Not to open a while new thing, but there are reviews and critiques.

There will always be room for critiques, but this interest has never really had that in a mainstream form.

If you are lookign for reviews, then GG and Edge are correct, all you need is a thumbs up, thumbs down and three bullet points for each pro and con.

But to put a game into perspective, to examine it and determine it's contributions, you ned a critic to provide a critique.  And most gamers are not looking for that, clearly.

What you both appear to be suggesting, which I do not at all agree with, is that any consensus is as good as another. If the people whose consensus you use to determine what you should buy are demonstrating that they have no more knowledge than you of what you are interested in buying despite having had direct exposure to it, I do not see how their consensus is of any value whatsoever.

You are making a judgment based on whether a group of people enjoyed the same press release and trailer you read and you watched, not (based on all evidence) what the actual product is.

In short: if what the consensus is based on becomes worthless, the consensus itself becomes worthless.

SupremeAC said:

Where did I say that the reviews are not based on review code of the game?

Indeed, no one did. The closest someone came to saying that was actually Aspro in his OP, where he described the constraints in which some reviewers are forced to play some games.



My point is, broadly, that if a reviewer demonstrates in their text the same level of apparent knowledge that the reader who has not played the game has (press releases and trailers), then their judgment (the score) must either be called into question, or be taken seriously only by way of a humungous leap of faith, and will directly affect the validity of a consensus when the majority of reviews suffer from this same flaw.



Or: if a review describes a trailer and a press release, the score is rating the trailer and the press release, not the game those things are advertising.

EDIT: internet explorer be fucking up the text.

Edi2: Re-reading Aspro's post, it didn't really have much to do with either of what we said. But that type of reviewing is fucked for the same reasons as critiques because: "they are the amalgam of press release, twitter response, play through informed by publisher provided guides and sample pull quotes from focus groups" which is of little practical use in trying to determine what to buy.

SupremeAC said:

Your argument is flawed.  Aspro said:

"But when you look at reviews today, they are the amalgam of press release, twitter response, play through informed by publisher provided guides and sample pull quotes from focus groups." / fake australian accent

He clearly states 'play' as well.  You can't just use snippets of text with no context to base your arguments off.  You're no better than these journalists you're bemoaning.

Something has clearly been lost in translation. When I quoted him, it had nothing to do with what we were discussing, and I used the full quote (see: "EDIT2", but you might have been writing your post at the same time as I made that edit). When I referred to, but did not quote, his OP (which I did not use as part of my argument in any way, but as an aside in my statement that no one is saying that game reviewers don't play games), I literally referred to him saying that game reviewers play games: "where he described the constraints in which some reviewers are forced to play some games." This statement does not mean that only reviewers who are forced to will play games, but that only some reviewers are forced to play games under constraints.

EDIT: I also think calling his Australian accent fake is a little cruel, considering his time spent in America.

Where did Aspro say anything about "the constraints in which some reviewers are forced to play some games" ?  Now you're just confusing me.  

I think it's a bit of a long stretch to say reviewers might not have played the game just because they don't give a lot of detail in their review.  We were discussing the quality of most reviews, not their integrity.

Also, I was referring to maa fak'  austraaali'n accint, not his.

SupremeAC said:

Where did Aspro say anything about "the constraints in which some reviewers are forced to play some games" ?  Now you're just confusing me.  

I think it's a bit of a long stretch to say reviewers might not have played the game just because they don't give a lot of detail in their review.  We were discussing the quality of most reviews, not their integrity.

Also, I was referring to maa fak'  austraaali'n accint, not his.

In reply to your first line: In his OP (original post), please refer to the emboldened text.

aspro said:

Marketing won. Twitter won, YouTube won.

Shakespeare wrote that brevity is the art of wit, which is true.  Wit can mean both having humour,and quickness of mind, and in this context I think that Shakespeare was talking abut the latter.  If you can sum things up in a sentence, you are demonstrating profound insight.

But when you look at reviews today, they are the amalgam of press release, twitter response, play through informed by publisher provided guides and sample pull quotes from focus groups.

If you are lucky.

Where is the thoughtfulness? The insight?

I'd be interested in this community's thoughts on this topic, for inclusion in the next game under podcast.

In reply to your second line: I'll only say this one more time: I am not suggesting games reviewers do not play games, nor that anyone here did, either. In terms of our discussion (assuming we refers to you and I), then we've misunderstood each other consistently since: "Yeah, I came to the same conclusion when Foolz mentionned that if reviews have become obsolete, so have scores.  I didn't agree with that.  Even if you have a hundred bad reviews, if you take the average of all those scores, you'll still have a pretty good idea of what a game's worth.  Hence the popularity of Metacritic."

As to your third line, I am fully aware of that and was, in fact, deliberately misunderstanding what you wrote, and accusing you of something you quite obviously didn't do.

SupremeAC said:

I am sufficiently confused to leave it as is.  So all in all, it was a big misunderstanding and in the end we're agreeing that Aspro might in fact be faking his australian accent.  

<3

SupremeAC said:

I am sufficiently confused to leave it as is.  So all in all, it was a big misunderstanding and in the end we're agreeing that Aspro might in fact be faking his australian accent.  

DAMNITT! The jig is up!

What I meant by "play informed by PR", is the poor professional reviewer (who works at a publication as his sole source of income)  is stuck in a room ready to review a game and he's been prepped to the nth degree by the publishers PR on what he is supposed to think about the game, how he is supposed to play, why his natural inclinations are wrong (if he is not 100% in love with the game), and how everyone else who played the game absolutely loved it, and what do you know anyway the game has not been released yet, and  what if you low ball it and the rest of the world loves the game? And what about the hardworking folks who develop the game that we had you go with for free beers and food three times during development, they have kids you know? And the game has 800K followers on teitter, what do you have? And why are you so underpaid? We have a community job opening soon.

Unless it is a Nintendo game, in which, he's just been sent the disc, so he can be as honest as he wants without all the head games.

^Amusing, but Videogamer reviews are fucking atrocious...this nicely summarises one of the reasons they're so bad, though: banal waffling of what they like and don't like composed with no rhyme or reason, and with no attempt to justify their likes and dislikes. At least it’s deliberate, apparently.

edgecrusher said:

Its like normal everyday people talking about games, basically.

I thik their written reviews try to be more than that, which clashes with the style of random dudes talking about games. And when they're reviewing something in a non-comedy video (random dudes talking about games), they play-down their funny personas, so come across as incredibly boring. Otherwise the videos might work.

EDIT: I've only watched video reviews by the small one who's part of the Eurogamer podcast (?); the others might better.