Game reviews on Metacritic: why we avoid inclusion
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Some publishers were great, and some were complete asses putting up embargoes on review release dates to hand them off to the bigger magazines first. Overall it just made the experience of reviewing them rather negative, which has tainted my view of games as a whole.
I used to be an avid gamer, now I'd barely classify myself as a casual gamer. There are some great and truly innovative games in all sorts of terms from gameplay to story, however mostly I just see Arbitrary Action Element 12 followed by Unsurprising Plot Development 8, even in some reputedly great games.
It's been very much downhill since then, with the exception of a few interesting developments in the console market.
1993. (I was doubting about 'wolfenstein', but that only makes it one year earlier).
After that it really got out of hand.
9 people is already a fair sized team.
Compare that to Jeff Minter or Braben & Bell.
Designer(s) John Romero Programmer(s) John Carmack Composer(s) Bobby Prince
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_%28video_game%29#Developme...
I wonder if that's because of platform limitations or because the big companies think there is no money to be made there on the scale they require.
That combined with the low cost of games also prevents big budget titles from dominating. While there is still room for a relatively higher budget games (sold at $9.99), companies simply can't poor millions and years into titles and expect to make their money back.
Also as much crap as the App Store gets, it's very democratic in that everyone is equally screwed by the volume of apps. But it means that unknown IP seems to have a chance to rise to the top as well.
By crap, I meant that they had so little resources to work with that most could only work on the level of playability, puzzles and reaction times; to get deeper, they had to rely on text, where they didn't enter into a visceral feedback loop with the player. They worked only on very slim slices of the mind's abstraction stack. If they were reaction-based, they would be at most tactical, not strategic, and certainly not epic in a story-telling sense; and if they got into story-telling, they ended up in interactive fiction land, where they lose the immediacy of high-bandwidth visual and aural representations. They need to say, rather than show, so the user gets a narration, rather than an experience.
That's exactly why I liked them. I used to play games a lot because it was great fun, the games out today concentrate on 'the experience' rather than any of the above, and I already have a great world around me to experience.
The pacman game on the google page really brought that home to me, I really had to very strongly resist playing it or I would have been hooked for at least an hour.
The issue of gameplay versus slick graphics dominated the early to mid 90s when FMV started to appear. It took a long time for game developers to create the modern interactive narrative and it still gets screwed up today.
I do respectfully disagree with your comment about the games being crap by today's standard and also your point on interactive fiction and narration, Classic games such as Lords of Midnight, Contact Sam Cruise and Maniac Mansion provided both narrative and visual representation and experience.
However, this does pose a problem for our METASCORE computations, which are based on numbers, not qualitative concepts like art and emotions. (If only all of life were like that!) Thus, our staff must assign a numeric score, from 0-100, to each review that is not already scored by the critic. Naturally, there is some discretion involved here, and there will be times when you disagree with the score we assigned. However, our staffers have read a lot of reviews--and we mean a lot--and thus through experience are able to maintain consistency both from film to film and from reviewer to reviewer. When you read over 200 reviews from Manohla Dargis, you begin to develop a decent idea about when she's indicating a 90 and when she's indicating an 80.
Nah, they just gave Metacritic a B-minus. It's not Ars's fault that Metacritic interprets that as a 67 out of 100.
It's true - Metacritic isn't at fault for THQ's policies, but then that's what you get for coming in and changing the mechanics of the game review world.
But when a game gets 8/10, it somehow either is an 8/10 game or the game reviewer is wrong.
Somewhere along the line people forgot that reviews are subjective, not objective.
(New) Games cost $60, and occupy a variable amount of time. Since I'm bootstrapping my startup i.e. poor, I only buy games with a high expected value. I typically look for $1 / hour of entertainment, or better. This means I buy games that I can expect to play for 50+ hours before getting bored. Modern Warfare 1, for example, I played for hundreds of hours, making it a great bargain.
The game review scale is also highly compressed. The difference between 8/10 and 9/10 is often the difference between "good game" and "unplayable".
In fact, since Metacritic do actually have a policy for the kind of reviews Ars makes, this article ends up feeling a little disingenuous. Or at least not the whole story. I don't think they are really doing as much of a service as they make out by not giving a real score. For me it's a negative.