A good journalist would explain the game so that the reader will be able to imagine what playing the game would be like, so the reader can judge for themselves whether or not they want to play the game. No reviewer ever does this, therefore review magazines/websites are bad journalism. Why would you want to read bad journalism? Fuck those guys.
Quite true! There is a lot of bad journalism around nowadays. I remember seeing a trade magazine that reviewed the Canon D200 camera. Only there's no such thing! There's a Nikon D200, and indeed the picture was of this. You could tell by the NIKON badge! However, the article said Canon three times, and never mentioned Nikon.
Anyone else remember the UK gaming magazines from back in the early 90s? The standard of journalism then was beyond atrocious, in retrospect.
I remember the gaming magazines from the 80s, let alone the 90s!! Stop making me feel old! :crying: hehe! There were some very good magazines in the 90s, though. OK, true, some of them had a somewhat quirky writing style (a lot of cor blimey language), but they were usually aimed at younger readers so I guess that's what they (we!) wanted at the time, or they wouldn't have sold enough copies to continue. As for scoring, whatever. They're all relative, anyway. A score out of 5 multiplied by 2 is a score out of 10, and you'll often find scores out of 5 attract half marks, so it is indeed the same thing. N64 Magazine rated on a percentage, and that was fine. Out of 10 is perfectly adequate, though. A nice summary method is good in my mind. A score out of whatever is all very well, but I like that to be justified with a short paragraph on why it doesn't get a higher score, or a list of pros and cons.
I think a good example of this is Shadowrun for the Xbox 360. This is in my opinion the most under rated xbox 360 title. It's a squad shooter FPS. The reviews gave it moderate grades, sometimes low. Despite every published review I've read - PRAISED it's game play. They gave it a low rating because despite being based off a table top RPG there is no campaign. It is mutiplayer only, with no split screen even. There are only 3 game types, and only 9 maps - with a few varients. However if you go to any website and read reader reviews...almost nothing but 9's and 10's. The only gaming community I know that loves this game as much as I do is MLG. I won't go into the plot, just the game play. You pick a class, human dwarf elf or troll. Humans are average speed and health but have the most money and buying tech doesn't use any essence. Dwarfs are shorter, have the most pips, are immune to headshots, and when in close range suck essence away from other players. Second slowest. Elves run fastest, have regenerating health and second most essence. But they have the least health. Trolls are the slowest, have the least essence but have the most health and run at the same speed no matter what weapon they have. They also have the ability to harden their skin - when under fire their bodies will emit spikes. This means they are hard and cannot take damage. Thus you must time your shots to kill a troll. So you cannot just spray a troll with an SMG and kill them. But harden uses up essence so if they are out of essence you can spray them and kill them. A tactic is to use a dwarf with an SMG or chaingun up close to trolls, taking away their harden ability and laying down SMG fire to kill them. You can see just in the race choices alone how this plays into a rock paper scissors set up with team balance. The gameplay is put into rounds - 6 rounds wins. Now you have money, you are credited money for kills, winning, and scoring the artifact in extraction and raid game types. With money you can buy weapons, magic, or technology. These are binded to your shoulder buttons but if you buy more you can swap them or quick cast a spell by holding B and selecting it and triggering it with R. Magic has things such as tree of life to regenerate health, resurrection to ressurect your team mates, strangle which causes spikes to appear and trap enemies, summons which cause CPU controlled minions to guard an area or you can target an enemy. among other things Ressurect is important, if you die and are ressurrected and the person who ressurected you dies you will bleeed out (tree of life is important now lol) unless another team mate has resurrect and uses that again at which point they are your new host. Tech uses your essence as well (unless you're human) and allows things such as enhanced vision, gliders, antimagic generators... Firing your weapons also is like counterstrike (much like the buy system is inspired by it). It has reticle bloom, so you can't jump in the air while running and fire as accuratly. you must time your shots, adjust and compensate accordingly, etc. Basically - the learning curve is too high. People can't just join a game and kill some people. It requires a LOT of team work and communication is KEY. Combined with the game released the same week as the Halo 3 open beta, and little to no advertising...this fantastic game was doomed from teh start.
Jrpgs are like anime. After a while you get smart and get tired of the stereoptypes and cookie cutter character types. I would go by famitsu reviews not american reviews.
Famitsu reviews are even more ridiculous. Every Final Fantasy game ever gets 10/10/9/10 or whatever? Give me a break.
Nah. It had the POTENTIAL to be a good game, but it fell very short. It didn't need a campaign (although that would have been fun). However, it did need to put more into the offline side. All it has is 3 'demos' with AI characters that sort of count as an offline mode. It needed more, though - more levels, more SOMETHING. I think back to games like Half Life and how you can have an enjoyable game just with bots. Or multi-player with friends. NOT just online. What you ended up with was a good game... for a few hours. THAT is why Shadowrun sucks. It's just an online game with not enough variety. And not enough people playing to get a game together!! Oh, and the achievements seem near impossible to get! I don't know if it's true, I've never played the PC version, but I hear that on the PC you get more slots for spells. If that's true, that takes the skill element out of the game. I would imagine it is just bullshit some kid made up, TBH. I also heard that the server isn't online any more. I can't see them turning it off altogether, but maybe they had a period of downtime for some reason, and people thought it was totally off. Who knows?
:shrug: PC game has the same amount of slots. 3. It's the exact same, thats why you can cross platform. You can buy more, and you can say Have rez equipped to RB, next round buy wired reflexes to RB and it'll still be in your inventory if you hold B. You can remap it during the match, or you can quick spell by hitting R. They wanted to be like counter-strike. No real offline mode. strictly multiplayer only. many PC games only have a few game types. Cs for example. From a competetive gaming aspect it's perfect. Also - hard to get games together? You can join a game faster than you can with Halo 3. Because there's less people playing it doesn't look as much for a match. Though I agree with Phrequency - 60 dollars was a bad price mark. If it wasn't full priced it would have sold well.
Cool. Yeah, otherwise it'd be unfair. Same deal on 360 Counter-strike has many maps, just in the game it has a lot. Shadowrun has what, 3? Counter-strike also has the ability to add bots, or play on a LAN. I'm not disputing the multiplayer only factor, but the fact that you can't play with bots other than 3 levels marked as practice levels. There should be more of that!! Not everyone has Xbox Live. And people want a game you can play with your mates when they come over. Shadowrun won't get a look-in. Halo will. No.. it looks for AGES then tells you there are NO players playing!! How is that easy to join a game?!?!
Yes retro. "Just like 360" I was telling you how you can buy more spells and not have them equipped... shadowrun has 12 maps. NOT 3. Shadowrun HAS BOTS. WTF? You're on crack dude. There are more than 3 "practice maps" you can play bots with. you can lan on Shadowrun, and add bots in. Holy crap you've never played the game obviously. Shadowrun almost instantly puts me in a game, unlike Halo you can join games partway through. I just joined a game, and once it was over joined another. No waiting. here, i just took this screen shot to show you See that? It's a LAN game, with BOTS. On a NON training level. Did you only play the fucking demo? edit: Oh yes. This map list right here only has 3 maps. Definatly. That's 3. The Lit up arrow at the bottom doesn't mean there's even more. Not at all.
I admit to not reading the whole thread, just some bit about journalism and reviews. Simply put, I dont think journalism and reviews go together. To me, journalisms more about trying to report something for what is, "So and so made so much money", and theres simply no way to review a game that is like that. Its for that reason why opinion pieces in a newspaper arent really journalism. Yes, I know everything has a bias, but in reporting, the good journalists are able to put that aside, and in reviews, thats just not possible. Oh, and Im a journalism major.
it was also an action rpg for SNES and Genesis. that's probably what he's referring to. since this isn't really a table top gaming forum.
