What Game Developers Hate About Videogame Reviewers

[Kid Ice]

http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=13224

I just noticed this article is kind of old, so if it's been here before please lock her up.

My favorite: "Developers hate game reviewers that only play their games for a few hours" How ridiculous. Does this mean that if you don't like a game for a few hours it just magically gets better? Give me a break. Personally I only play GOOD games for a few hours...bad ones are out of there in 20 minutes!

[Neil Koch]

I think they were talking about reviews that weren't done after a complete play-through.

It makes sense on one hand - would you trust a review of a movie from someone that only saw half of it? I have to watch a lot of crappy movies from my site and I've sat through them all, because oftentimes the last part of Hong Kong movies are the best (ie big action scenes).

But can game developers really expect reviewers to put 10, 20, 40+ hours into every game they review? Hell, for a "complete" (100%) of review of something like San Andreas, that would require around 100 hours.

Most gamers i know put very little stock in magazine or "mainstream" website reviews anyway - they're much more apt to take the advice from someone on a board like this.

[swlovinist]

mainstream reviews are out, I would trust ther overall review of DPers over any of them. I still like to see the game in person before I judge it totally. I remember when Dark Wizard for the Sega CD got a really bad rating(EGM), that was the last time I took someone elses word on a game before I made a judgement myself.

[Half Japanese]

Pertaining to the issue of "gaming journalists" not playing games enough to warrant a fair review, Gamespot was busted a few years back for only putting 3 hours into a game's online mode (which was the meat of the game, though I forget which game it was). The publisher logged hours played by reviewers and called the guy on it. If I remember correctly, there was a Penny Arcade post and possibly a strip about the situation.

As a big fan of sleeper hits, I trust fansites and message boards like this one way more than I trust reviews. That's not to say that I don't check GameRankings before taking the plunge on new games, but a lot of games get an unfair reputation based on reviews by "journalists" who have no business reviewing games outside of their favorite genres. At least there's Play Magazine, where anyone who's read any of Halverson's mags knows ahead of time to expect big, gushing reviews of platformers and (at least in Play) a fair review by the rest of the staff. To me, it's the only monthly game rag worth subscribing to, as they treat it exactly how entertainment media should be treated in my opinion: as big fans working at a job they love, trying to spread the word about things they love to other fans.

[njiska]

I've argued with Gamereviewgod about this multiple times. Generally i beleive you should make a full play through but it really depends on the game. Playing RPGs through is just insane, but playing 15-20 hours is reasonable. Even 10 depending on the amount of cutscenes.

Similarly story driven games need to be play through as much as possible so that you can get the full experience. I'm thinking mostly Adventure titles when i say that.

And obviously no one needs to do a season of madden to know what it's like.

[Mayhem]

I understand the witholding judgement until finishing the game opinion. In general we don't write reviews over at NTSC-UK until we're either done with the game (anything story line driven) or given it a lot of hours (Guitar Hero for example).

[Griking]

I can understand developers complaining about reviewers not finishing a game before reviewing it but if you're 1/4 of a way through a game and it just plain sucks then I understand them not completing it. Some games nowadays (especially RPGs) can take over a full work week to complete and you can usually tell well before that much time that you have a stinker on your hands.

[FantasiaWHT]

Re: full play-throughs

Reviewing a game isn't like reviewing a movie. If you go to a movie theater and the movie is bad, you're probably (except in some extreme situations) going to finish watching it. A gamer who buys or rents a complete dud is NOT going to finish the game, so I think it's fair for reviewers to aproach a game in the same manner

My favorite point was about focused games, which was basically identical to the next point of games being reviewed compared to a related-but-fundamentally-different genre. When I see a perfectly fine mystery-dungeon clone (Izuna) get ripped because it's a turn-based action RPG and not Diablo, that really irks me. Same thing goes for Mario Party- those games are all extremely fun and playable by just about anybody, but they get mediocre scores because they're the same game year-in-and-year out. If that's true, then why do Maddens and the like get 8's and 9's consistently?

[Kid Ice]

Well....I'll sort of revise what I said before...if it is a simple review that simply discloses if the game is worthwhile or not (like on the videogame critic's site), IMO it's fine just to play it a few hours. If your really going to get into detail and give a rating such as 6.6 or 6.8 or 8.2 or whatever (like IGN) then yes you should play the whole thing. Although even then, a rating below 4 or so is pretty much meaningless..whether a game is 1.2 crappy or 2.4 crappy doesn't mean much to me. But I believe that argument was already had in another thread.

So yes I do agree that for a mainstream publication that gives detailed reviews, they should play the whole thing. But for People Maqgazine to give a B+ or a D- or whatever, a few hours is fine.

[Push Upstairs]

Everyone knows that the best reviews were from your friends.

No job on the line, no deadline, all that was at stake was your wrath or loss of friendship if he screwed you over.

How that translates to on here...I don't know.

[Poofta!]

i think games should be completed. not 100% complete like lets say gta, but the story line or campaign(s) must definately be completed. this is your job, you took it so do it right. that is why i respect (and trust) PCGamer, their policy is to finish everygame before reviewing it, regardless of genre (MMOs of course dont count, but even then, they are always a month late to force the reviewer to put in enough hours to reach hte endgame) if you as a reviewer dont want to do that, or think its insane, then no problem, someone can be found that will.

[Nick Goracke]

And obviously no one needs to do a season of madden to know what it's like.

Sports games are probably the most carelessly reviewed genre out there, mainly because of this attitude. I don't know how many technically sound (ie. graphics, features, sound, interface), well reviewed sports games I've played that are virtually unplayable long-term because of "money-play" tactics, deep-seeded AI problems, or minute but ultimately significant fly-in-the-face-of-reality oversights in game balance or real life modeling.

Fighting games are probably a close second, because while it's easy to get a grasp of graphics, sound, and features in a relatively short period of time, the real test is if the game stands up in a competition setting.

[RCM]

i think games should be completed. not 100% complete like lets say gta, but the story line or campaign(s) must definately be completed. this is your job, you took it so do it right. that is why i respect (and trust) PCGamer, their policy is to finish everygame before reviewing it, regardless of genre (MMOs of course dont count, but even then, they are always a month late to force the reviewer to put in enough hours to reach hte endgame) if you as a reviewer dont want to do that, or think its insane, then no problem, someone can be found that will.

I agree with the above. I review a title every once in a while and refuse to push the review until I've explored every road possible. I've ruined relationships with publishers b/c I couldn't review a game "on time." That's why I don't review many titles, plus with the advent of demos it's thankfully eliminating the need for game journalists and I couldn't be happier.

They (the GJs) won't go away, but hopefully it'll weaken a lot of the prosites and promags and put the power in the players hands.

[cyberfluxor]

The thing to keep in mind is they're game reviewers for a profession therefore they need to be professional and complete as much as possible before a deadline. Sometimes I don't like my job but I don't just get up and leave expecting to get paid because I don't like what I'm doing, it'd be insane.

RCM:
Demos are nice except when it butchers a game; ie. the GH2 demos at stores don't have the best selection. I've also played quite a few demos that didn't make me say OOOOO-ahhh while others that own it really liked it.

.. Oh wait, I was looking from the readers perspective of getting a full review, not a developer. LOL
Well, if I spent lots of time on a project like a game I'd hope someone would spend their time doing a complete review if that's what they're being paid to do.

[Aussie2B]

As much as I hate a review that blatantly is only written on a short amount of play, I do have sympathy for the professional reviewers. There are a lot of problems in the game journalism industry, and some of it can be chalked up to pure laziness or apathy, but sometimes they just CAN'T play through a game entirely. It's not even a matter purely of deadlines. Usually professional reviewers are paid the same for one review as the next, so if it's something you can play through over a weekend like God of War or what have you, great. However, if it's some bloated, massively long game like Dragon Quest 8, then it's really not to your benefit to play through the whole thing. If you divide your pay by the hours you put into the game (not even including the time spent writing the review), you could be making even less than minimum wage.

The part about reviewing by genre and not understanding specific types of games makes some good points. There are few things worse than when a reviewer just doesn't "get" a game. There may as well be no review at all in those cases. Some games, like King's Field and Harvest Moon, are for a very niche audience, and you have to make sure the right reviewer is tackling the job. What's nice about Video Game Collector is that the publisher and editor-in-chief are aware of every writer's personal area of expertise, so the writing assignments are divided up accordingly. I also like to include statements in my reviews along of the lines of "If you're looking for this, then this game offers that". Of course, you don't want to degrade down to saying something like "If you like RPGs, you'll like this" since that really doesn't say anything, but going back to my Harvest Moon example, I'd say that if you're interested in a relaxing, laid-back game, it's up your alley. Not only does that pin-point exactly what the fans are going after, but it also lets those who are unfamiliar with the game to know what the proper expectations are (so you don't go into Harvest Moon expecting edge-of-your-seat excitement and action).

Finally, the statement that reviewers don't know what goes into making a game intrigues me. I've come across that from time to time, and I appreciate when a reviewer can get more technical, without going overboard. I'm in the middle of getting a computer science degree myself, and I always figured that even if I don't end up as a programmer, the experience would be helpful and offer extra insight for any career within the video game industry. I already, with my meager knowledge, look at games much differently than I used to. I can better understand the inner workings of game, understand what should've and could've been altered easily and what would be too difficult of a task to fix, and just plain get into the minds of developers and understand what experience they go through in the creation of a game.

[roushimsx]

Sports games are probably the most carelessly reviewed genre out there, mainly because of this attitude.

Was it Madden '06 for PSP where running plays were completely ineffective because for whatever reason the game had the tag-football-rules bug, which IGN never noticed when reviewing it and then tried to play it off by saying that the bug worked its way into the code after the build of the game that they were playing? Classic.

I'm a firm believer in dumping some serious time into games before reviewing them. Most games should be finished and you should never, ever, ever think of reviewing an RPG if you've clocked under 10-15 hours. I mean, with an RPG you need to take into account the potential for a slow build up time in the storyline in addition to really needing to get into the meat of the combat system (which oftentimes doesn't really "click" until around the 8-10 hour mark). Even then, if someone reviews a game without beating it then it generally has very little weight on my opinion to buy/not buy a game.

It really rubs me the wrong way when a reviewer obviously spent more time writing the rough draft for the review than they did playing the game (which was painfully obvious in more than one ChoroQ review). A good game can go straight downhill and leave a seriously bad taste in your mouth by the end of the game (Okami) while you can really warm up to a game that might start off on the rough side (Castlevania: Lament of Innocence).

Tangent: The 6-10 grading scale that most sites use is bullshit. Why can't every site be at least half as good as Eurogamer?

[Gabriel]

I feel "professional" reviews are worthless. They are formed more by editorial policies and advertising dollars than by quality of a game.

As for the topic of game playtime, what we're really talking about here is a game that gets a low score after a short period of play.

OK, quiz time. How many of you have known whether you like a game after 30 minutes with it? I expect that everyone's hand is raised, or at least most everyone's.

If I have to play a game for over 3 hours to begin to have fun with it, is it a good game? I'd say the answer is almost certainly a big NO. The only people who will play turd games for that period of time are people with limited entertainment options, like kids who only get a new game once every several months.

[Griking]

Re: full play-throughs

Reviewing a game isn't like reviewing a movie. If you go to a movie theater and the movie is bad, you're probably (except in some extreme situations) going to finish watching it. A gamer who buys or rents a complete dud is NOT going to finish the game, so I think it's fair for reviewers to aproach a game in the same manner

Another thing to keep in mind is that a movie reviewer only has to sit through a movie for around two hours. It's not that huge a commitment. If however you're expecting a game reviewer to complete a game before reviewing it you can be talking about a full work week of playing time. there's a huge difference there.

[Flack]

It's great to want reviewers to have played a game for 20 hours before writing a review, but especially for reviews written for web sites, it's pretty unrealistic. It worked a lot better when magazines only came out once a month. These days, people expect reviews the day a game is released (if not before).

I do agree that some games need to be played longer than others before writing up a review. Obviously an RPG is going to take a little bit longer to get used to than a SHMUP. But still, 20 hours?

[rbudrick]

I dunno...being a game reviewer where you only have to do part of your job, and then the publishers pay you off, give you free games, trips to far away lands, hookers, drugs, etc. sounds like a pretty good gig to me (and yes, this is common practice in the industry), ahem, that is, if I were one to partake of hookers and drugs...umm, yeah. Integrity of a review goes out the fucking window for a lot of folks when you're getting free shit like that all the time.

-Rob

[Mayhem]

There are a lot of problems in the game journalism industry


In today's world, journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

To me, there's as much crap games journalism out there written by people who don't care as there is crap software being sold. Long gone are the days when you truly believed and trusted many of the icons who were in gaming mags of the 80s. Those people, and for those in the UK you'll recognise a name or two, such as Julian Rignall and Gary Penn, are those I look up to as a model for writing and try to have the same dedication and love for the job that they had at the time.

[roushimsx]

I do agree that some games need to be played longer than others before writing up a review. Obviously an RPG is going to take a little bit longer to get used to than a SHMUP. But still, 20 hours?

Even then, your average shmup takes a hell of a lot more time to really get the hang of and understand than most reviewers ever bother putting into them. Typically the shmup review process for a mainstream outlet goes like this:

1. Fire it up.
2. See if the Treasure logo pops up. If so, stop playing right now, go online and find out what fans of the genre have written about the game and rewrite everything they've been saying since the japanese version came out.
3. If the Treasure logo doesn't start up, go straight into the game and madly slam on the bomb and fire buttons, running into all of the bullets you can until you run out of lives.
4. Keep repeating until you run out of continues.
5. If the game had unlimited continues and you finished the game, write a short review about how easy, short, and overpriced the game is. Ramble on about how the genre's glory days are long since gone. Assign the game a below-average review for your site/magazine.
6. If the game did not have unlimited continues, write a short review about how its hardcore design harkens back to the glory days of arcade action games and of how it'll please fans of the genre. Assign a slightly above average review for your site/magazine.

Nuances of the gameplay and scoring systems are typically glazed over in the reviews unless the reviewer bothers to go online to see what shmup fans have written about the game, because why bother dumping 5-10 hours into a repetitive action game when other people have already done all of the fact-checking work for you months earlier?

[bangtango]

i think games should be completed. not 100% complete like lets say gta, but the story line or campaign(s) must definately be completed. this is your job, you took it so do it right. that is why i respect (and trust) PCGamer, their policy is to finish everygame before reviewing it, regardless of genre (MMOs of course dont count, but even then, they are always a month late to force the reviewer to put in enough hours to reach hte endgame) if you as a reviewer dont want to do that, or think its insane, then no problem, someone can be found that will.

Some people just aren't that great at certain games and can't finish every single one. I can run the table in platform games, fighting games and sports games pretty well. However, I usually go home in a body bag after half an hour when I tackle your average first person shooter, stealth game or RPG.

I guess I better wait until I finish Tiger Heli before I submit my next NES review. I'll also need to polish off Impossible Mission for the 7800 before I send that one in, too :)

[j_factor]

Yeah, if beating the games was a strict requirement, some games would never get reviewed. Poofta must think that no review of Bubble Bobble Revolution is respectable since it contains a bug that makes it impossible to complete. :P And what about games that have no end point, like Sim City or Ms. Pac-Man?

[Gamereviewgod]

Nuances of the gameplay and scoring systems are typically glazed over in the reviews unless the reviewer bothers to go online to see what shmup fans have written about the game, because why bother dumping 5-10 hours into a repetitive action game when other people have already done all of the fact-checking work for you months earlier?

Because the likely audience for that review IS NOT the shmup community. It's likely the mainstream crowd who would never get into the scoring system anyway and see it as mindless blasting.

The shmup fans already know, and they (reviewers) have a site to run. A general gaming sites audience is a giant variety of people, not a small minority of gamers. Do you believe a casual Madden or GTA fan would get into Raiden III even if the review went in-depth with the scoring?

[ShenmueFan]

I agree that games shouldn't be reviewed unless they are either finished completely (not like finding all 120 stars in Mario 64, but by beating the main game only) or the game is soooooo frustratingly difficult or stupid that it is impossible for the reviewer to finish the game in a reasonable amount of time (one example is the last boss from Blinx on the XBox or even Ninja Gaiden on the same system - games that have very high difficulty levels).

A movie reviewer wouldn't watch the first 10 minutes of a film and write a review, now would they?

[playgeneration]

"A movie reviewer wouldn't watch the first 10 minutes of a film and write a review, now would they?"

Sorry but that's a crap analogy - there aren't movies that last 20 hours or more.

If a game is bad there's no need to play it for more than a couple of hours at most. It's incredibly unlikely that an awful game suddenly gets better half way through. And when it's the games engine or camera system thats the reason for a game being bad - thats something the game is stuck with all the way through - so it's obvious that it wont improve later.

Even if a game did get better after 6 hours of play time, it would still get a low score anyway because why should you have to play that long to get to the good bits.

[Flack]

Dream all you want, but completing games before reviewing them is completely impractical. The job of a video game reviewer isn't to beat every game he plays, it's to let you (the reader) know (A) the reviewer's general impression of a game, and more importantly, (B) give you enough information to judge whether or not you should buy it. You don't need to be able to beat every game you review to provide that service.

[ShenmueFan]

"A movie reviewer wouldn't watch the first 10 minutes of a film and write a review, now would they?"

Sorry but that's a crap analogy - there aren't movies that last 20 hours or more.

If a game is bad there's no need to play it for more than a couple of hours at most. It's incredibly unlikely that an awful game suddenly gets better half way through. And when it's the games engine or camera system thats the reason for a game being bad - thats something the game is stuck with all the way through - so it's obvious that it wont improve later.

Even if a game did get better after 6 hours of play time, it would still get a low score anyway because why should you have to play that long to get to the good bits.

That's not necessarily true. Shenmue II is a perfect example of a game that starts of really friggin' slow for about the first 5-6 hours and then jumps into high gear in the last half of the game. Same with Zelda 64. That first bit where you're in the tree and crap is god-awful boring and if you didn't get past the first couple hours you'd have missed out on a great game. And like other people have said, RPGs are notorious for starting out slow and then picking up the pace once all the characters have been established.

My comparison to movies only means that if you can't finish what you start, you shouldn't review the book/movie/game/album at all because you haven't seen all there is to see.

*HOWEVER* If a game is just so crappy and poorly made completing it is way too difficult for it's own good than be fair in the review and say that you didn't finish it, but explain why - don't lead readers to believe you have played everything (for example, if a platformer game is 10x harder than it should be because of downright awful controls and a crappy camera, than I see no problem in only playing 10% of the game).

[Gamereviewgod]

"A movie reviewer wouldn't watch the first 10 minutes of a film and write a review, now would they?"


Games are repetitive by nature. Take a beat-em-up, in this example Streets of Rage. After level 1, you've seen everything that game has to offer in terms of gameplay. The only thing that changes are the backdrops and the boss fights. You're performing the same routine countless times, just with different colors which keeps the player from fully realizing how many times they're actually performing the same routine.

With a movie, the dialogue, special effects, and other various aspects change throughout. It's critical to see it all. For Streets of Rage or any other simplistic affair like say Gradius, not so much.

My general policy is that if the game requires a deep rooted story (Metal Gear) I'm staying put and not writing a word until it's over. If it's a generic shooter like one of my recent favorites, Earth Defense Force 2017, I could have written the review by level 3 and not missed a thing.