For those of you who recall, you may remember a post back in October we did that covered Kotaku’s take on game reviews. It is a very good read and I highly recommend you run through it, beings that it’s one of the few places that have taken on the notion that gaming reviews nowadays frankly suck. But most importantly, if you look in the comments of our post, you will see that I mentioned I would touch on this subject myself once I got around to writing. And here we are.

Game reviews and ratings have always been a funny thing. At the individual level? Well if you give any one person internet access he/she will instantly spew pretentious as though they’re an editor for Pitchfork, with a handy bookmark to Dictionary.com and Microsoft Word open to check for synonyms. When the ability to publish some sort of art, whether it be writing, music, imagery, video, etc., becomes cheap and accessible enough for the masses to get a hold of, you can expect some low quality material. A case of “yeah, it’s great they can do it, but they shouldn’t.”

However, at the professional level, there isn’t any source out there that I can say I can trust with one grain of salt any more than the everyday blogger. The review and evaluation process from these sources, which are supposedly reputable, are typically inconsistent from title to title, lacking in a fair review based on full completion of the game, biased towards their advertiser’s preference, focused too much on technical individualities such as graphics/sound/online, or ‘aided’ by large yet completely meaningless scores.

Hit the jump for my take on these problems, and if I feel like posting them, solutions.

No standardized criteria

Before I begin putting blame on any one sect, if there is one problem that faces game evaluation and criticism to this day is that there is no standardized system to rate games. There is no official organization to set in place the theory and analysis required to do so. Film has the National Board of Review, yet we have the Spike Video Game Awards and X-Play. I think it’s time to evolve past the carnal and simplistic rants of Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb and look more critically at the medium as a whole, even if that takes some progressive-minded/abstract thought. Nobody said it was going to be easy.

Another argument that goes with the ‘lack of standards’ in evaluation is one that I personally have been on the fence about; basically, whether this medium is one of art to begin with. No offense to the majority of you gamers out there, but when the topic comes up about “Are video games art?”, I see nothing but reactionary and rabid mouth foaming answers of “YES YOU DUMBASS!!!” with little to no explanation as to why, or if there is one, it amounts to “Because I feel emotion” or some other transparent quip. Don’t get me wrong, I believe games will evolve into a meaningful artform, as titles such as Shadow of the Colossus and Killer 7 pave the way towards questioning what we consider artistic games, but as it is, it’s a really hard argument to make. And assuming if one is capable of making that argument, I’d sure feel much better if it were coming from someone with formal study and training in all facets of the medium, rather than someone who has been pumping gas after he gets out of school.

Considering that compared to other media that have these sources of criticism and have themselves matured greatly, much greater than games at least, this may seem like an unfair criticism. However, it still is an issue and before I can pretend to take any critique seriously, and it is something that needs to be done; it’s a healthy change, albeit a more formal one that may upset the cheetoh-stained Internet meme’-ers. Consider this less of a critique of gaming reviewers and more of an opportunity for gaming reviews in general that will take care of itself in time.

Finally, while researching this piece, I stumbled on this article which nearly discouraged me from writing this to begin with and just throw up a “CLICK HERE AWESOME READ LINK”, but I still recommend you give this article a thoughtful read and bookmark it. Don’t just bookmark it, print that sucker and memorize it. It is possibly the most intelligent take I’ve seen on not just the lack of reliable gaming critique in general, but also as a great look into the medium itself.

Completion, or the Lack Thereof

For those of you who might not be aware, Maxim Magazine was recently busted for their ‘review’ of The Black Crowes’ latest CD because the review was in fact a non-review…the reviewer didn’t even listen to the damn thing. Maxim has since issued an apology about it, but my opinion of their reviews are pretty much tainted from here on out.

So am I implying that gaming reviewers don’t play their games? Obviously not, but I think it’s fair to say that games go reviewed uncompleted. If you think about it, it really is not surprising. Given that games take many hours to complete now instead of just one sitting, and that titles such as Final Fantasy or Smash Bros involve many feats/side-quests that require a grand amount of time to accomplish…nevermind secrets that are in the game itself that add even more gameplay value…it’s reasonable to see that a game can be reviewed without being played through to completion. Add onto all of this the need to get time-sensitive reviews published to meet deadlines, all for a medium that doesn’t have a standard street date policy (I can’t count the number of times place X releases a game while place Y won’t put the title out until tomorrow…just make it Tuesday like every other damned thing), and you can imagine the massive pain in the ass it is to get a review out the door.

Simply put, it’s hard to get an accurate critique of a game if you haven’t touched on everything the title has to offer. Movies, music, and books only take a few hours out of your day, and you just have to watch/listen/read rather passively without having to deal with branching pathways or alternate endings or sidequests to deviate from the linear path given to you…with those media, ‘it is what it is’. Games, not so much (which with the rise of DLC, even less so).

So when you read your next review, be cautious of whether or not the game was completed before his/her final opinion was formed.

Flawed Numbering Systems

Review numbers are problematic for a couple of reasons.

First, many places use completely asinine decimal points that, as Kotaku pointed out, go into the hundredths of digits. What, I ask you, separates an 88.56 from an 88.58? Although not as outlandish, but still related to my point anyway, but when I saw Gamespot’s review of Zelda: Twilight Princess, I called bullshit. Not because I necessarily thought the game was the best thing since sliced cheese (though I do like it), but because that number just seems so arbitrary…8.8. Why 8.8? And the Gamecube version got an 8.9; do motion controls cost a tenth of a point? Is that official doctrine? Do I need to ask anymore questions to get my point across? Arbitrary scoring methods are fodder for the pretentious or the greedy flame-baiting traffic grabbers. Keep it simple, and keep it honest. If they would have just went with a definitive 8 or 9, that would have been hunky dory, though die-hard Nintendo fanboys would have still cried foul. But when your score is between one and ten, what is the point of having the decimal places to expand your arbitrary grading criteria to one hundred places? Face it, it’s a big number that gives you pretentious leeway and has no consistent bearing from title to title.

Secondly, and on the flipside of things, they are the crutch to the lazy gamer. Sure, I could glance quickly at a review that scores a game 6 out of 10 and infer that it is average, or slightly below if a source (such as IGN or Game Informer) use the completely out-of-place educational grading scale I eluded to above (where anything below 7 is pretty much awful). However, I will not know for what reasons those scores were given unless I actually, you know, read the review. Games that have some merit that get a less than stellar score are ignored because most attention is given to the final score than the written word. No review score is worth its weight in anything if it is not accompanied by the actual justification for that score in the first place, yet most gamers don’t care. They should.

Final Word

Finally, even with all of this talk, I would like to inform you that we will be bringing back a scoring system to our reviews. We will try our best to remain consistent for you and to best inform you of what games are worth your time, definite buys, total abortions, etc.. We are doing a 5 point system with no ridiculous decimal points or fractional scoring; just pure whole integers.

Hopefully we can help establish a new standard while the industry can work out these issues on a more global basis.