Missing gameplay elements is pretty common, I’d wager. Our very own Tom Chick has admitted to missing things.
I can understand how someone can lose himself into Torchlight 2, a very good action RPG with no small amount of aesthetic charm and design smarts. But once I realized there was absolutely no risk/reward trade-off in terms of how you progress through the game — folks who play on the easiest difficulty get the exact same loot and experience as folks who play on the hardest difficulty — I lost any desire to play it. An action RPG is based on constant rewards. As such, I expect it will have some risk/reward trade-off rather than just freely dumping its treasures into the lap of anyone who comes along.
Read the review — which was written before I knew there was no risk/reward mechanism in the game! — here.
To clarify: He sticks by his review score and the content of the review, he just stated that finding out about the difficulty levels not giving him more XP or loot sucked away his desire to continue playing.
It’s a topic worth discussion I think, if any game reviewers, developers, or critics would step in. How do devs make games which are playable by both high and low skill players? Can a low skill reviewer provide a useful review for high skill players, and vice versa? If a dev makes a game with an extreme range of difficulty settings, should it be reviewed by different people almost like different versions or separate games? How should a reviewer present a game when they are unable to play it well enough to know if they have even seen the core systems in action?
Clumsy or obtuse or slow, are all conditions which create different game play failures, so all “bad” play reviewers are not even the same.
There are factors which are teachable, and tutorial functions which can help work people into competence from a game’s start. But so many games rely on split-second reactions to instant visual cues, and a 60 year old gamer may just be physically unable to react fast enough, while a 22 year old doesn’t even perceive the problem.
Of all the reasons people have been indignant at video game journalists (and they themselves have been doing most of the angry pointing anyway), you’d think that “not being able to play games” would be one of the better motives.
I don’t think there is a problem with low skill reviewers. There is possibly a problem with low skill reviewers providing reviews on what amounts to high skill games.
It’s like saying “Review TV” or something - there’s a billion channels worth of content now. A person reviewing Lifetime is probably not the same person who should be reviewing Realtrees ™ The Blood Trail on some wildlife channel, nor reviewing cartoons and kid shows. Or saying “Review Music” when there are so many genres and genres on top of genres. For some reason we still have this idea that games are games are games. It’s been clear to me for some time this just isn’t true.
Agreed. Thank goodness Dean Takahashi isn’t reviewing Cuphead. Dean even admits that platformers aren’t his thing.
In fact, platform games like Cuphead are not my specialty. Mike Minotti of GamesBeat plays them, and he will likely do the formal review of the game when it comes out on September 29.
It’s the other accusation, that because he’s so bad at Cuphead, he must not be worthy to write about games at all, that’s at issue here.
Steve Bauman of CGS+/CGM always assigned reviewers to genres and styles of games they were familiar with so you could get a strong review from a person who had played those types of games before. I did a lot of auto racing games because I not only knew a lot about racing sims, but because I was also a racing fan and could match it up to the real thing in an educated way. I also played a lot of real-time strategy games so while @tomchick usually got the higher profile RTS titles (or one of the folks who worked in the office as a full-timer…), I reviewed a lot of second tier RTS games like Earth 2150, Perimeter, etc. There was never an explicit definition of being an expert at the actual gameplay, but we were given games to review that matched with our skill set and history as a reviewer.
That said, I think there must be some competency by the reviewer as a player to write a decent review. That Polygon video playing DOOM was pretty bad stuff. If you really can’t hit even the first thing they throw at you, then you might not be the guy for that job because most players coming into DOOM are going to have basic aim as a core competency, and rightly so. A reviewer should not review games he has no background with at all, and IMO, the best reviews come from people who play TONS of games rather than delve super deeply into one genre or another. At that point you can give a better overall definition to what works and what doesn’t when you write a review. That’s probably self-serving because I always felt like that was a strength of mine, but that really doesn’t seem to be valued in today’s reviews. Free or almost free writers are what’s valued now.
I always tried to give readers a sense of my overall enjoyment and experience with the game. I think every game has a sort of soul to it that you define in conclusion of the review. How did it accomplish what it set out to do beyond your little nitpicks (which some reviewers turn into much bigger issues than they are IMO) and disappointments? How does it all come together in the end? Those explanations make or break the end result. To get there you can’t absolutely suck at playing the game.
Yeah, but this video isn’t even pretending to review the game. It’s essentially making fun of the guy playing it. The idea of reviewer competence is a completely separate issue that is using this as a vehicle for predictable reasons.
Oh yeah! I agree that this video isn’t a review and shouldn’t be taken as such! I was kinda replying to @sillhouette who seemed to be asking how you assign reviewers to specific games. Also @Woodlance who noted that “not being able to play games” is probably a decent motive to be indignant toward a games journalist.
You have to have some competency.
And @Brooski, while I enjoy a good wargame and have pushed chits since I was small with my (much) older brother, I know I couldn’t review them. I can enjoy them, but I was much happier to read your perspective as a guy who knows history AND the games. That’s where current games journalism often falls down because it doesn’t value the well-rounded historical perspective both real-life and in terms of games played that may have influenced that one.
I agree with others. There’s no problem with low skill reviewers, the problem is when a reviewer reviews a game he is not suited for (doesn’t have the skill, does not know the genre, is of the wrong demographic than the target -although this last one is perhaps not as important and easier to overcome-…). Normally this is mitigated by being very clear when giving info about the game as to what to expect when playing it, so that a no-reflexes, fan of TBS guy doesn’t end up playing Blazblue or something like that.
BUT many times this communication is mismanaged and review codes are sent out with wrong info. I do think it’s fine to say the game is too hard/belongs to an uninteresting genre for me. But a full review is probably a waste of time of both the reviewer and the readers in that case.
As for players, it’s the same. Some game genres (and budgets) allow to target wide demographics catering to all skill levels and styles of play (AAA anyone?) but if the game is targeted at a small group of user who need to have certain tastes/skill/genre literacy, you better communicate that in crystal clear way.
So I randomly learned more about this, since I originally just saw 3 minutes and moved on thinking it was some kind of joke, and it’s an incredible bunch of bullshit. They posted the video because it was the only footage they had of the game, period, damage be damned.
The original article said it brings to light how hard some games can be, which it fucking doesn’t because he doesn’t even know how to jump properly, and complains he can’t jump on enemies when he has a perfectly good gun. It then goes on to credit the developers on a game they didn’t make, because why be competent if it doesn’t bring page views?
It also misrepresents the game and possibly damages its sales when it hasn’t even come out yet.
But that’s ok, because it was all for laughs anyway (they just forgot to tell anyone) and look at the conversation they started (about something that’s completely fake).
When you look at the rest of his articles (rewritten press releases), you get the whole reason no one believes in journalism anymore (EDIT: sorry, it doesn’t really apply to US, unlike other places) (EDIT2: this is likely not his decision and he’s not the editor, he probably just goofed). But, hey, page views! and you get to play the victim and someone else pays for it, so it’s fine.
Damage to Dean’s reputation? Because it surely didn’t damage Cuphead.
That would be a fair criticism if the editors hadn’t corrected the mistake and update the article with a notice of the change.
Misrepresents the game? How exactly? And let’s be honest, a lot more people than ever before have now seen Cuphead. I’d say this controversy is probably the best thing that’s happened to this game.
I know, right? It’s not like Dean started the original article with “I suck at Cuphead.” Oh, no. Wait. He totally did. Maybe including the sentence “Go ahead, laugh your heart out at my expense” was too subtle for you? Definitely ending it with “I figure it might take 1,000 times that for me to complete this game, if my initial 26 minutes of shame are an indicator” was just not enough of a clue.
Yeah, Dean Takahashi is totally known for regurgitating PR. It’s not like he’s been writing about the tech industry for 25 years with The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, or The Mercury News along with VentureBeat. Yup. This guy is a scrub.
