SteelAttack said:

So I finally found out two things:

• My Wii wasn't dead as I thought as a consequence of the lightning that struck near my house a few weeks ago. It was only the power cable.
• Unfortunately, it seems the video chip is fried. The system powers on just alright, but the starting screen with the warnings text over black background is fuzzy and almost illegible. After that, nothing. I get sound but nothing more.

I guess I have three choices. See if I can get it repaired, look out for a cheap refurb or just wait until Wii U gets released. In the meantime, I will borrow a Wii from a relative. I finally got to try Xenoblade out!

AND IT LOOKS LIKE SHIT! D:

Well it is a Wii game!

I can understand hating art games; I can understand hating the first wave of clunky games after a move into a new perspective. What I can't really understand is expecting reviews to reflect your own analysis and conclusion.

SteelAttack said:

Even beyond that. It looks pretty bad.

It looks great Wii game or not.

SteelAttack said:

So I finally found out two things:

• My Wii wasn't dead as I thought as a consequence of the lightning that struck near my house a few weeks ago. It was only the power cable.
• Unfortunately, it seems the video chip is fried. The system powers on just alright, but the starting screen with the warnings text over black background is fuzzy and almost illegible. After that, nothing. I get sound but nothing more.

I guess I have three choices. See if I can get it repaired, look out for a cheap refurb or just wait until Wii U gets released. In the meantime, I will borrow a Wii from a relative. I finally got to try Xenoblade out!

AND IT LOOKS LIKE SHIT! D:

Depending on how much your kids want a U I'd say wait for that. If they don't care, get a reefurb.

aspro said:

I don't think anyone is expecting that. I think the key is being confused as to what purpose a review is trying to accomplish (both on the part of the reader and the writer). Is it a buying guide -- if so today's reviews of Papo and Yo are completely appropriate (except for the scores at the end of the reviews).  If you read the words they are telling you exactly what you should be expecting from your purchase.

I like scores on reviews, but they are not the review in its entirety.

Well I think that's pretty easy; almost every review attempts to be a buying guide (not something I personally find interesting), but obviously not all are going to be successful in their intent. A score is possibly the worst way from a reader's perspective to approach a review for buying advice, though unless you like everything. In which case, why do you need a buying guide?

Case in point Yoda, Mass Effect 3. High production values except where it counts. I'm now two hours into the game and had to reset thrice due to lock-ups.

In a turret level the next wave of enemies did not load. So I'm climbing around, trying to see what I can do -- I fall through the 'world' to my death. HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN? It's not like I'm playing it on some weird-spec PC (actually I am playing it on a 360 ). HOW DOES THIS MAKE IT THROUGH TESTING?

I think you are really onto something with your production values <> quality game talk.  I think a lot of that came from back in the day better graphics being the sign of better production.

aspro said:

As a bellwether scores help. But not in the reviews I've read over the last two weeks. Particularly for NSMB2 and Papo y Yo. The scores just don;t match up with the words of the reviews. In review after review NSMB2 got ripped to pieces for flogging a dead horse and having disjointed levels, but when it came to the score at the bottom it was 4/5 stars, 8's and 9's.

Well it is Mario, the formula is bad proof. Even a bad Mario game is probably really damn good.

360 or PS3?

Yodariquo said:

Also, that it's not that general opinion doesn't match.  It's that NONE of the reviews reflect our opinion, or even close to it.  For example, if a game has a lot of framerate drops that affects gameplay -- an objective thing -- and the review just blindly praises graphics as amazing and doesn't mention it; it's as if we're playing a different game entirely.

EDIT: For clarity, I don't read reviews anymore, so it's a bit irrelevant at this point outside of informal opinion.

This is what I meant with expectations. What Yoda wants should be the case, but given the quality, style and intentions of reviews, it's not going to happen. So not really sure what I'm saying here other than I agree...perhaps just that it's become so passe that I'm over it?

aspro said:

As a bellwether scores help. But not in the reviews I've read over the last two weeks. Particularly for NSMB2 and Papo y Yo. The scores just don;t match up with the words of the reviews. In review after review NSMB2 got ripped to pieces for flogging a dead horse and having disjointed levels, but when it came to the score at the bottom it was 4/5 stars, 8's and 9's.

But the thing is, what's the point of a score without context anyway? Let's say you hate open world games, but see that GTAIV has a 98 on metacritic. Such a high score must (let's forget about the laughableness of that score average) mean it's a great game and should be at the top of your list. But obviously GTAIV is exactly the sort of game you should avoid. I know that's a rather extreme example, but you get the point.

Hell, this applies even within the same genre. Say you want a good online first person shooter. You look at the scores comparing Call of Duty Black Ops and Battlefield 3; there's enough of a difference that you could extrapolate that one is significantly better than the other, but they're actually both vastly different games, and if you want a fast paced, slightly more dudebro experience then you should actually go with lower scoring game. The score doesn't tell you that; hell, even with the context of words, it doesn't help your decision---it's the words that do.

I'm not saying scores are useless, just that when making a purchase they are. Has anyone here ever bought a game over another because it got a higher score? Given that reviews are the last thing I'd take into account when deciding what game to buy, perhaps I'm wrong simply because using a review for such a purpose seems rather stupid to me. Though Hyper used to allign pretty well with my taste, so I suppose it wasn't always that way for me.

Of course just as importantly around the same time they developed terrible taste they also started to follow more mainstream review conventions which made it hard to really get much of an idea what a game was like, even if the reviewer liked all the same games as I did! I could read through a review of a game we both absolutely loved, and it wasn't just as if we played two different games, because to a degree that could be down to interpritation and taste. To me a better description would be it's more as if they simply didn't play a game, because so many reviews fail completely to get across a good description of the game, just as the fail to analysis it. With reviews you guys have written, even if we completely disagree on the game, and don't even take note of the same things, I still get a sense that you played the same game in your review, and if it's a game I haven't played, then I get a good idea what it would be like. That really doesn't happen with almost all professional reviews.

Hyper and a very select few IGN reviews (many, many years ago) are responsible for the only professional reviews that seem to actually be useful, either in the context of analysis, or entertainment. It's bizarre to me that amateur reviews are generally of a far higher standard than professional ones, even if the writing is an unpolished mess. Not much worse about an amateur unpolished mess, than a professional polished mess anyway. The writing still sucks in both; the professionals are just good at covering it up.

It's 2 in the morning Vader, what are you doing up? How many hours have you logged on Darksiders II?

aspro said:

It's 2 in the morning Vader, what are you doing up? How many hours have you logged on Darksiders II?

Im in bed check the days news. I played about 7 hours today.