Video Game reviews/reviewers [Rant]

[djx]

I'm a sound designer/composer at a game company (and my spelling sucks). We're a 3rd party developer, so we take the work requests from a bigger publishing type company. Usually these are companies like Disney, Matell, TDK, etc. This gives us little creative freedom to make our own game.

Recently we did Shrek for GBC. It wasn't too good. Not terrible, just not great. It's a fighting game, like Street Fighter 2 and the like. We had very little money, and less time to do the project, and it suffered a lot in the end. All the cool features that we wanted to put in got cut because of the deadlines. Still though, we worked as hard as was possible, most of us spending 14 hours a day at the office for close to two months (which is somewhat normal in the game industry, just not 2 months of it). The actual team put in a tremendous ammount of work to get the game done on time.

I think I wrote 34 pieces of music, and put together close to 100 sound effects. Compared to all the other fighting games on the GBC, we were doing a lot of very cool technical tricks with the sounds, and game play. But compared to any real console or arcade game, it was laughable.

So I'm searching around for a review of it, and they're all terrible. There's a kid on amazon that can't say enough bad stuff about it. So many of the reviewers talk like they knew what happened in the production of the game, and often make sweeping assumptions about our talent as if they know us.

The thing that gets me is that a perfectly fine and average game will get terrible reviews, yet a game that has gotten a great deal of hype and is published by a favored company (like blizzard or sierra) gets great reviews even if there are many more things wrong with it. There's so little objectivity and care about fairness it's hard to trust the reviews.

For instance, the game Black and White - tons of new technology and a enourmous ammount of work gets destroyed by reviewers because they don't like a couple things in the interface. Little or no thought to how much insight went in to making the interface smooth and semi-intuitive on the part of the developer. Just selfish opinions.

And they all want to seem like rock stars, and have people run up to them on the streets and ask for autographs! Like John Romero clones.

Does anyone ever read a review of a game and think "Hey that doesn't make any sense, you give other games bad ratings for having low quality X, but all of a sudden it's okay on this game? Because it's Return To The Terrible Game Arena Part 5??"

I'm done. Time to go to sleep. Thank you for your time.

 

[spankyj]

djx - Keep up the good work! Reviewers, experts, kids, whatever are generally unknowledgeable about video games. I've bought many games with terrible reviews and been extremely satisfied(for example Stanley Cup for SNES). Movie reviewers are the same way, 2 movies can nearly identical plots, but b/c one has Charlize Theron it suddenly is "A Stunning Performance"???? Makes no sense. So disregard the reviews, and keep the games coming. But get some sleep for now.

 

[sciencetoy]

You're allowed to rant. Life would be too short without it. However . . . when you start feeling down about this stuff, remember that you actually are working in the industry, creating real product, whereas most people don't have a clue. You really are one of the cool people that others pretend they are.

There are good, interesting reviewers and there are (the majority) idiots. I've had a lot of weird jobs -years ago I used to work as a projectionist in NYC screening rooms where the movie reviewers would watch the movies they reviewed. Most of these guys would put the movie on, go out and make phone calls, talk, read etc during the movie and then leave after the first reel (20 minutes). Did you ever wonder why movie reviews often have detailed descriprions of the Beginning of the movie, and not a whole lot else? That's why. Sometimes these guys would ask me what the movie was about, or they would just read the PR blurbs to do the rest of the review. BTW these were top name-brand reviewers who you would recognize.

There were a few reviewers who actually watched the whole movie every time. I came to respect that. Even if I didn't agree with their reviews.

Very few reviewers know much about what they are reviewing. What they DO know is how to meet a deadline, how to grab readers and get them interested, and how to get their names mentioned. You know as little about their jobs as they do about yours.

Reviewers aren't meant to be taken seriously (they just think they are). Don't lose any sleep over this. BTW You may want to collect the stupid reviews and "rank" them in terms of how bad they are. We used to have a wall in the projection room of loony reviews - no shortage of that. Ha. The personal favorite, much yellowed, was somebody who believed it when he was told that Blazing Saddles was a serious western. Serves him right for not even watching past the opening minute.

 

[Killbat]

One of the worst magazine reviews I ever read was Myst III.
The reviewer really hated it, and in the pros/cons list, he put in as a con: "Endless mechanical puzzles" ?:Q?
What kind of idiot does it take....:disgust:

 

[StageLeft]

Unfortunately VERY few games don't have detractors. All you have to know is that you tried hard and its not your fault - lack of time and money can sink any game. You're right about overhyped games. Personally I never liked starcraft much. I found it offered nothing new to the genre. It was repetive and boring, but many people thought it kicked ass. I don't see that it would have been so well acclaimed from another company.

 

[StageLeft]

Just found this - looks like sound got the best score

Shrek review

 

[royaldank]

Just because someone puts in 2 months of work doesn't mean it's good. I know that is generalization, but look at it this way. The reviewer is there to review the game as he sees it. Why should the amount of time spent on the game have anything to do with score? My, this game sucks, but I bet it took a long time. Or, "man, this menu is unusable, but I bet it took someone a year to develop it, so good score."

But, I do see you're point on reviewers being short sighted and brutally nit-picky sometimes. And I'll agree with your point that two products may be the same, while product X is far superior because it has the name Rare or Nintendo on it. That is unfair to any further start up companies or middle of the road developers that are headed in the right direction.

But, to be fair, many reviewers like what they like. Say they've been playing Red Alert 2 for two months and love it. Then, they try a knock off game that is pretty much just like it. However, the console is slightly different and not intuative to them because they have been playing RA2 for the last two months. Thus, they give it a bad review. I would think this happens alot, especially now days when there are few "new" games.

I think your job is really cool. I'm jealous you work in the industry. Also, I enjoyed the opportunity to hear your side of reviews. Keep up the good work.

 

[wyvrn]

Reviews are just opinions, and I like to make my own opinion of a game. I almost never pay attention to a game review unless I am looking for something specific, like will the game have XX feature or not. Otherwise, I buy what looks interesting to me and go from there.

I have to disagree with Skoorb's opinion of Starcraft. It was the first Strat. game to have 3 races, and each was distinctly different. For example in Total Annihilation, there are two sides and they are remarkably similar. The designer tried to make a bunch of different units to compensate for the lack of originality of each. I am the other way, I like a smaller number of units that have very different abilities and appearances. Of course comparing Starcraft now to the current strategy games would be silly, it came out several years ago.

However, it is a testament to its balance and unique gameplay that so many fans have stuck with it in spite of a plethora of less rewarding alternatives released since. Also, starcraft is such a good game because every time I play a race, I discover a different strategy by grouping different units together. And that forces my opponent, who anticipated a different attack method, to change his defenses in mid-game. No other strategy game I have played (this is my fav type of game) has this ability to keep my playing for years. Too bad battlenet is riddled with hackers and cheats

 

[LethalWolfe]

Always remember that they are reviewing the product, not you. You can't take what they say personnally (and if the reviewer takes a personal shot, ignore it because that person isn't being a professional). I'm in the entertainment industry (TV/Movies) and I know exactly where you're coming from.

That said, reviewers and the general public(myself included) only care about the finished product. They don't give a rats @ss 'bout what happened behind the scenes. They don't care how hard you worked, or how your project got shafted by management, or even if your house burned down killing your whole family. No consumer cares about what great ideas were floating around or 'bout the really cool stuff that was suppose to be in the game. They only care about what's in the game they just paid money for.

Do I care that a bunch of actors, film crew, and support staff busted their butts for months working on the Planet of the Apes remake? No. I just care that I dropped $8.50, and a couple hours of my life, on a movie that sucked.


Lethal

 

[JellyBaby]

It's impossible to write an impartial review since the writers have biases just like everyone else. One thing that always bothers me is when a review opens with something like, "Now I've never been a fan of fighting games..." when he's reviewing a fighting game. I pretty much stop reading or skim the rest at that point (though I appreciate the honesty).

Also, veteren reviewers often have different expectations of games than newbie reviewers. For someone who has played games for 20 years, Just Another Diablo Clone isn't likely to score highly with him. Term limits on reviewers then?

User reviews at Amazon are to be avoided. It's just a bunch of blabber.

 

[SALvation]

Firing Squad had a great feature last month called Diary of a Developer where it explained the cuts and deadlines that game developers go through. It sounds exactly what you went through. Keep up the good work and remember...you're making games for a living and its a lot better than some jobs out there.

 

[royaldank]

Really, the best thing to do with reviews is to try and read the same reviewer. I'm not saying you have to like the reviewer or have the same opinions, but usually good reviewers still give the information you need. Granted, they have to be good at their jobs.

For example: I read the CD reviews in Rolling Stone mag. Rarely do I agree with their scores and ratings, but over the years I've grown to understand what these people are looking for and how that is different than my opinion. So, if I read a review for a disc I want and they don't like it, that doesn't stop me from reading. Typically, they point out why they personally didn't like it. Then, I'm able to guage whether or not I'll like it because they do a relatively good job of telling you about the product. I also know how my tastes differ and can guage by that.

But to look at some review written by somebody you've never heard of or read before is not the best way to use reviews. It's better to get comfortable with the reviewer (person or mag) and what they have to say about the product. I'd recommend sticking with one or two places and how to pick out of their review the useful information for you.

www.videogames.com and www.ign.com are fairly good at writing reviews. Sometimes they are completely biased and probably don't play the games, but otherwise they are consistant in that they usually provide all the info you should need.

 

[skace]

Hey DJX, nice to see a post from someone who works in the gaming industry, thats pretty cool .

Heres the big thing. Sure, a lot of things get hyped while a product is in development but this is what it all comes down to. People don't care how much time went into the product, how superb the graphics team was, or how many hours the sound designers spent on the sound. They care if its fun. If a game is fun, no matter how many bad reviews it gets it will still come out on top.

You brought black and white up. I bought black and white right when it came out. Guess what? It sucks. Why? Because they focused so much on "tons of new technology" that they fergot to develop a GAME around it. Every level is the same as the last one. Leash your animal to a village, let it do stupid things, win village, move onto next village. Online play was fun for a couple games because you could force your evil animals to hug each other or play catch the flaming rocks, but thats about it - there is no game there. Yes, they hooked me into buying it with hype and I don't completely regret purchasing it as they put a lot of effort into the game, but if I was reviewing it I wouldn't be giving it a real great rating.

Skoorb brought up Starcraft and couldn't figure out why it is such a hit. I can figure this out, having spent many hours playing it. Here is the secret reason Skoorb: It is fun. Go play a lan game of SC and have a damned blast. Starcraft has some of the most balanced units I've ever seen in an RTS. It has a great community backing it with maps. It has a nice easy way to get into online games and share maps. The games don't last rediculously long while still requiring quite a bit of strategy. It cuts right to the heart of what a strategy game should be. Are the graphics great? Not really. Is the sound anything special? Ugh, nope. It has a great single player plot though. Name another RTS that manages to pull off what Blizzard has done with SC and I'm pretty sure I can point out where it doesn't.

Just think, Deus Ex had massive DirectX problems due to relying heavily on glide (massive problem) and it still became RPG of the year (or was it game of the year?). The game damn well deserved it too, bugs and all.

But, I agree with you, DJx, about one thing: that there is many stupid reviews out there and hopefully most people take them as such.

 

[TallBill]

Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic.

 

[Angrymarshmello]

What you see as hard work is seen as crap in other people's eyes. Have you tried being objective to your work/game? I'm not trying to flame you or whatever, just saying sometimes you just need to open your eyes and take a close inspection of your work.