http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/blogArt.cfm?artid=17476 
I have a friend who often asks me for advice about video game purchases. He has both a PS3 and an Xbox 360. Despite my lack of owning the latter, it doesn't stop him from asking me "what I've heard" or "what I've read." And that's fine. I like being the go-to guy for gaming-related decisions. He often calls me at the store, game in hand, and says, "What do you think of Mirror's Edge?" I liked the demo, I tell him, but published reviews have been all over the map. Game Informer, EGM, and Play liked it, but Edge hated it, and even among the publications who gave it high marks, they were quick to point out its faults. I rattle off a list of review scores I've seen, thus illustrating the bipolarity of the press regarding Mirror's Edge. Then he asks me a question that renders all of those scores irrelevant: "But is it fun? Will I like it?"
Those are much tougher questions to answer. I daresay they are impossible to address in a standard number-based review format. Here's an example that hits close to home. Back when I first started here at NWR, my editors sent me Phantom Hourglass, a game I gave mediocre marks. The ensuing Talkback thread ballooned to eight pages of people yelling at me, proving beyond a doubt that enjoyment of ANY game, even one from a well-respected franchise, is completely subjective. Many people thoroughly enjoyed the very aspects of Phantom Hourglass that I criticized. And you know what? Nobody is wrong. I'm not wrong in giving the game a 7.5, and they're not wrong for giving it closer to a 10. The numbers don't mean anything.
Here's another example: Beyond Good & Evil is one of my favorite all-time games. Were I to review it today, with my NWR reviewer hat on, I would give it average scores in all counts. The graphics are kind of all over the place, the music is good in places, the control scheme is a little floaty, partner AI is questionable, and the game just can't decide what it wants to be. However, even though each criteria (Graphics, Sound, Control, Gameplay, Lastability, Final) would get average marks, only the final score, which here at NWR we disconnect from the others, gives any indication of how great the game is. BG&E would get 6's and 7's across the board, but probably a 9 from me at the bottom. BG&E has an emotional core that, until I played it, I had not experienced in a video game (except the MGS series). Now the inverse: I gave Phantom Hourglass fairly high marks in each individual category, but a lower final score.
Graphics, sound, control, none of this matters. What matters is whether the game is good or not. All you need is a final score. And even then, the final score is not definitive. I didn't like Phantom Hourglass, but many of my readers loved it. I love BG&E, but I know a lot of people who don't or wouldn't. I think Wario Land: Shake It! is one of the best games of 2008, but most publications barely gave it the time of day. It's all subjective, even the final score. It's just like my buddy asked me: "But is it fun? Would I like it?"
These are not questions I can put into numerical form. Whether you, the reader, will like a game or not is not a question I can answer. I can tell you that I, personally, thought the game was great (or sucked). Hell, there might be a guy out there who really liked Homie Rollerz. Me? I hated it, and I think you good people would similarly despise it, so I told you not to waste your time or money. And that's all I can really do. Scores don't mean anything. All I can do is tell you what my experience with any given game was. You might agree or disagree, but ultimately you have to make that call.
My feeling is that "scores" have stuck around to benefit aggregator sites, like MetaCritic and GameRankings. Review scores are collected at those sites and the resulting average affect things like stock prices, funding, and, ultimately, the consumer. It's a dirty business--one that leads to questionable situations like publishers allegedly bribing reviewers for higher numerical scores, or reviews being canned after giving a highly-advertised game a low score. Numerical values hold a lot of weight, more than I think they actually have.
If it were up to me, reviews would simply be narrations of one player's experience with any given game. Play and Edge, two of the more progressive gaming publications out there, have dramatically reduced the number of numbers in their reviews. One of them gives a final score, and the other has done away with scores entirely, leaving readers with a short "parting shot," basically the text that would go under NWR's "Final" score. Think about it--would that Phantom Hourglass review have been so lambasted were it lacking numerical scores? I really doubt it. You can argue about subjective scores, but it's tough to tell somebody that their opinion is wrong. I didn't like the game, simple as that, but you might. Numbers are infinitely more concrete than language.
The value of a game cannot be measured in terms of math, only experience and personal taste. What do you guys, as the readers, think of the standard review format? Do numbers help you? And if so, how?
Topic: Making the Review Process Better (Read 26317 times)
