Rage Here at Bad Game Reviews

Can't point to any specific reviews, but every time Ecco The Dolphin gets ported somewhere, my Google Alerts bombard me with reviews of the first game that tend to boil down to "This game is stupid because dolphins are stupid olololol" and/or "This game is too hard".

Also, there was a pretty hilarious review of Eversion that made it clear the guy hadn't played past the first level or two.

That is a masterpiece of absurd art.

Yeah. You can't spell IGNORANT without IGN.

edited 5th Feb '10 2:12:18 AM by PippingFool

I'm having to learn to pay the price

But...I already made that joke... ;__;

360 Gamertag: Electivirus. 3DS friend code: 5412-9983-8497. PSN ID: Electivirus. PM me if you add me on any.

"Also IGN:

Imagine: Party Babyz = 7.5

God Hand = 3.0

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF- FFFFF"

To be honest, how many people have played the former?

People wet their pants over something like graphics. If the presentation doesn't hurt my eyes and I can see what I'm supposed to do then I can excuse a lot. Sometimes slightly blurred graphics help me forget that I'm playing as an anorexic 13 year old boy, a bastard talking animal or a generic space marine. For the price of most games I could buy 100 70s movies and they'd still look more realistic, I could rent 50 movies from the last two decades, and they'd look more realistic.

Voice acting, THQ introduced it to their wrestling games, and what they got to show for it? Better games? Nope, it took them four tries to make a Smackdown vs Raw better than the Day Of Reckoning games despite the wrestlers making more noise. Ask the Mega Man fans if voice acting made later titles superior to what came before. Metroid has voice acting now, woopdeedoo.

A good story does not make a good game. Unless its an adaptation of something else, a game based on Captain America or a game about a book(Mist), the motivation for events really isn't all that important. Did they kill your brother, steal your identity or are you paid to chase them? Doesn't matter, you got ten seconds before they board the plane. Didn't make it? You suck. True, getting attacked by a Tyrannosaur in a game about washing windows will be jarring but if its fun get over it. Who cares if snowboarding had nothing to do with saving the land of Hyrule, you really need motivation, a heart container isn't good enough for you? They're fighting because the kids who own the toys want them to. If fighting in a fighting game disturbs you that much go play Wii painting or an NBA game.

WWF No Mercy was praised for its story mode because of how much it added to the game experience, not because of how well the plot was put together. It didn't have fancy graphics, would have been ok if it did but not it took 15 minutes to load the polygons. It didn't need anything like voice acting to tell that story its praised for either.

Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack

This is true, but keep in mind many things about games are subjective, especially when you get into aesthetic elements like graphics and sound. And one of the major questions a reviewer is expected to answer during the course of a review is, "is it fun," which is the most subjective question imaginable.

Well, when done right, voice acting can add immensely to a game. A lot of subtelty can be added to a line with inflection and the correct spin, to say nothing about encouraging a greater connection with characters and the game world at large.

Perhaps not by itself, but it's at least half the reason many people play games at all, RP Gs in particular. Not everybody plays games to run from the Tyrannosaur, some play to explore a game world. It's like Lord of the Rings; some people find it dull as heck, while others enjoy it for the intricately constructed world.

What I'm trying to say is different people play games for different reasons, which is part of why reviews are so important. Just because an element of gaming doesn't sem important to the games you play doesn't mean they don't have a purpose.

But somehow,◊

Voice acting only adds something if the writing was good to begin with. It's the cherry, not the cake.

I dunno about that. A good actor can take horrible lines and make them plausible. The original Star Wars movies are a good example of this; James Earl Jones did a lot as Darth Vader with lines stuffed so full of cheese they should've been sold on top of hamburgers.

But somehow,◊

This.

I only dislike reviews when the reviewer does not understand the game or genre. So watchign Yahtzee bitch about the character creator mode and the single-player campaign and the story without even saying anything about the gameplay of Soul Calibur IV itself got me kinda pissed. Same thing when he complained about how you always fight Bowser in Mario games when no-one actually is disturbed by that and also when he said that Left 4 Dead 2 did more innovative things than New Super Mario Brothers Wii when L 4 D 2 is the Expansion Pack Sequel.

Also, seeing how we practically work on a 4-point scale nowaadays, 5.0 is too harsh for Sonic. Maybe a 7 because, you see, I play a lot of action games and seeing a God Of War clone, only more brainless and clumsy is down-right abominable but the Hedgehog levels are good. I didn't even die that much despite the ridiculously fast action that I hope they tone down. There aren't that many parts where you die from going too fast and even then it's easy to learn how not to.

I disagree. Watching the LP of Sonic 2006 I can safely say that the voice acting(except for Tails) was one of the few things about the game that wasn't brain-breakingly horrible, and if Dan Green had more lines the game would have been almost enjoyable, even if still unplayable.

SHIKI is dead.

In before that guy with the Code Geass avatar shows up and tells you that Sonic 2006 isn't an unplayable mess, you just didn't do the research.

Got sick of my old avatar. But I still can't resist one last Jiiiii~

Yes a superb VA can bring awful writing up to decent/good, the same way a bad VA can make an excellent script sound like garbage. Personally, I don't think that really adds anything substantive to bad writing though, it just makes it tolerable. At that point you might as well just throw out the cake and buy more cherries.

And since most VA's aren't that ball-bustingly awesome, it usually doesn't even do that, it just exaggerates the natural goodness/badness of the writing.

I guess what I'm trying to say is of course Dan Green is awesome, but that alone is insufficient.

Akaso: No, even he knows that Sonic 2006 sucked. It's when you say things about 3d Sonic in general that he gets mad.

(And I agree with him about Unleashed's reviews. Werehog or not, Unleashed is not worse than Sonic 2006.)

SHIKI is dead.

To be honest, how many people have played the former?

This Troper has. And down right hated it, returned it to the store after 10 minutes of playing it.

It seems apparent to my family that becuse I'm a Gamer Chick, I have no taste in Video Games whatsoever and they can buy me any Wii shovelware aimed at girls and I will lap it up.

edited 5th Feb '10 7:24:51 PM by PippingFool

I'm having to learn to pay the price

The whole "give the American version of Sonic CD a worse score even though you acknowledge the game play is just as good, just because the music, while equally as awesome, was different from the original" spiel.

edited 5th Feb '10 6:02:50 PM by KnownUnknown

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

Sonic The Hedgehog 2006 wasn't an unplayable mess, it was a borderline unplayable mess.

In after the guy with the Code Geass avatar showing up and telling people that Sonic 2006 isn't an unplayable mess.

edited 5th Feb '10 7:09:08 PM by Komodin

Experience has taught me to investigate anything that glows.

Some of the X-Play reviews are just ridiculously retarded.

Case one: The review of Trapt. OK, the game wasn't the best thing since sliced bread. But it was decent. It's just that the way the review presented the game totally ruined it. You're supposed to kill people using death traps; in the review, every time a trap went off, the editors inserted a cartoony "BOING!" sound which made it impossible to take seriously, even though it was actually pretty cool and fun. It also totally sucks a lot because it's Japanese.

Case Two: Timeshift. The entire review was nothing but X-Play bashing it for its supposed lack of originality. "Oooooh, Timeshift is soooo unoriginal. I mean, all you do is go places and shoot stuff while progressing the story! Bleeh bleeeh bleeeeh! Sure, you do have time powers and can do really cool shit with them but that's not new or innovative in an FPS game at all! Three crappy reviews out of five!" Then they proceeded to praise the shit out of Halo III and say how totally awesome it is. I'm not saying it's a bad game...but technically, in terms of how innovative the gameplay is, wouldn't Timeshift be like Halo III except with time powers added? I mean, this just baffles me. I do admit I am a bit biased against Halo III, but if that can get 5/5 stars so should Timeshift for sure.

edited 5th Feb '10 8:58:50 PM by Nika-senpai

Shine

^See, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

You can't even write racist abuse in excrement on somebody's car without the politically correct brigade jumping down your throat!

It is true that I rage mostly because I disagree with those reviews, but they are very bad.

But when you mention no good point of a game and only mention how terribly lackluster it is compared to a game that's just as good, something fishy is going on. :/ This game also released like a week before Halo III but that's just me and my silly conspiracy theories.

Also, making fun of a game the entire time instead of critically addressing its good and bad points does not a good review make. -.-

Shine

Yeah, you can generally tell a bad reviewer by how often they denigrate a game because some other title "did it better." A certain amount of comparison between games is legitimate, especially where games within a series are concerned, but dropping a game's score because it doesn't work like other popular entries in the genre, or even because it *does*, is ridiculous.

That's not to say games need to be criticized in a vacuum, of course. But it does need to be criticized on its own merits, not on how other games work.

But somehow,◊

everyone who writes a bad review for a game i like deserves to die in a house fire t/f? t

Another thing that really pissed me off is Every reviewer of NSMBW that conplained about the co-op not being able to go online. Eventhough the reason why it wasn't a DS game is to support the frantic co-op that wouldn't be possible on the DS and it would have SERIOUS lagging issues that would make online play partically unplayable, but noooo. If a multiplayer game has no Online mode, it automatically sucks.

I'm having to learn to pay the price

everyone who writes a bad review for a game i like deserves to die in a house fire t/f? t

Um, a bit Disproportionate, don't you think?