That’s right. Everyone knows that J Evans Pritchard mastered the right way to evaluate poetry, and his scale can accurately be transposed to games. Here’s a reminder of how it works.
The Witcher 3 had 3.7 teraflops worth of boobies. That’s all I really need to know to smash the Buy button.
AVATARS Y/N?
- Y
- N
- S/B
0 voters
Niche isn’t dead.
They are containers for art.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
- open mailbox
- go east
- turn inward, and contemplate the unbearable lightness of being
0 voters
Question, is the flag up or down?
Thank you stusser for this wonderful new game! However, it has terrible graphics, and I didn’t hear Nolan North even once! Also, this game is playable on my phone, so can I ask why you hate rEaL gAmErS?
7/10
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
You sit with your flippers in a lotus position, turn inward, and contemplate the unbearable lightness of being.
Your dorsal fin itches.
- Scratch it
- Check inventory
- Ascend to the outer plane known as the Heroic Domains of Ysgard
0 voters
What the hell, people? You always open the mailbox!
What if there’s a pipebomb in it?
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
You sit with your flippers in a lotus position, turn inward, and contemplate the unbearable lightness of being.
Your dorsal fin itches.
You remove a jacinth gem worth over 1,000 gp and an ornately carved bar of silver worth over 100 gp from your backpack, crush them in a mortar and pestle, mix with pixie blood and salamander spit, inscribe a hexagon upon the earth, then spend an hour in an ornate ritual of dancing and chanting. At the end of this ritual your body collapses but your spirit collapses to a point of the brightest light and speeds through a portal to the Astral Plane.
You are floating on a featureless plane of grey mist. There are no directions here but in what we’ll call the east, in the distance, you see a silouette.
There is a silver cord here. It comes out of your butt and reaches down into the featureless grey mist.
- Cut the cord
- Go east
- Wait, how is a shark a wizard?
0 voters
I wanted to yank the cord like I was starting a lawnmower, but I’ll guess I’ll just have to cut it instead!
Woohoo, free pipe bomb!
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
You sit with your flippers in a lotus position, turn inward, and contemplate the unbearable lightness of being.
Your dorsal fin itches.
You remove a jacinth gem worth over 1,000 gp and an ornately carved bar of silver worth over 100 gp from your backpack, crush them in a mortar and pestle, mix with pixie blood and salamander spit, inscribe a hexagon upon the earth, then spend an hour in an ornate ritual of dancing and chanting. At the end of this ritual your body collapses but your spirit collapses to a point of the brightest light and speeds through a portal to the Astral Plane.
You are floating on a featureless plane of grey mist. There are no directions here but in what we’ll call the east, in the distance, you see a silouette.
There is a silver cord here. It comes out of your butt and reaches down into the featureless grey mist.
Your mind whirls at the possibilities inherent on the astral plane, but settles on an odd question-- how does a shark become a wizard? Perhaps they have their own magic schools like your species, the Bottlenosed Dolphin?
While you ponder this question, a crew of githyanki sneak up behind you. One draws his vorpal sword and swings at your silver cord. Being that you are a powerful and canny dophin wizard who’s been around the block a time or two this activates your Contigency spell, triggering a powerful conjuration spell and incidentally disintegrating a diamond worth over 5000 gp in your backpack. A Gate opens, and through slithers the Aboleth Psi-Ninja you summoned by its name, which I will not reproduce here because it sounds like an upper respiratory infection.
A grand melee ensues.
- Kill them all with an incendiary cloud spell
- Make an aquatic sound not unlike a creaking door, but look hella-cute doing it
- Wait, how did you crush a gem with flippers?
0 voters
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
You sit with your flippers in a lotus position, turn inward, and contemplate the unbearable lightness of being.
Your dorsal fin itches.
You remove a jacinth gem worth over 1,000 gp and an ornately carved bar of silver worth over 100 gp from your backpack, crush them in a mortar and pestle, mix with pixie blood and salamander spit, inscribe a hexagon upon the earth, then spend an hour in an ornate ritual of dancing and chanting. At the end of this ritual your body collapses but your spirit collapses to a point of the brightest light and speeds through a portal to the Astral Plane.
You are floating on a featureless plane of grey mist. There are no directions here but in what we’ll call the east, in the distance, you see a silouette.
There is a silver cord here. It comes out of your butt and reaches down into the featureless grey mist.
Your mind whirls at the possibilities inherent on the astral plane, but settles on an odd question-- how does a shark become a wizard? Perhaps they have their own magic schools like your species, the Bottlenosed Dolphin?
While you ponder this question, a crew of githyanki sneak up behind you. One draws his vorpal sword and swings at your silver cord. Being that you are a powerful and canny dophin wizard who’s been around the block a time or two this activates your Contigency spell, triggering a powerful conjuration spell and incidentally disintegrating a diamond worth over 5000 gp in your backpack. A Gate opens, and through slithers the Aboleth Psi-Ninja you summoned by its name, which I will not reproduce here because it sounds like an upper respiratory infection.
A grand melee ensues.
Alarmed by the gruesome sight of a githyanki trying to tear its own arm off under mind control from the Aboleth Psi-Ninja, you involuntarily make a clicking kee-kee-kee-ahh sound. It is adorable.
You flip fin over tail in a display of silvery grace never before seen out of the water and rapidly swim away through the Astral Plane. You could really go for a nice wriggling mackerel or sardine right around now, and that silver cord is leading up to one heck of a wedgie, but you continue, you persevere, content in the knowledge that you successfully derailed this thread.
fin
None of you took your damn towel.
He doesn’t understand how anything works. That’s his thing.
Oh, look, who came out of hiding for a cheap jab. Well done!
So you honestly think that a review should not rate a game’s quality of art? How consistent the art style is, if it is well done, if resources are wasted (by using 2k textures for door knobs, yeah that happens), if graphical glitches happen, there are MANY important aspects here. All of that can be done objectively.
It should not rate the game’s mechanics? If they achieve their purpose, or if they just downright do not work, if they are well-balanced (if that was their goal) or is one build (in RPG terms) totally dominating? Again, all of which can be objectively analyzed.
It should not rate the audio quality? If the voice over is well done, or just read by someone without emotion? If the sound makes proper use of the channels (3D/2D positioning) or is just blared through like mono sound? If the music follows a composition or is just slapped together open-game-audio with no coherence? All of which can be told objectively.
It should not rate the game’s setting, worldbuilding and story? If it is coherent within itself, objects, cities and NPCs have a convincing reason for doing what they do and aren’t just there because they need to give you a quest? If actual thought was put into WHY something is there, or if the entire world is just a theme park with no logic to it whatsoever? If the story develops in a convincing matter or is just full of deus ex machinas? Of course, this cannot be applied to every game (for example, puzzle games), but where it can be applied, it can be rated objectively.
Then there is the tech (bugs, loading times, etc.), there is the UI, etc.
All of that is factual information, that can very well be rated. If someone liked it (or not) is, at best, important for the petty ego who wants to put his opinion out there (hey, I do/did that myself, I just won’t pretend that my opinion is valuable information, but my facts sure are) and useful only for those knowing their own bias in relation to the reviewer’s. So it isn’t fully useless for some, but nowhere near as valuable as factual information about the game’s quality.
Of course, writing a proper review requires actual knowledge about game theory, game development, art, music, etc. Not everyone can do that, or should do that. Why do you think games journalism is in such a pitiable state? Too many people doing something they are bad at…
I’ll fully admit there are things about games that can not be objectively rated. Humor, for one. You can tell a game is humorous, but humor is so subjective it is pretty much impossible to objectively rate it.
But the vast majority of what makes a game can and should be rated as objectively as you can. Nobody says you can’t say if you liked it or not in addition, but if that is the focus of all you do, what useful information did you actually put out into the world?
Opinions are mostly useless due to how subjective they are (including my own, just to make that clear), though they can be fun to discuss. Facts are never useless and therefore superior information.
Some reviews try and do a separation here, by having categories like art/audio/tech/story etc. and then something like “fun factor”, which is of course mostly useless (what does it tell me if someone I don’t know had fun with a game? Not much, that’s for sure). That’s a step in the right direction, as it at least separates facts from opinion. Of course, some just use them to say “I like they graphics, I don’t like the audio, I like the story”…
Oh, look, someone holding forth about objective reviews in a thread that has veered wildly from how much mobile games suck to gamersgate. Color me unsurprised.
I rate this thread a 7 on the 7-9 scale. However, it gets a fun factor rating of 7.1. Overall rating: 7.05.
-Tom