G4: Gaming TV

Gotcha. Well, he doesn’t like sims very much from what I can tell. That’s really just a preference thing. Usually Tommy makes it clear when he goes on one of those rants. For example, whenever he reviews an RTS, he almost always begins the review by saying that he hates RTS games, and that you should take his review with a grain of salt. It might be for the best if Tommy only reviewed action games or something. But I think the guy’s pretty honest, and you can’t fault him for having an opinion.

I’ll watch Icons if its something I havn’t seen before. I don’t watch Xplay as much as I think their humor style is getting old. I’ll addon to the Tommy bashing for JD. Just have the Victor guy and it would be a hundred times better.

The comment about old TechTV shows coming back is a good sign. I’ll reserve judgement untill I see them though as to how their presented. The main beef for me now is that so many of the shows like Attack and that call in show feel like cheap public access cable shows to me. TechTV had a nice professional look and feel to it for the most part.

I really dislike Tommy on a personal level; as said earlier he gives odd reviews, bad ratings for no reason, and slams games for entirely stupid reasons.

And personally I think that every time he reviews a game he should disclose the fact that he works on a contractual basis with game publishers with his own company from what I understand. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but does he not own a sound studio or something similar that does effectswork and voiceover work for game companies?

— Alan

I believe its music/game sountrack stuff.

He absolutely does. He did the music for Advent Rising, there was a special on it the other night.

[Edit : He also gave Advent Rising for Xbox an 8, quite a bit higher than average.]

Damn it people. ATTACK OF THE SHOW! Al Lowe was on this week talking about Larry and sex in games fer chrissake!

–Dave

I just don’t get you folks.

I don’t really care for hard core racing sims either. I like steering to be easy. There… might as well hate me too. :roll:

I mean if you think the guy’s an asshole, then so be it. But just because you don’t like his reviews doesn’t mean you should dislike him on a personal level. I really didn’t care too much for what most of you guys said about Doom 3, but it has no effect whatsoever on how I feel about you guys personally.

I actually find Tommy to be a pretty personable guy. Sure he’s strongly-opinionated and doesn’t shy away from sharing his opinions. He’s slammed a number of games that I like a lot, and it really didn’t affect my personal opinion of him. He’s definitely not the first person I’d look to for information on a game that I was interested in, but I enjoy his reviews nonetheless. Obviously the guy has a lot of fun when he’s working on the show and I don’t think you should take some of his negativity towards certain games very seriously.[/quote]

I lean more towards Shadari here than MBorucke. Tommy is very up front about his biases, e.g. not liking sims or Japanese style RPGs at all. He’ll crush games in those genres but he basically tells you that if you like that type of stuff, disregard his rants. I do.

Besides, I’ve been reading Victor’s reviews since the mid 90’s, when he used to write for the Electronic Playground site. This was when they were mostly talking about it becoming a TV show.

If you review Doom 3 should you knock points because it doesn’t have enough puzzles, or you don’t like guns?

No, those are an obvious part of the game. I’m not saying he had to like Forza, but putting down a core aspect of the genre as a negative for a specific game is just retarded.

If I like shooters more than racing games, I’ll probably end up giving an average shooter a higher score than a superb racing game. If I’m upfront about that, then should there be a personal problem with that?

Now take that with a grain of salt. I’ve never formally reviewed anything in my life and I really don’t know how the professionals try to objectively review things that they personally don’t care for. It seems like quite a conundrum to me. Seeing as how I’m not a pro though, I just give my opinion on things and try to leave it at that.

He didn’t just give it a bad score. He listed being hard to turn as a negative. That’s like knocking points off Myst because it doesn’t have guns.

Not liking a game is one thing. Not understanding that your concerns are inherent to the game’s genre is another.

I understand where you’re coming from. But I think my point is valid too. I really don’t know how you’d expect someone to review something that they dislike. We’ve got a bunch of game reviewers here on this site, maybe one of them would like to jump in here and take a stab at this.

If you are reviewing something you dont like I dont think you can be objective about it at all.

Remember kids, you can only have a proper review if you feel completely neutral after playing it! If you find yourself either liking or disliking the game then your opinion is TEH BIAS!

If one were a very good reviewer, you could look past the part that you don’t like that kind of game and still give a very good review of a product. I don’t play adventure games but I can still review them. Or Japanese RPGs for that matter - and I don’t like them that much. But I know where to draw the line.

If Tommy were a fanboi or amateur reviewer, I would cut him some slack. He is not. He provides numerical ratings and pros/cons on games not only does he not like, but lets that influence his review ratings.

And, according to the above, he even reviews games he has worked on without any kind of disclosure. That’s wrong on quite a few levels.

— Alan

Remember kids, you can only have a proper review if you feel completely neutral after playing it! If you find yourself either liking or disliking the game then your opinion is TEH BIAS![/quote]

I am talking about a certain type of game.

I dont like onions so having me review any type of onion would end with me saying " it sucks ".

I understand the argument but this goes counter to everything I want in a review and a reviewer. I don’t want the reviewer to project what an audience might think of a title, which invariably leads to “check it out if you like this sort of game” closing lines. I want to know whether the reviewer liked the game and why. If the why part is explained well then I can apply my own preferences to get a better idea if it’s something I want to play.

If you don’t like Japanese RPGs what makes you think you

I apologize. I clicked on the second page of the thread without realizing there were still a few posts on the first page I hadn’t read. I thought you were referring to the “the perfect review is completely objective and shouldn’t demonstrate any of the reviewers tastes” manifesto that I disagree with so much.

Which makes your review completely worthless to anyone at all interested in that particular type of onion. A professional reviewer needs to look past their dislike of a particular type of product in order to give a useful review. If Rolling Stone reviews a CD with, “It’s country, so it sucks” I might miss an enjoyable CD. But if they are able to point out that although it has country stylings, it also has folk and alternative influences, I can expand my musical horizons a bit. “It sucks” is not a review, it’s an unsubstantiated opinion.

I thought you were referring to the “the perfect review is completely objective and shouldn’t demonstrate any of the reviewers tastes” manifesto that I disagree with so much.

Well yeah because thats pretty impossible. I mean ideally the way reviews would work is you would have someone that likes the certain genre reviewing games from it. I could see a cross genre review if the game was so good that it even brought in people that didnt care for that type in the end loving it.

Something like that I guess :)

That would be my ideal world.