WHY GAME REVIEWS SUCK An exercise in hypocrisy

WHY GAME REVIEWS SUCK
An exercise in hypocrisy.

Everybody, everybody, roll on up for the hot new game everyone is talking about: Dragon Age: Origins! 8.5/10 GAMESPOT! 8.4/10 IGN! 8/10 EUROGAMER! Wow, these guys must be really unified in their opinions!

Hold on a second, that last one can’t be right…

If you click through to the Eurogamer review of Dragon Age, you’ll find 3 pages of seething disgust for the game and everything it stands for. Every aspect of the game is ripped apart, piece by piece, good points brought up only to emphasise the horrible ones. The game is called cliché, bland, and overdone, only succeeding in spite of itself. The storyline? An emotionless mess, designed by a committee in such a way as to suck any heart out of it whatsoever. And so, the shell-shocked reader turns to the final page to gaze upon the final nail-in-the-coffin judgement score on this game that the reviewer has so mercilessly torn down, to find that he’s given it:

8/10.

What the hell.

It’s nothing new. Every single game that isn’t either a shining pearl of brilliance or a steaming crud-pile of mediocrity gets an 8. I’m not talking about Eurogamer here: I’m talking about everyone. They cover it up well, I’ll admit: 8.5, 8.9, 8.3- there’s a marvellous range and flavour of eights. That doesn’t change the fact that 8 IS NOT A BAD SCORE. I recall a scandal a while ago over some hapless reviewer giving GTA4 an 8, to the outrage of all. That this was considered a bad score shows the truth: 8 is the average, given to everyone.

God knows why we listen to game reviews, or why we pay so much attention to it all. Because they’re shit. Game reviews seem to have perfected the art of telling you everything about a game while leaving you without the slightest idea of whether you want to buy it or not. We wade through pages of talk on the games mechanics, sound design and graphics in a hopeless search for the bit where they tell us whether it was good or not. Even upon reaching the score, that beacon of hope that should instantly tell us everything in a stroke, we find the game has gotten an 8. Only another 8.

Why are game reviews so vague, muddy, and shit? Allow me to provide an answer:

If you go up to a man on the street and ask him about a game, he will give you his opinion. If he happened to be a huge fan of Gutsplatter 3X, he’ll say so, and probably go on to gush enthusiastically about the high-tech gut-splattering effects, or the total immersion in a living, breathing, gut-splattering world. If he hated it, he’ll go ahead and say that, and then attack the over-emphasis on gut-splattering sidequests or the lacklustre gut-splattering soundtrack.

If you go up to that same man, however, and give him a games journalist badge and a laptop and tell him to write a REVIEW of a game, that will then go on to be published on a professional game-reviewing website, then he will suddenly become very unsure of his feelings towards Gutsplatter 3X. When it comes to a review, he can’t give his personal OPINION- he has to give a sage, unbiased, objective judgement of every aspect of a game. He might have hated it- but can he really, truly say it was a bad game, when he thinks about it?

When you try and be objective about your opinion, madness ensues. Madness like putting decimal points in game scores, as if you can calculate how good a game is to the nearest percent. Madness like trying to judge how every single person who plays the game would judge it. Madness like never rating a game below 8.

Give us the old five stars, for gods sake! Scores aren’t meant to show precisely how good a game is so you can stack it on a chart, they’re meant to give you a rough idea- go for the fives, avoid the ones!

Give us your damn opinion, for gods sake! Put a disclaimer saying “YOUR PERSONAL EXPERIENCE MAY VARY” if you have to, but just tell us what YOU thought of the game, not what you think we will think of it. Doing that just confuses everyone.

And if you didn’t like a game, for the love of god, give it a bad score. If a game is bad, give it a 4 or something, not an 8. If a game really is great, give it a 10- what are you saving 10’s for anyway, some mythical perfect game that will descend at the apocalypse?

I think part of the problem here is perhaps that we all seem to take reviews as gospel, unshakable truths that pronounce whether a game is good or bad like the judgement of god. We care about these things so much! If a reviewer gives a game we like a bad score, we’ll clog up the comments section raging at him! Why? Why do we care? It’s just his opinion.

So, everybody, don’t go online to find out whether or not to buy a game. Go to your friends- to someone you know in real life, who’s played the game- and ask them about it. They may be biased, inaccurate, un-objective, and exaggerate like all hell- but that’s what an opinion is. And that’s something you won’t get from Gamespot.

COMING UP SOON: A review of fallout 2!

Jack Shandy – Swashbuckling thespian