Quote Originally Posted by Aussie2B View Post
I'd actually say it's more a matter of the professionals not being allowed to be completely subjective, rather than objective. A critique is a completely subjective thing, but I think the professionals are pressured to be more "objective" and attempt to predict how the industry and consumer base will respond to a game, rather than be truthful and state the conclusions that they genuinely came to.
To be completely fair to game reviewers, I think that game reviewers are human -- and, what I mean by that is that those game reviewers for the most part do believe what they are writing...

But the thing is that game reviewers can form their opinions by reading the opinions of others. For example, let's say that you really enjoy game X, and you go to type up a review about it. You didn't think it was the greatest game ever, but you notice that all the other reviewers have given the game a 4 / 10 or below. You were going to give it an 8, so you decide to read those reviews, where you have people who talk about the camera being a little wonky in this one part -- which it was, you had forgot about that, another person pointing out some story inconsistencies that you hadn't really noticed, but now that you've read them yeah, it's weird they are in there, and another person who was really disappointed that the game didn't include a few multiplayer modes. You hadn't thought of this before, but now that you've read it, it too makes a lot of sense.

Suddenly, are you going to review that game as a 8 out of 10? you were just reminded of a bunch of issues that it has, and you agreed with a bunch. There was an issue recently about this in EGM actually where one of the editors noted that people were complaining that he said a bunch of negative things about I think it was Splatterhouse, but still graded it as like a 7 / 10, and he answered that while he saw the flaws that the game definitely had, he still had a lot of fun playing it and therefore even though his review sounded more negative, he stood behind the 7 / 10 (or whatever it was). He also pointed to another game that he reviewed pretty positively earlier, and noted that he scored it low because again of the intangibles.

But I don't think that many people do that in their reviews, but I don't necessarily think people do it on purpose. I do think things like where that 1up review that I read earlier stated things in it like it was "pretty fun at points" and stuff like that that the real reason it got such a low grade was simply to drive people to the site to read it.

Having said all that, maybe I'm wrong -- I know that I would grade White Men Can't Jump for the Jaguar as the worst game I've ever played, but I would also tell you that the reason why isn't that the game is completely horrible, but instead that the game builds you up for something that it completely fails to deliver on, and because of that in particular, it brings out all of the other flaws in the game and magnifies them.

I played through and *beat* White Men Can't Jump, something I probably can't say for even 25% of the games that I get. Yet, although I'll admit that it had fun moments, thanks to it completely crapping on me for playing it by basically just cutting the game off, all that I really remember about it was the horrible, horrible taste it left in my mouth.

Based on what I've been reading with some of the Duke reviews, my guess is that the aliens impregnating women thing that does sound pretty crass and tasteless being so near to the end of the game really was the thing that stuck out in a lot of reviewers minds when writing the review. Having said that, South Park tends to do things of equal or greater shock value, and doesn't get lampooned nearly as much as Duke is getting...