Judgement Day, respectable? Isn’t that the show with Tommy “I did the music so the game gets 5 stars” Tallarico on it?[/quote]
I actually saw a fairly comprehensive list of games reviewed on Judgement Day and Tommy tended to give them lower scores than Victor on average.
Not that I have any faith in him as a reviewer, but that’s more because he seems to refuse to accept popular genre conventions due to personal bias, and knocks games for doing things they have to do to please their target audience.
I do agree with Gary, too. Barbed Wire Biscuit and The Whip Set stand out in particular.
I said fairly respectable. And that’s mainly based on the fact that at least I have a sense that both Victor and Tommy actually played the games they are reviewing. Tommy obviously tilts towards twitch type action games and he makes no bones about that. Victor on the other hand is open to different types of gaming experiences and I think his reviews are generally informative and from my experience accurate.
Well I know for a fact that in at least one case they didn’t. And it’s easy to guess from the number of reviews that they do that it happens quite often.
BUT
But frankly, it doesn’t really matter who plays the game, as long as somebody did. They’re willing to present the review as their review. But the one case that proves they didn’t also proves that the person who did didn’t either. So they have to watch out for that.
If you want to know what it was, it was a holiday roundup review of Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly, which I was cursed to review myself for GameSpot. It was a quickie review, so it was vague and positive (the game is actually nowhere near good), but also mentioned that it had a “rock-solid framerate”, when five minutes with the game would show you otherwise.
On the other hand, I have watched quite a bit of X-Play and found their reviews to be consistent with games I’ve played, or at least lacking any such glaring errors.
Yeah, clearly those late afternoon slots are racking up the thirtysomethings like nobody’s business. :roll:
Personally, as a gamer, I could never use a show that hands out a 2/10 to Smash Bros. and a 3/10 to Pikmin but gives 8’s to Advent Rising and The Guy Game as any kind of useful review source. It’s an entertaining show, but half the entertainment for me comes from how wacky some of their viewpoints are. I think there was one episode where one game’s “negative” bullet point was “could have been better.”
In the mountain time zone Judgment Day comes on at 3:30p and X-Play comes on at 9:00p. That would seem to dictate the demographic of the audience.
Obviously Tommy’s score’s are often going to be way out of the norm (I think the game scores you refereced are his) but I think Victor is generally reliable.
In any event because X-Play is one of only a handful of video game shows on the “video game channel” I will continue to watch it. One improvement off the top of my head would be to allow for 1/2 scores. A 20% increment is just too vague I think.
X-Play airs at various times throughout the day as well as prime time/late night. Certainly the later showings help, but the content of the show is aimed at a much older audience than Judgment Day’s, and that audience tends to find it, whether at 11PM or 6:30PM.
In any event because X-Play is one of only a handful of video game shows on the “video game channel” I will continue to watch it. One improvement off the top of my head would be to allow for 1/2 scores. A 20% increment is just too vague I think.
No point in that. We chose the 5 point scale precisely because anything beyond that is useless in the vast majority of cases. There are a very few review outlets who actually use the entire 10 point scale (such as Edge), but generally five points are all you need. People tend to assume it’s a 20%-40%-60%-80%-100% scale, but that’s not how we run it. It’s more accurate to picture it as the top five numbers of a ten point scale. 5 is a 10, 4 is a 9, 3 is an 8, 2 is a 7, and 1 is 6 and below. Once you get below that, who really cares exactly how bad the game is? You clearly don’t want to bother with it, whether it’s a 3.2 or a 4.9.
The simple rating scale is also more suited to a television show. The most successful TV review scale remains the two point scale, in fact. Thumbs up, thumbs down.
I prefer X-Play on the whole though I could do without the skits. At least the frequency of them, though that could be do to watching repeats in the afternoon. I will admit that I’d watch it more if Tina Wood were to replace Morgan. What can I say, I may not be in the demographic but my inner 18 year old still is.
I’m wondering at what point will G4 start to air episodes of Reboot. I think at this point the only shows I watch regularly on g4 are xplay, brainiac and when I can catch it judgement day.
I started actively avoiding any show that Tallarico is on (note: I am lying, I started avoiding him way before this but accidently saw it anyway) was when he gave a game a 2 point bump for having a stripping minigame.
I used to watch the show. Before they became too cool for their demographic, and decided that hamfisted comedy theater was the bold new frontier in entertainment.
Now if I see it on, I watch long enough to catch a flash of the talking pair of breasts to see how much further they’ve slowly sagged since her Maxim shoot. Ah sweet time, you slowly debase and expose those to whom you’ve given your gifts.
Wait, this is the Help Me Deny Being a Misogynist folder, isn’t it?
Ugh this is what I don’t like about X-play. They don’t review their own games. Adam and Morgan read reviews that other people write. I much prefer the back and forth dialog that Tommy and Victor do in Judgement Day. When they disagree they go at each other arguing their point back and forth. When they agree they get all giddy about particular features or aspects that made them really enjoy a title. Tommy gave like a 10 minute review all by himself about a horse jockey game of all things but you could see the excited fervor to which he reviewed the game and that alone gave it some reason to watch.
I’ve mentioned this many times here before. The Xplay hosts just don’t have the enthusiasm on their show. How can they when it’s mostly cue cards and prewritten reviews? I loved Adam and Morgan on the live shows like last E3 where they genuinely talk about what they like and don’t.
Let me end this by stating the obvious and say that this is my preference and opinion. I’m sure lots of people prefer the zany skits of Xplay to the unfair review of Super Smash Bros (which is the best GC game out there) by Tommy KindOfAnAss T. I’m really surprised Xplay skews older though.
Well Jazar, as I’ve said before, Viktor and Tommy don’t play all the games they review either, and I’ll reiterate that it’s ridiculous to expect them, or Adam and Morgan, to do so. I prefer X-Play because the reviews are better. Viktor has decent taste but is a bit of a sweetheart and Tommy is an eternal teenager. In the end, maybe Viktor and Tommy’s ability to seem like they’ve played each and every game says something about the content of their reviews.
The reviewers on X-Play do play the games they review. It’s just that sometimes Adam or Morgan is the reviewer, sometimes not.
And again, same goes for Judgement Day.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why this is so, and it has nothing to do with “review standards”. The reviews in a magazine aren’t done by just two people; not even close. Why should it be any different on TV? No two people could do the number of reviews and previews at the rate X-Play puts them out.
There is good news though, if you want the person who wrote the review to present it to you on video: go to GameSpot. They do that. Most of the time.
