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Overrated: The Truth About Videogame Reviews and The Power That They Wield


Pookiablo

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I must confess to using review-collecting websites like metacritic to pick a game to play. I also used to buy pretty much anything that got scores like 98%, and it never steered me wrong in the past. (I was not a big Resident Evil fan, I hadn't been following RE4, it got 98 in a few places, I picked it up, turned out to be one of the best games ever).

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Zero Punctuation is the way to go.

 

This! Yahtzee pretty much trolls every game apart from his very select group of all-time favourites, but at least he drives home the aspects of (hated, more often than not) gameplay, and it's entertaining! I feel like I have a decent idea of what a game is like after watching the Zero Punctuation vid.

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This! Yahtzee pretty much trolls every game apart from his very select group of all-time favourites, but at least he drives home the aspects of (hated, more often than not) gameplay, and it's entertaining! I feel like I have a decent idea of what a game is like after watching the Zero Punctuation vid.

 

The moment I realised not even that was accurate, I stopped taking his reviews as relevant. He does those reviews in less than a week, right? He skims by a lot of things.

 

Not to mention all the negativity. It's something I dislike.

Edited by Jonnas
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Yahtzee's reviews are pure entertainment, and I tend to enjoy them and nod my head knowingly even when he's ripping apart a game I thoroughly enjoyed. The only thing that bugs me about his reviews is when he ignores the co-op aspect of a game - which happens a lot and leaves me thinking he missed an opportunity to really enjoy the title. But that's only because I love co-op gaming.

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Yahtzee seems to hate multiplayer in general, which makes his reviews for more multiplayer-centered games a bit skewed. But I'm not big on multiplayer either, so I kind of like that.

Though I do enjoy co-op a lot.

 

I will say though, having 7 as an average leaves less gradations for the higher tier games, which I actually think is a good thing.

I'm not sure I follow. How is having less scores to denote a good game than a bad one a good thing? :hmm:

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Yahtzee seems to hate multiplayer in general, which makes his reviews for more multiplayer-centered games a bit skewed. But I'm not big on multiplayer either, so I kind of like that.

Though I do enjoy co-op a lot.

 

 

I'm not sure I follow. How is having less scores to denote a good game than a bad one a good thing? :hmm:

 

Moogle already mentioned but since games usually never score below 5 and that the difference between say 6/10 and 7/10 is unclear, they may as well score out of 5.

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Games rarely score below five because game reviewers use seven as the average for some reason. So you get four 'good' scores and five to six 'bad' scores, which is way more than necessary. If five denoted an 'average' game, it's reasonable to believe that more of the scale would be used.

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The thing is, I think that scores of around the 4.5-7 do mean an average game - but that our idea of what is average has become skewed, and the fact that average or below average games often have the same expensive retail price, means that we come to expect a certain amount of quality for our hard earned £40.

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