wanted to I was playing it because I had a deadline and I needed to beat it. I stopped immediately and decided I'd write about the game whenever I got around to beating it. I spent another day and a half with it and during that time I hunted for hidden flags and explored the cities again. I came in this morning and finally did beat it but I did it at my own pace and I enjoyed every part of it.

Imagine what an open ended sandbox title must look like to a reviewer especially right now. How many games do they have piling up on their desks? A game like Assassins creed isn't meant to be played under a deadline. You shouldn't be trying to beat it as fast as you can so you can move on to Mass Effect or Mario Galaxy. As soon as I gave myself a deadline all of a sudden I understood all their complaints. It was like a fucking Escher painting. I had put myself in their shoes and suddenly the landscape flipped and I could see games from their perspective. In the end I wasn't angry at them for their bad reviews. I actually just felt bad for them.

-Gabe out

Unfortunately this happens quite often. Most software and hardware companies do it to an extent. Some extort favorable reviews, bribe journalists to get them, or withhold funds to get what they want. These reviews are viewed to be financially critical. Poor review scores can damage a product and cost the developer millions of dollars. There are no saints here, and the devil plays for both sides.

The reviewers are often willing participants. Often being more then happy to review a game highly in order to steal advertising revenue from their brethren. Who often cry foul even though they probably did the same thing a few months earlier to someone else. Gaming journalism has never been a bastion of journalistic professionalism. They rely entirely on being spoon fed information, and rely on the companies to supply them with advertising revenue.

For those that do not want to play ball their is a abysmal fate. There are a dozen other gamers waiting for a shot to get that cushy reviewers chair. There are more then enough people out their desperate enough, hungry enough, and with little to no integrity. Who will gladly sell a company a great review.

The greatest problem is their are too many journalists. You need some monopoly formation to take place. Once a journalistic organization gets large enough they become more immune to corporate pressure. You want to see a few magazines and sites get so large that developers would be insane to not advertise with them, and if they push the publication. The publication can push back. Creating a large negative back lash.

People often think monopolies are bad things. However they do tend to generate universal standards, and in the end get universal rules of conduct set. Right now their are hundreds of small time players hustling for every scrap they can get. The competition is too fierce. Which makes exploiting the system that much easier. Will that ever change I doubt it. Just something we have to accept.

 Or at very least stop paying attention to the meaningless scores which are probably often decided by advertising dollars. Game Trailers gave it a 9.1 but there actual video show off some very serious issues, and there's a lot of criticism involving combat being easy as hell once obtaining counter attacks and monk mode makes you invisible allowing you to kill in plain sight with no major consequences.

In response to the Penny Arcade counterpoint, I can't really take Gabe and Tyco or whatever their names are anymore seriously than any other internet based reviewer. I generally enjoy their comic, but that's about it. His initial response to seeing bad (7.7 is bad now?) reviews was to rush through the game so he can say they were full of shit. Clearly he already has an agenda and not interested in being objective, or he would have kept playing at his own pace, and not rushed through in attempt to spite those he felt wrong him, stopping only because it was dampening his own personal enjoyment.

He also doesn’t address a few of those issues above mentioned in the game trailers. Such as monk mode and counter attacks dominating combat. It’s also hard for me to buy “oh the story really is great, but I won’t spoil it” line either. Excluding it’s entirely subjective, if he wants to make a stronger argument, he should “spoil” it, after all this is the internet, spoiler tags are fairly easy to do. We do them here all the time.

I’ve argued before, good criticism doesn’t have to justify itself, the critique itself should be the justification. A well written review of any product covering as many possible reasonable concerns speaks volumes more than attacking other critiques.

It’s one the reasons I hate the idiotic scores which I’ve only found useful for observing different trends amongst reviewers and genres through GameRankings and such. Their intentionally designed to avoid being responsible reviewer by immediately drawing attention away from what they’ve actually written.

In closing I give Gabe’s counterpoint a 3.5/10. =P