Gaming reviews - recommending the mediocre?

[Nemz0r]

I tend to trust PCG UK reviews, they seem to be quite accurate in my experience. I may have not played a few games because they've rated them lowly and others love them though! For example they gave Hellgate: London 74%, about what I would give it basing my opinion on the demo - it's good (i thought), but I can imagine it becoming repetitive; it's certainly not bad though.

Then they give some games abysmal scores - think it was the Little Britain game, they gave 4% or so . Ratatouille around 40%.

One I found surprising was 85% for CoD4. Not giving into the hype to give a 90%+ score - which I agree with because the first game was totally awesome, but the scripted 'enemies from no-where' thing is getting a bit old now.

If they gave Crysis 99%, i'd believe they really thought that - because I think it's totally awesome .

As for Hexus reviews, I do hope you start putting %s; that's really what I look for after reading everything, as it's kind of a sum-up of "Should I or Shouldn't I?". I only really tend to get games that score 90% or over - unless i've been waiting ages for them, or just know i'll enjoy them (of course a 40% review would change my mind ). eg. Stalker got iirc 84% in PCG, but I was anticipating that for ages, and loved it . Another one: Evil Genius, 89% I think, was great fun - had to use money cheat though, was kinda solid otherwise (unless you just kept stealing money for hours before you interrogated the maid). Plus I always made my base rooms far more big and expensive than they had to be at the time - all in the grand scheme of things .

[Ciber]

I'm not wanting to offend anyone here, but I have been getting the feeling that hexus revews tend to like games that are in fact not very good. I've always found hexus hardware reviews to be honest and worth reading, so that reflects a general honesty, however hexus game reviews I feel could be more critical of a games weak points. With the quantity of games out there, it should be outstanding to be recommended and game of the year material to get editors choice, as most of us dont have time to waste on mediocre titles.

[Nick]

True, there are games that just wont end and thus a review can be written when the user feels they have played enough, but with the withcher being a fairly big rpg 10 or 12 hours is still getting started, but if it's a game with a story and an ending (single player), then i do believe it should be completed before a review is written.
Plus when hexus reviews a game do they tell us what platform they played it on, i didnt realise the review for time shift was on 360.

Quick cut and paste time...

From the title of the Timeshift review article : TimeShift - Xbox 360

From the forum thread linked to the article : Review :: TimeShift - Xbox 360

From the info box that heads up every page of the review : Platform: Xbox 360

Can't really put it out there much more, can we?

And as for completing games, check out a few of other sites, as I did this afternoon. Nearly ALL of them have, hidden away somewhere, 'how they review guide' and in three of the four I visited, they all said the same as me, ie, they play a game as long as they feel necessary to write the review. Some sites even state an average of 10 hours of gameplay, so you and pretty much the entire reviewing community are going to have to differ on that one. Soz.

Ciber, not offended at all chap.. now, where did you say you lived?

I thought we were being critical of poor games? I like to think we give everything an honest go rather than just basing our reviews on reputation, hype and whether or not we like the platform/genre/publisher/bloke who makes the tea etc. so perhaps in an effort to be fair we've gone too far the other way?

I do read other sites to see what their take is and once in a while I'm see reviews that obviously are panning for the sake of panning... Hell, I've written a fair few scathing reviews, such as Pacific Fighters which had me roundly flamed by practically every flight simmer in the world.

But your point IS taken and I shall be keeping a close eye on things.

[Nick]

Then they give some games abysmal scores - think it was the Little Britain game, they gave 4% or so . Ratatouille around 40%.

I did do a two word review once, "Total ****", which, quite rightly, I was told to write a proper review on as it made us look less than professional.

Then there was the one where I libelled an entire developing house and the one where, in effect, I questioned the sexual tendencies of the writers, publishers and anyone who stocked the game, which is class A defamation, especially when I suggested bestiality as well. I think the phrase was something like "fellate a horse"... hardly suitable for a game review though a lot of fun to write in a review.

Whilst slating can be a lot of fun it can also be very dangerous...

[noTHINGface]

... I think that clarifying the actual meaning of the Hexus accolades makes sense, I'm not exactly new here and I still find them a little awkward and confusing. Steven writes well, his words make sense hence why I wanted to make it clear I wasn't attacking him but I would challenge the awards - recommending the mediocre. Percentage or 'out of 10' sounds like a good move.

[k0nigen]

Give me Digi (Digitiser - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) any day

(no offence intended to Hexus...)

[Ciber]

Theres some intersting things on this subject here: Ophelea, "Out There" - The "Reviews are Broken" Argument

[gtech]

oh they do then

[UltraMagnus]

i think its more or less a reflection on the PC games industry than reviewers.

it seems more and more games are just "yet another MMO" or "yet another FPS" there have been very few groundbreaking titles, probably the most recent one was oblivion, and thats 2 years old. its just natural that reviewers and "average joe gamer" start grasping at straws looking for "the next big thing"

[directhex]

dear reviewers,

if a game is average, then award it a numerically average score of 50% (5/10, 2.5 stars, whatever)

giving games an average of 7.5 (as sites like gamespot or ign do) completely breaks the review curve

love, directhex

gamespot:

ign:

[Nick]

Hex raises a point that was discussed, at incredible length, yesterday between us HEXUS staff.

Now, here's my question for you guys.

When reading a review, what score do you interpret as representative of an average game?

[kalniel]

Disagree Hex,

Reviews are not (IMHO) a direct measure of how a game compares against other games, they are a measure of the enjoyment you can expect to get playing them.

Therefore I'd expect most games that make it past the fight for funding, dev milestones and QA to actually provide some decent measure of enjoyment. A score of 50% would in my view represent a game that did not provide or take away pleasure in playing. Less that 50% would represent something that was actually painful to play, above 50% represents how much enjoyment you'd get compared to not playing the game at all. In that scheme I would definitely expect most games to make it to retail to provide well above 50% scores.

So to answer Nick's question, there is no score that can represent an 'average' game - assuming the industry's in a relatively healthy position then I would expect 'most' games to score around the 70-85% mark.

[directhex]

Disagree Hex,

Reviews are not (IMHO) a direct measure of how a game compares against other games, they are a measure of the enjoyment you can expect to get playing them.

Therefore I'd expect most games that make it past the fight for funding, dev milestones and QA to actually provide some decent measure of enjoyment. A score of 50% would in my view represent a game that did not provide or take away pleasure in playing. Less that 50% would represent something that was actually painful to play, above 50% represents how much enjoyment you'd get compared to not playing the game at all. In that scheme I would definitely expect most games to make it to retail to provide well above 50% scores.

we don't apply the same standard to movies, where 3/5 is the 'baseline' score given to average films. movie reviewers aren't scared of socres below 20%, why are games reviewers?

[Nick]

Let's all take a vote on it:

http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-gaming...s-average.html

My reasoning behind doing this is that we need to understand how YOU guys interpret scores.

[directhex]

Hex raises a point that was discussed, at incredible length, yesterday between us HEXUS staff.

Now, here's my question for you guys.

When reading a review, what score do you interpret as representative of an average game?

5/10 is average for *everyting* except games, where the broken review curves mean 7/10 or 8/10 is "average"

because the curve is broken, there's a very small margin for rating games that are actually good - on a pure points marker, since 7/10 is so often used as "average", that means there are only 3 grades of "above average"ness - "better", "good" or "perfect". even on a more fine-grained system like percentages, with a 75% average, that means there's only 25% to mark the difference between average and perfect - but a worthless 75% to mark the difference between average and abysmal

no scores is better than pointless scores. Edge magazine has always done well on marking games - and a 6/10 from edge is a pretty good recommendation that a game is worth buying, let alone >6

[kalniel]

we don't apply the same standard to movies, where 3/5 is the 'baseline' score given to average films. movie reviewers aren't scared of socres below 20%, why are games reviewers?

You're right, we don't. I think they're measuring different things, like I stated above

Infact I think the movie system is broken. Is a movie that scored 5/5 really going to give you 40% more enjoyment compared to a 3/5 movie?