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Press Junketeer  Posts: 429 Joined: 3 Oct 2008     | |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 2111 Joined: 15 Jun 2008    |
That's why. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 2770 Joined: 13 Feb 2008    | It's a reviewer's job to take any aspect of a game that's not perfect, make a big deal about it, and decry the rest of the game for it's failings. But I'd rather have them do that than review everything really well and downplay any flaws. At least you know what's wrong with the game. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 2354 Joined: 14 Sep 2007   | They think differently to you. It's weird, I know, but it's true. Too Human doesn't seem like a game I'd like. Realism doesn't count for much in my eyes when it means the weapon goes "SWING, *onemississipi* SWING". Also, I've seen the gun gameplay, which looks god awful. |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 2111 Joined: 15 Jun 2008 |
Isn't that what critics do? I thought reviewers were meant to focus on both the good and the bad and then give an overall opinion |
Press Junketeer Posts: 429 Joined: 3 Oct 2008 |
Well of course I've read the good ones. I personally don't see any major flaws in the game. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 3745 Joined: 29 Dec 2007    | Because its a bad game? My favourite game is Dues Ex Invisible War, now there is a game that sucks. Bad reviews, bad-ish sales, the lot. I don't care because I like the game. If you like Too Human there is nothing wrong with that, it's just most people wont like it. If you really do like it, it shouldn't matter what is said about it.
Umm typo? |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 2111 Joined: 15 Jun 2008 |
That's because you love the game, the good aspects of the game really appeal to you, and the bad aspects don't jar you so much. |
Press Junketeer  Posts: 411 Joined: 8 Jun 2008    | Too Human is one of those games that people either seem to love or hate. For me it's just a matter of whether or not the negatives in a game interfere with my enjoyment. If not, then I'll like the game, regardless of what other people think. I've noticed similar trends with other games I like, i.e. Mass Effect, Star Wars: TFU, Oblivion, etc. Sure these games are flawed, and in some cases annoyingly so, but overall I had fun, so to me, they're good games. |
Beat Writer  Posts: 168 Joined: 2 Sep 2008   | What about Baldurs gait? Me personally finds Master Chief moving too slow for my standards (at least in Halo 1). Maybe it's just me, but honestly! He moves just about as fast as the Heavy. And this is particularly frustrating when you're trying to dodge, rush, or when you come across that huge expanse with nary a vehicle (which are better, but still kind of slow, and particularly clunky) in sight. X-Play gave it a 4 out of 5, so not everyone thinks its that horrible. Maybe some of us just have different standards or expectations, since they also gave all Haloes 5 out of 5s. I certainly don't think Combat Evolved is worth that. 3 or 4 maybe. Apparently, they either do think it's that good or maybe there are certain conditions that cause them to believe it is, that Yahtzee isn't affected by. And not necessarily needles full of dopamine. |
On the Record  Posts: 5484 Joined: 13 Aug 2008    | First off, there are very few games that Yahtzee doesn't pan. If a critic decides to not point out a flaw in the game and the players do, the critic will get hate mail in every concievable orifice. Plus, every person has different likes and dislikes, so you have to take that into account. Think about it this way: if a reviewer listed everything GOOD about a game, the article would be huge. Instead, they list the highest and lowest points, and let the reader decide how to interpret that. |
Paperboy  Posts: 47 Joined: 22 Sep 2008  | its just an opinion, we all have them...don't act surprised because that yours is different from someone else's. it's actually a good thing for different people to have different opinions... |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 2354 Joined: 14 Sep 2007 |
Oh, shite! I'll fix that up. |
BANNED  Posts: 829 Joined: 9 Aug 2008    | Why exactly does this bother you so much? If you like it, then...play it. I don't care, at least. User was banned for: Half-wits to the left of me, Wankers to the right. (Permanent) |
Press Junketeer Posts: 429 Joined: 3 Oct 2008 |
I know.. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 4269 Joined: 13 Aug 2008 |
Someone kick him, someone kick him now! I honestly haven't given Too Human a second thought, I first heard of it from my brother, he came running up and said "(Iron Ninja's real name), there's this game coming out called Too Human, it's going to be Norse mythology set in the future!" |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 3918 Joined: 16 May 2008     | I hated it. I tried really hard to like it. But I hated it. I ran into all of the problems Yahtzee did. Especially aggravating was the ranged targeting system and the death sequence, and the lack of any real penalties for dying. Plus, the game just seemed really ugly for me, and the objectives between missions weren't really all that clear You're allowed to like it though. Some people like electrocuting their genitals. I really don't care for it, but that's not my business. |
Red Guard  Posts: 2659 Joined: 16 Dec 2007     | True reviews are supposed to be fair and balanced. With the proliferation of amateur game reviews and payola for major review sites we see a lot of extremes. Most games do, at the very least, have a few redeeming qualities that will appeal to some players. I love Mercenaries 2, but it received a pretty average mark from most major sites. That's why I always play a demo before I spend 60 bucks on a game, I don't trust anyone to tell me what I think will be fun. There are just too many ways to play the game before you buy it, rent, demo, go to your friend's house... |
Press Junketeer  Posts: 442 Joined: 26 Sep 2008     | The problem with Too Human is that it has a couple of glaring flaws that make reviewers start to pick-out all the more subtle things. A really good game can get away with a mistake here and there, but when you're annoyed with a game because of a really slow death scene, lack of recovery items, and a clumsy battle system... it causes them to also gripe about the minor nit-picks because it makes them wonder if there's ANYTHING not broken about the game. With a good game those minor issues are easier to ignore because you have plenty of examples of how the developers actually spent some time with the game. With Too Human though, I tend to agree with Yahtzee in wondering if they had anyone play-test the game. I find it hard to believe that no one would write down that the death scene needs to be skipable. |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 4269 Joined: 13 Aug 2008 |
Everyone would do well to pay attention to this man, as he has summed up Zero Punctuation perfectly. Watch the review, have a laugh if you're so inclined, and then go and find a review not built for the purpose of entertaining you. |
Press Junketeer Posts: 442 Joined: 26 Sep 2008 |
Doesn't your example kind of support Yahtzee? I mean... Yahtzee's review pretty much said exactly what you did: The game was disappointing, but it's still fun. As for my own personal experiences, I bought both The Orange Box and No More Heroes based on his reviews alone (Orange Box because I didn't know it had HL2 and Ep1 until I saw his review, both of which I missed because I had a crap PC when they were out, and No More Heroes because it sounded like an interesting game). The thing to remember with his reviews is the thing to remember with all reviews: Don't just pay attention to the fact that review is praising or bashing the game, pay attention to WHAT they're praising or bashing. A stellar review that praises a bunch of gameplay features I don't care about won't sell the game for me, and a poor review where everything that the review slams on is a feature that doesn't bug me won't kill the game for me. Heck, I read a review for a game (forget which) and they were bashing on the game for having a gameplay feature that I actually LIKE in some games. So you have to know what to look for. Edit: Though with Yahtzee you also have to remember that his reviews are more for entertainment value and less about being a thorough review. |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 4269 Joined: 13 Aug 2008 |
Did I say he was wrong? I just don't think his reviews should be used as a basis for whether you buy a game or not. |
Anonymous Source Posts: 3 Joined: 24 Aug 2008 | I liked the gunplay in this game. Yahtzee said the guns didnt work well but i play a commando and they do, and if you think back to the brawl review yahtzee said if you enjoy the game then great and reviews shouldn't bother you. He says many true things but i still enjoy the game so you can't base all your game choices based on reviews. |
Press Junketeer Posts: 411 Joined: 8 Jun 2008 | He tends to pan most of the games I like, but I don't take offence, because like above posters have been saying, Yahtzee's mainly for a laugh. |
Red Guard Posts: 3570 Joined: 27 Mar 2008   |
Reviewers tell you whether something is worth paying for. Critics aren't people who say negative stuff. Oftentimes, "critics" are just reviewers. When they are not, they are supposed to be discussing or evaluating a work based on its artistic and thematic content. There's almost no one who actually does this kind of criticism with video games. -- Alex |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1077 Joined: 26 Apr 2008   |
That makes me wonder, do you ever get up the day after the latest ZP is posted and know you're going to have to trudge through ten pages of comments, giving out bans and probations left right and centre? Has it got to a point where you and Nilcypher have to take turns? Anyway, if you're enjoying Too Human then all the better for you. I played the demo, just too slow and difficult for me. It looks nice and the story is strong, but the camera and some of the fighting were just to hard for me to grasp. |
On the Record  Posts: 6715 Joined: 22 Aug 2008  | Wow, this thread is only...a month late.
So I read your post, and I have to say, it's a bit silly. 1) You should't *have* to ignore one of the settings of the camera, the setting designed so you could have a largest view over the fight, in a combat game. 2) Combat is sticky, in my opinion. Baldur always seems to take a moment after each swing to gloat or just revel in the fact that he's so awesome and amazing and whatnot. 3) Fast? Maybe for you. Realistic? Uh...no. Realistic. That's certainly not how you used it. Baldur may be holding a heavy weapon with you, but he does it even when he's using a single shortsword. Remember that this guy is not only a well trained military machine, he's also cybernetically enhanced. Swinging a shortsword should be one of those "faster than the eye can see" movements. As it is, it feels sluggish generally. So, why so serious? (Obligatory Dark Knight reference hoy!) |
Pulitzer Laureate  Posts: 988 Joined: 22 Sep 2008    | I was actually interested in being a games journalist for a while. Aside from being caught between my journalistic integrity and the advertising dollars, though, there were other factors that turned me off from it. Reviewers have a limited time available to play games before their articles have to go up. They need to form an accurate, strong and justified opinions about games often after just a few hours of play time. This doesn't just apply to the latest forgettable shooter, too, but to hundred-hour-long role-playing and strategy games that take at least half of that to get a good sense of the quality and depth of the title. Very rarely do they actually get the chance play these games enough. The second problem is very much related to the first, and that is that journalists, because they play games for fairly short periods of time, are going to be drawn in more than others by technicalities. Pretty graphics? Check! Good voice-acting? Check! Nice camera angles and controls? Check! The problem with this approach is that reviewing games becomes more about reviewing the presentation aspects alone without grading the gameplay; while some reviewers are mindful of this, many are not. I have said many times (not on this forum, but elsewhere) that Eurogamer, for example, rates games based almost entirely on presentation, and when it comes to either a 6/10 or a 9/10, that is true in almost every single case. Now, take an unconventional game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. It's a first-person shooter, but it's slow-paced, it has technical issues everywhere, it lacks decent voice-acting (most of the game doesn't even have any), the graphics are good in stills but the animation is stiff, there's almost no coherent storyline the first time through the game, and it's very, very easy to take the game at face value and rate it based on technical merit alone, which is what many reviewers did when it came out (they did the same with the sequel too, although more justified in that case due to the number of crash-causing bugs it had on release). However, playing and reviewing the game in this way just doesn't work. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is an open-world sandbox game emphasising emergent gameplay and light role-playing elements. The best parts of the game, though, may not be felt until much later on. Let me try to paint a picture: the Zone is a large, fairly open world. Your goal is to get to the centre of it, but as you get closer and closer, you get farther and farther from civilisation, from safety and security. The enemies get more and more dangerous as you go in, use different weapons, etc. You need to stock up on food, drink, anti-radiation medicine, health kits and bandages, and tons of ammunition for your weapons. Coupled with a big bulky suit of armour that's required to survive the radiation and enemies present, this means that you're left fairly burdened and won't be able to carry much extra stuff with you. Now, in the game, there also happen to be artifacts: highly irradiated objects which give the player special benefits for wearing them, but more importantly can be sold for a large amount of money. The more stuff you're carrying, the slower you walk and the faster you run out of stamina. I think you can see where this is going. The farther and farther you get from civilisation, the closer you get to your objective, the more valuable the rewards get, but the less of them you can bring back with you, and the more dangerous the enemies and the environment get. Needless to say, everyone who plays the game for a decent amount of time will get to the point where they are out of health kits and bandages, have two or three bullets left for their weapons, are fully loaded with artifacts to sell for a killing, and emerge from an underground bunker after completing an objective. However, you also become incredibly aware of your own mortality, because all of a sudden it occurs to you: I have to get back now. See, more than anything, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is really a game of resource management, of weighing risk and reward. It may be a shooter on the outside, but it's all about using its environment and gameplay mechanics to their fullest to do one thing: instill a sense of fear and vulnerability in the player. All of that above may be just sound a little too silly for some people here, but it's true; unfortunately, it's also an experience which takes a minimum of maybe fifteen or twenty hours to arrive at, as not only does it require some story progression, but also the culmination of progress up to that point. Throw the player into that situation from the beginning and it's going to have less impact; no, it has to build up over time. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a phenomenal game for precisely the reason I've described above, but people are much more willing to rate it on technical factors, on immediate, instant gratification than on the cumulative experience. Maybe that's because the reviewers don't have enough time, or simply don't know how to get that sort of thing out of the games they play. That's why I don't want to be a reviewer: it would kill the games for me. More to the point of the thread, however, that is also why I don't really take reviews, especially of highly controversial games like Too Human, all that seriously. Mid sevens? Chances are the game is much better than you are initially led to believe, especially when the developers are very passionate about it. You can't blame Dennis Dyack or Peter Molyneux for the game failing to live up to your expectations. They are incredibly intelligent, talented individuals that care deeply about what they do, but as a developer, things happen. You need to hit a deadline, you run out of money, your team isn't as experienced as it could be, the hardware isn't as capable as you thought, the ideas that sound great from a design perspective just don't work that well. Too Human is a classic case of a game where people rate it down on technicalities like strange control schemes, inconsistent presentation, bugs, etc.; in otherwords, all the stuff that their spokespeople (or effigies, if you prefer) are generally not responsible for. Admittedly, I have not played it; this is just the impression I get from the outside, simply because I have seen it in so many games. The fact of the matter is, what separates a good game from a great game these days has nothing to do with gameplay or design, it has everything to do with how pretty and immediately accessible your game is, and it's a crying shame. Reviewers, and consumers, have to realise that not all games can be perfectly polished blockbusters, even when they want to be, and to look a bit deeper at games to figure out what makes them really tick. I also know that nobody here will read this post, because it's a bit too long for most of you kids. If you got this far, pat yourself on the back. |
Beat Writer  Posts: 194 Joined: 6 Aug 2008   | yeah i downloaded a demo of it and played it for a bit. its much the reason why i dont like devil may cry 4. walk, kill, walk, kill. button bashing idiocy is how i saw it. but i did enjoy using the right analog stick for swordplay... for atleast like 10 minutes. |
Muckraker  Posts: 330 Joined: 9 Aug 2008  |
Like marmite. But made of disk. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 2063 Joined: 23 Jan 2008 | I really wish these forums had like, size 36 letters cause I'm tired of writing this: It would be nice to remember - ALL - reviews are SUBJECTIVE. There is NO such a thing as an "objective review". A good reviewer will give you HIS educated opinion of a game, according to his taste. You can't fault a review for being right or wrong according to YOUR taste. I, for once, love Yahtzee's reviews as a source of information, because I, mostly, share yahtzee's tastes in gaming (from what I've seen so far at least). But then again a lot of people love WoW, EVE and more recently Warhammer and I think they're gigantic buckets of spunk and failure. |
Pulitzer Laureate Posts: 988 Joined: 22 Sep 2008 |
Who's Yahtzee? |
On the Record Posts: 6715 Joined: 22 Aug 2008 |
You don't know who Yah- Ah, I see where you're going with that. Very clever of you. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 3205 Joined: 10 Nov 2007     |
Attacks are nowhere near that slow if you're playing the game right. Which at least the Gamespot video reviewer wasn't (in all the gameplay shots he never uses the slide, which is pretty much the most basic combat move), and if you press the stick and hold it towards an enemy there is no perceptible pause between attacks. In fact, one of the characters can get his attacks so fast it's like sticking enemies in a magimix. Gun combat in it works like a twin stick shooter, and far from being useless, as many reviews claim, is almost brokenly powerful. |
Press Junketeer Posts: 411 Joined: 8 Jun 2008 |
Damn, that's a lot of word. Seriously though, I agree for the most part with this guy. Too Human is one of those games that takes a bit of time to get into, but once it sucks you in, it's damn fun, my opinion anyway. |
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I rented Too Human, and I have to say, I'm enjoying it.
I'm looking at Yahtzee's review, and the negative reviews of it.
I have to ask.
What games are they playing?
I haven't even experienced any of the problems that Yahtzee pointed out in his review.
The camera can be fixed if you don't have it as far out as possible, and the combat isn't sticky.
It's quite fast, and realistic.
Baldur is holding a heavy weapon, so he's not gonna be like super fast.
So, seriously.
Why all the bad reviews?