Posts Tagged ‘Reviews’

Reviewers have a tendency to make comparisons with other examples of a medium. There are many reasons for this practice, but for newcomers to a medium it remains exclusionary. Whether the author is using it as lazy shorthand to aid understanding or from a desire to laud an expansive knowledge over the audience, the reader must be informed about the point of reference for it to be of any use.

This use of references is as common a practice in the gaming press as any other, perhaps more so thanks to the era the industry has grown up in allowing for such a rapid dissemination of products and opinion. Audiences are, for the most part, indoctrinated into the culture; aware through blogs and news sites of every major release they have even a passing interest in. Issues only arise when new people try to enter this impenetrable, elitist culture. A Zelda clone, or even a more generic term such ‘platformer’, must surely prove a near impossible barrier to entry for most newcomers.

Big bad guys.

Recently the issue was brought to the fore courtesy of the game Darksiders. Reviews uniformly described the THQ title as Zelda meets God of War, and some people felt this portrayal was lazy. Maybe it was, but it was also descriptive. I instantly comprehended what was meant by this simple comparison. My understanding allowed the reviewer to move on to a deeper opinion of the whole experience rather than a mechanical break down, without exceeding the one thousand-word limit that typically signals the end of my attention span (for reading onscreen text at least).

Asserting that similarities shouldn’t be drawn in reviews and that each game should be judged on its own merits from within a vacuum is ridiculous. Hand my dad a PS2 and he will tell you how real the games all look, and then offer you a whisky and bore you with stories of Ireland. Ignoring what makes our opinion ours is disingenuous. If the reader doesn’t know the foundation of an argument then they cannot truly appreciate it.

Bigger bad guys.

Everything we experience informs our outlook; if we are unable to draw on our well of knowledge to explain our impressions then we are neutering our vocabulary. To state outright that other games shouldn’t be referenced when talking about another title would mean never again mentioning a previous game in a franchise or from the same team. We would have to turn a blind eye to advancements made and explain everything from the basest level in every article, because if a gamer doesn’t know Zelda it is safe to assume that the term ‘action RPG’ would be just as incomprehensible.

I suspect the bigger problem is that now there are so many people covering games. I sit with my RSS feed open and watch every day a new stack of reviews pour in for the latest big release. On occasion I have been known read each and every review of a game I am interested in, and I do begin to see patterns and trends emerge. Occasionally this can annoy, especially when I feel a writer is not addressing the elements of the game I believe are important or when their views differ wildly from my own.

Biggest bad guys.

Certainly if there is no qualification presented for a comparison it is problematic. A review that does nothing to expand on its flimsy comparisons tells the reader nothing. Simply put a bad review is a bad review. A well written piece will utilise accepted touchstones that have made their way into the gaming lexicon, giving context and creating a more concise read. Providing the author of a piece sufficiently communicates their opinion, without the need for extensive outside research, using such comparative examples can be a valuable tool.

Different sites have different mandates on the subject of at what point a review should be written. I used to believe that a reviewer should experience a game in its entirely before they could reasonably pass judgment. It is a view that has slowly eroded recently, leaving me unsure as to my own principles and questioning at what point I am qualified to write a review.

Initially my concept of finishing a game before reviewing was solid, every game on my own site has always been completed before anything was written. But playing Ultimate Band for review on Game People threw all of this in to question. Playing the Disney rhythm game I could be found repeatedly pumping my Wii remote above my crotch with no penalty for my constant, rhythmic ‘strumming’ which didn’t even come close to emulating the onscreen beat. I finished around half the songs offered with a variety of instruments, and concluded that it was fair to say I had seen enough.

The game that changed me.

It was peculiar how divided the decision made me. Maybe I was doing readers an injustice by not experiencing everything the game had to offer. But I knew that the template for the action wasn’t going to chance, and nor was my opinion. I set to writing the review feeling that I had been fair to both my readers and the developers.

I constructed a new internal guideline for my reviews. Based on the time I play and the genre/size of the game I ensure that on sites that do not require I finish a game that I at least give each it a fair amount of my time. I was happy with my new code until recently when the question was again reawakened by the narrative heavy Mass Effect 2 and Silent Hill: Shattered Memoires.

Narrative dependent titles have an implicit expectation that you will experience a story in its entirety. Similar to a movie it would be unfair to review it before it reached its conclusion. If I were to watch the first hour of The Sixth Sense and then review it my opinion would be very different to someone who watched it all. But it is impossible to dissociate a game’s narrative from its interactive elements. Again if The Sixth Sense required all of its audience have their toenails torn off while watching, then I would be justified in saying it doesn’t matter what the pay off is, it can’t be worth it and subsequently leaving after only five minutes.

Almost entirely incredible.

Looking at Silent Hill and Mass Effect 2 both game’s finales sit in contrast to my opinion of the rest of the experience. Mass Effect 2 was for me an incredibly involving forty-hour experience; every moment (bar the mining) was a joy, until my final confrontation. Any ending of a story or game with an expansive and involving plot will always struggle to meet the high expectations established throughout the rest of the experience, and thus they are almost uniformly anticlimactic. In Mass Effect’s case end sequence in its entirety is an emotional sequence of events, but the last tiny fraction was a let down. I couldn’t even say it tarnished the rest of the game, but it did hit something of a bum note when it should have reached its crescendo.

Silent Hill takes the opposite approach. Incorporating two game styles, creepy atmospheric adventure and running in terror my opinion throughout Silent Hill oscillated between amazement at what the developers were trying to achieve, and dismay at the infuriating action sections. Discussion of the emotions that the game’s infuriating controls induce and how intentional they were aside, every moment spent fleeing your enemies during these sections were soul crushingly bad, yet instantly forgive when you get to the end and begin to realize what it was building to.

A strong ending can make up for a lot.

Now I am stuck in a quandary. Mass Effect 2’s slight disappointment did not alter my feelings about the experience. Maybe it is due to the length of the title, or perhaps simple that the mechanics were solid enough to have overlooked weaker narrative elements. Silent Hill’s ending however totally altered my opinion. Lasting only six or eight hours perhaps I was inclined to be more forgiving of the hour or so spent in the games broken action segments; looking back I am even starting to appreciate the real sense of apprehension the scenes created in me. But what it boils down to is that I could have reviewed Mass Effect 2 after ten hours and bar a throw away comment about the ending my conclusion would have been unchanged. Where as if I hadn’t finished Silent Hill my feelings would have been inclined towards the negative, rather than the overwhelmingly positive view I now possess.

So it is back to the drawing board with my guidelines. Currently I am leaning towards the idea that when left to my own discretion I play a game until I just can’t bring myself to play any more, assuming of course that I at least have ensured a solid grasp of the concepts. I arrived at this formula because personally I would not feel ‘cheated’ if any writer supplied their opinion in this manner, providing they clearly indicated what their exposure to the game entailed. It seems many disagree with this methodology however feeling entitled to reviews that encapsulate the complete experience.

I can understand arguing for completion, but it seems that with both the industry and distribution of information changing as rapidly as it is, changes in coverage’s content should adapt also. With game media moving almost exclusively to websites, speed of coverage and personality of the review are becoming increasingly valuable. Following someone with the same tastes, or drawing from hundreds of voices, allows us to choose what suits us personally. As players have more games to play and less time available a review that tells me that one persons experience was so bad it made the player put down the controller and never return is invaluable providing the writer frames what their opinion is based on sufficiently.