Game journalists CRAP reviews.

[rusty_shackleford]

reminds me that one of the ninja gaidens had an easy mode that actively made fun of you for playing on that difficulty

 

[Alphons]

https://www.gamesradar.com/dirt-ral...-its-all-because-of-a-bloke-with-a-clipboard/

Quote from the first paragraph:

It’s Dark Souls on wheels

 

[Cryomancer]

reminds me that one of the ninja gaidens had an easy mode that actively made fun of you for playing on that difficulty

There is a easy mode already. Cheat Engine. I don't care much about a game which forces you to play with the most overhiped weapon ever but for those who wanna play and lacks skills/patience...

 

[Reality]

For me overpraise of AAA games and underpraise of games with in-depth mechanics are boring and to be expected.

The reviews that are worth seeking out are the ones that go full SURREAL

This one, about a Tennis game most people consider to be overly complicated and more sim than game is a gold mine - The best part is the long rants about how the modern game of tennis has evolved into a spectator sport as rowdy and loud as Football and that Tennis in video game form is doomed if it keeps presenting it as a quiet gentlemanly sport.

Never in my life did I expect portraying hype with "pre-match locker room atmosphere" to be relevant to any sports game that didn't involve Wrestling.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2008/06/23/top-spin-3-review-3
https://www.ign.com/articles/2011/03/31/top-spin-4-review

 

[HansDampf]

It is fundamentally impossible for gaming news sites to create truly good or insightful game reviews.

....

The "it's a structural problem" argument, which is almost always correct.


Some cases provoke at least a counter-reaction in form of review bombing and 0-point user scores. But the trend seems to be going in the direction of trying to shut them down as well. It's one big circus.

 

[samuraigaiden]

Gamespot's Alien Ressurrection review is still a classic, even 20 years later.

The game's control setup is its most terrifying element. The left analog stick moves you forward, back, and strafes right and left, while the right analog stick turns you and can be used to look up and down.

 

[Falksi]

It's not that hard just to tell the truth. Mean Machines used to do it all the time, and that IMO is the greatest gaming mag ever, online or in print.

Deadlines? Keep it short & sweet like they did.........

https://archive.org/details/Mean_Machines_Issue_16_1992-01_EMAP_Images_GB/page/n59/mode/2up

Highlights include......

JAZ

"Dragon's Lair is the equivalent of a garnished cack sandwich"

"Once you play it, it's true vileness is revealed"

"After a couple of hours I was seething with annoyance, and felt like smashing the cart to bits!"


RICH

"Let me start by saying I hate this game intensely. Not since Shadowgate have I wanted to perform various violent acts to an inanimate object like a Nintendo cartridge"

"I hated every minute I spent playing it"


As Roy Walker would say, "Say What You See"

 

[RolePlayer]

Two pages into this topic and nobody has mentioned the obvious:
1. The conflict of interest between good journalism and advertising dollars from publishers.
2. The anti-consumer systemic corruption between industry insiders, writers, influencers, developers, publishers, etc. none of which give a fuck about the consumer (although they market themselves as if they do).

3. Just get a PC and install steam. The user reviews with all of the information provided about the reviewer including how many hours they've played the game and all of the games they've reviewed in their history with breakdowns overtime is the most thorough and comprehensive and consumer-empowering way to buy a game. Which is why publishers fucking hate putting their games on that platform. That platform is one big fuck you to the industry and i fucking love it.

 

[Pentium]

Not exactly all reviews but this repulsive sjw shit is not easily forgotten (or forgiven):

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-02-20-kingdom-come-deliverance-review
https://kotaku.com/kingdom-come-owes-its-popularity-to-realism-and-conserv-1823420208



I don't even give a fart about EN gaming media for reasons mentioned above. I was just interested in foreign reviews and opinion essays (=neckbeard hipsters' after-bender morning throw-up) on the topic due to the sjw shitstorm Warhorse unleashed with KCD back then.

Oh, and this: https://thespinoff.co.nz/games/04-04-2018/chuchel-is-fun-so-whats-up-with-the-blackface/

 

[Pentium]

It's a low grade job attracting low grade people (could be extended the majority of modern "journalism" tbh). Back in the nineties most reviewers were actual gamers and the medium was still pretty young and yet, reading those mags now with hindsight, you can see lots of stupidity, cringe, dishonesty etc.

Exactly, in my land the first generation of game journalists were people who had started as walkthrough writers and were universally recognized as the most hardcore kind of gamers. They also had thier own part of slight controversy and their legacy is stuff of legends among gamers old enough to date. I still have my old mags stashed and read them for the entertainment from time to time, some of the reviews in them are still so hilarious that I've almost pissed my underpants occasionally. Others are simply so stylish. Wish I could give you a sample.

 

[Cryomancer]

Not exactly all reviwes but this repulsive sjw shit is not easily forgotten (or forgiven):

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-02-20-kingdom-come-deliverance-review
https://kotaku.com/kingdom-come-owes-its-popularity-to-realism-and-conserv-1823420208

Imagine a game set in the Empire of Brazil.

"all nobles are white looking and all slaves are POC = 0/10"

 

[Jvegi]

 

[Terra]

Nintendo World Report TV Review of Baldur's Gate

What a complete joke game journos of today are. I remember playing the BG series as a kid, despite reading the sizeable manuals front to back, much of the game's mechanics was still a mystery to me, but holy christ, how to you end up in a situation where you are "trapped by enemies you can't kill" in any of the IE games and while you're in retardo-journalist difficulty mode to boot? I'm assuming the author jammed a whisk in his ear and just went nuts shortly before playing the game and creating this review because I honestly have no idea how the dude makes it through the day. Jesus Christ, these people are so fucking dumb, I remember battling through far more obtuse games than Baldur's Gate, sans internet and you know what- you fucking persevered and got it done. The icing on the cake is the dumbfuck then hops on Youtube to showcase his sheer fuckwittery in a five minute video. It's little wonder games are a shitshow today.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Took some sniffing but I found it

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

The whole idea of journalists having deadlines and thus enjoying shorter and easier games more seems interesting to me, but also brings up another problem. I remember someone once found a whole bunch of journos Steam accounts, and most of them don't even play for much more than 2 or 4 hours. I remember some kind of issue with a Total War game, forgive me if that's wrong. No, I think their inability to play games properly is a sign of them just sucking at their chosen job.

 

[markec]

 

[Mexi]

Nintendo World Report TV Review of Baldur's Gate

Quite incredible how bad this review is. I posted it because the controls were prominently displayed when I Googled "Baldur's Gate Nintendo Switch," but fuck, I didn't watch it until now. That review is fucking horrible. I don't think I learned anything new. You'd think that the review would be spent contrasting the gamplay with a controller versus the mouse and keyboard, BUT the fucking low-T cuck just complains the entire time! How the fuck is that a review when the guy gets stuck on the lowest difficulty setting!?

 

[Aemar]

Just get a PC and install steam. The user reviews with all of the information provided about the reviewer including how many hours they've played the game and all of the games they've reviewed in their history with breakdowns overtime is the most thorough and comprehensive and consumer-empowering way to buy a game.

The reason I stopped caring about gaming journos and their reviews many, many years ago. Tbh I never paid much attention to them. Gamespot used to have a somewhat solid user review section back in the day; I was actually more interested in finding out what regular people who bought the game had to say about it rather than what this Gamespot dude wrote about the said product.

 

[Cryomancer]

Nintendo World Report TV Review of Baldur's Gate

Quite incredible how bad this review is. I posted it because the controls were prominently displayed when I Googled "Baldur's Gate Nintendo Switch," but fuck, I didn't watch it until now. That review is fucking horrible. I don't think I learned anything new. You'd think that the review would be spent contrasting the gamplay with a controller versus the mouse and keyboard, BUT the fucking low-T cuck just complains the entire time! How the fuck is that a review when the guy gets stuck on the lowest difficulty setting!?

Note : Is the lowest difficulty OF the EE version which can be translated to "i can't die" difficulty. This while I had no problem soloing on Legacy of Bhaal difficulty except on final chapter, not because "muh too hard" but due a BUG.

 

[Alphard]

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

1. The conflict of interest between good journalism and advertising dollars from publishers.

the reason i still can't fully hate paradox, despite today it being a completely different monster being made by completely different people: back when i was young and written word was just born, i've been assigned to review paradox games, also because i wasn't your average popamole shit eater and could manage more complex games. first thing i did was to get in touch with them, explaining "i'm renown for having absolutely no remorse in trashing anything deserving to be trashed. are we going to have issues because of this?" and i've been told back "we expect nothing less from you".
i've been brutal sometimes, with impire, or march of the eagles, or when in an interview with their ceo i even made fun of him asking who the hell greenlit the aztec ck2 expansion, never once i've been denied material and coverage when asked.

it can be done, you only need people willing to do it.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

^^

 

[Absinthe]

S0rcererV1ct0r, honestly, the PoE reviewer is not wrong about PoE being a repetitive grind-fest where it's more fun to make a build than play the game since you just mash your one god-skill endlessly to kill everything. That's completely true. The idea that this is acceptable because it's a genre convention somehow is fucking retarded, since there are plenty of ways to do hack & slash that do involve tactical considerations, use of environment, and a cast of enemies that make you change your approach to get past them, but in PoE your goal is to bulldoze everything as much as possible by tailoring a single catch-all solution or maybe two if you are feeling fancy and want 1 skill for pack clearing and another for boss-killing. It's extremely lazy and generally mindless gameplay.

 

[Cryomancer]

PoE being a repetitive grind-fest where it's more fun to make a build than play the game since you just mash your one god-skill endlessly to kill everything. That's completely true. The idea that this is acceptable because it's a genre convention somehow is fucking retarded, since there are plenty of ways to do hack & slash that do involve tactical considerations, use of environment, and a cast of enemies that make you change your approach to get past them, but in PoE your goal is to bulldoze everything as much as possible by tailoring a single catch-all solution or maybe two if you are feeling fancy and want 1 skill for pack clearing and another for boss-killing. It's extremely lazy and generally mindless gameplay.

I know. Not all of his criticisms are bad HOWEVER "you need elemental resistance to fight enemies with elemental damage" is pure BS.

And my problem when someone criticize the "god-skill" is that their solution is 99,9% of the time, bringing cooldowns to the game. Not bringing depth to the game and making skills more situational...

 

[Absinthe]

Wait, what? No. That's common sense. Not having 75% all resists (although you should be raising your resist caps even higher) is completely fucking retarded. The only resist you tend not to cap is chaos resist (or physical resist, but lots of people like to invest in that one too, since just endurance charges are helpful). Go equip Veil of the Night if you think PoE isn't balanced around maxing resists.

Just because it's possible to solve the god-skill problem in even more retarded ways (and do not underestimate PoE's own attempts at play-with-yourself builds where you are supposed to press multiple buttons in sequences to get good damage with generally apathetic disregard for your enemies) does not mean god-skill criticisms are remotely invalid. There are plenty of ways to make it so that there are skills that work better for some problems than others and encourage people to take a tactical approach in order to avoid ridiculous amounts of punishment. PoE however does not have a decent system of resource management or tailoring your abilities towards enemies' weaknesses or giving enemies strengths that can exploit your weaknesses if you are not careful. Neither does it have good use of mobility as part of encounter design. Since it's too easy for everyone in PoE to zoom around levels, environmental challenges are usually a joke if they're present at all and things like careful positioning become minor concerns. It's only one-shot boss mechanics that make you position carefully a lot, and there's almost never a good reason to stay in an enemy's face. Even "melee" builds try to find ways to do their damage from a distance.