Company News How to make friends and influence previews

[onemananadhisdroid]

What you are saying is the equivalent of – "Stop with all your petty preferences, you are all petty petty people, if I see a good looking women I want to sleep with her, the more good looking she is the more I want to sleep with her, I am not petty like all of you, I don’t care if she has a Penis.

Nahhh. You know, as a reviewer, you can throw all those labels that don't carry any meaning away, and if not doing so means you review something with a bias, it has to be thrown away. No more perceived genre (games being lumped together into the same made-up category because of whatever reason) is any more special than any other, and nothing of this has to do with the merits of the game currently in question anyway.

The truth however is, that each and every person holds different standards to a game. You might call it taste, preference, hell bias even, and ultimately, that's what it is. No one, not even professional gaming journalists (or PGJs™ as they call 'em) are free of that. It's hard-wired into human nature and nothing to feel bad for, hell. Anyway, now the reason I really objected to anything was the way some called bullshit on people raving about games that received hatred amongst the hive mind that is The Codex, which, in the grand scheme of things doesn't mean jackass. And Japanese RPGs™, as they lazily call them, never mind the different design most of these games had ever since day one. What all these pesky sub-labels getting thrown around like there's no tomorrow are ultimately an indicator of is variety. Which is a good and healthy thing. While further raising walls around ideas, turning them into rigid rules just isn't. Nothing can get in. Nothing can ever get out. That doesn't mean I'm not sympathizing with those who like to see ideas brought up by Tim Cain and company developed further, turned into something new and incorporated into more games. And it certainly doesn't mean anybody has to dig Japanese RPGs™ or pretty much anything. It just means that some people need to give themselves a slap from time to time.

Since, on top of all of this, nobody's home-brewn formula of what constitutes an "RPG" is any more right than anybody else's.

Speaking about Troika Games, deep character interaction and so such, anybody ever tried Facade? Warning: Not a game as such.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Façade_(interactive_story)

 

[Section8]

Maybe it's because not everyone judges each and every game against some idiotic self-defined dogma (or a strict, even more idiotic rule of design each and every game is demanded to follow), and judges those games on their own merits?

I fucking love Mount & Blade as a game, though not necessarily as an RPG. It oozes class. I could cite numerous examples of things it does well that ultimately make it a fun game.

On the other hand, while I probably would have loved Oblivion ten years ago, it just doesn't offer much, even as a game rather than an RPG. This isn't about whether or not Oblivion matches up with the RPG Codex standard of "roleplaying", it's about Oblivion being nothing at all special to anyone with any real depth of gaming experience.

It's like a mediocre cover band performing a brilliant song from the past. To anyone who has heard the original, it's redundant at best, though more likely to stack up unfavourably against nostalgia, possibly even to the point of taking offense toward it.

You know, if they're actually fun? If they work? Or maybe it's just that somebody sees those games in a different light than you? Or something?

I don't think anyone is saying Oblivion can't be fun, or doesn't work. They're just saying it doesn't work or entertain to an acceptable standard for their personal taste. And I think in general, that "different light" is simply the mark of inexperience. As I say, I would have loved Oblivion 10 years ago, but now it's just a resounding "meh" because I've seen and done it all before.

To summarize, and sorry for once again using Codex vocabulary, I hope you will appreciate it: Here you come off as nothing but a bitter man that for some reason feels like he hasn't been proper fucked the way he thinks and demands to be fucked in a long time and now he's just being bitter about it. On the internet. And he has to show it to the World. At each and every turn and whenever opportunity arrives.

That's about the gist of it, except a great many of us here have a hard-on for reason and are more than happy to expend wind and energy explaining exactly what has made us bitter.

 

[Monolith]

The link to the article doesn't work anymore. A pity. Does anybody know if the article is still online somewhere?

 

[Zomg]

Even in movie reviews there are wildly different critiques of box office hits. Book reviews are just the same. I don't think I have ever seen a single book where every book critic has gave glowing, not to mention oddly similar, previews/reviews about a product.

Woo, this is a bit late, but this is a great point. There are almost no commercial critical voices out there that might differ about a mainstream game. Game reviewers essentially do a quality control pass on games - The interface works, it doesn't crash too much, they're using the shaders you'd expect, the avatar doesn't clip through trees, 9.7/10 GOTY candidate right there man. There's never any significant critical point of view or theory. I'd take a string of reviews, editorials or articles doing that sort of thing as the vanguard for an increase in the quality of games journalism.