| Kresnik said: Interesting topic. And I thank you for bringing it up, because as not-much-of-a-Vita-fan (that I know of!), it was interesting to read your thoughts. Honestly, I've taken issue with multiple IGN reviews of Vita games, but I've always struggled with whether I was being fair on the review since obviously, I like the Vita a lot. My most recent concern was actually something I discussed with Conegamer, and it was Colin's Soul Sacrifice review. Not that I overly disagreed with anything he said in his review, but comparing it to another IGN review of a game in the same genre (Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate) showed a world of difference. The MonHun review was by Kezza who spent 50 hours playing the game; went into detail about the online mode etc. etc. Colin's SS review was after about 20 hours of gameplay and he openly admitted he hadn't played the online mode that much/at all. He just seemed to be the wrong person to be reviewing a game in this genre. Like other people have mentioned in the thread, he actually scored it above the Metascore so perhaps I'm just making a mountain out of a molehill from this. But even in the actual content of the review; it just seemed like Kezza was so much more invested and knew what she was talking about better than him. Anyway, my second issue is to do with the way they review multi-plats on Vita. Specially, the two games which irked me were Need for Speed: Most Wanted and Sonic & SEGA All Stars Racing Transformed. Both of these reviews could be summarised as "Good, but not as good as the home console versions", making specific note of the graphics being worse And that's my issue with it. Yes, I know, Vita is advertised as "Console quality on the go". But that doesn't stop Vita from being a handheld console, and I just find their reviews un-necessarily harsh on titles like this. The odd thing is that they're not consistent with this mantra. Dead or Alive 5+ scored extremely highly, exactly the same as the home console versions. And to be fair, it's a very good port. But it still received a visual downgrade that IGN were screaming bloody murder for on NFS & Sonic. Anyway, rant over. But thanks for making the topic anyway, it was interesting reading your thoughts. |
Very much agree, and as you point out I'm not a Vita fan. Wasn't even a Sony fan in general until recently - well I'm still not a "fan" per se but appreciate direction Sony is going these days so I certainly wouldn't be pointing this out in anything other than an objective way, pleased you noticed :)
End of the day - handheld does not = console, everyone should know that and IGN and whoever else would do us a service to not make the silly comparisons/expectations as such.
Sure the Vita was marketed as a home console in the palm of your hand, but so was the DS (People saying it was as powerful as a Nintendo 64 purely based on the Mario 64 port), what we got with the DS versions of games were just isometric top down rubbish or just straight 2D. Not complaining about that bit as it doesn't make a game, but it is relevant if talking about "console in palm of hand".
Same with PSP, it was thought of upon first release as a portable PS2 in terms of power, which it wasn't, certainly not on the GPU front, even if the CPU was capable of running at 333Mhz same as PS2.
But then we didn't get that critcims back then, we got "wow these ports are amaizng it's like having a PS2 in your pocket" - No it damn well wasn't. It was more like having a souped up PS1 in your pocket on anything except the 1st party games like GoW.
...Pshhhh, anyways - point is reviewers have some kind of ridiculous expectation for the Vita that it should be churning out PS3 quality graphics, and then the games should cost 2/3 the price as well. Madness. :P
