Is IGN really ignorant?

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

I am not a fan of IGN for reviews but I would call everything they do 100% rubbish. Although, what they do seem to do is to go way out of their way to be abrasive to get a bit of controversy. One video on the video which was made just to be trollish and piss of JRPGs even left an email address for idiots to spam. If that isn't blatant and horribly over the top Devil's Advocate to get a storm coming, I don't know what is.

 

[zehydra]

Nah, IGN is just the overrated establishment. I'm not a part of the camp that really hates them, I just don't go on there.

That being said, I used to go on Gamespot, and I think IGN's actually a little better than Gamespot.

Doesn't matter, I don't buy that many games, and when I do, I generally know what I like in games and figure out whether or not the game I'm looking at has that.

 

[SargentToughie]

The Escapist gave Dragon Age 2 a perfect score. Just saying.

Did it seriously? Where was this?

 

[Kahunaburger]

The Escapist gave Dragon Age 2 a perfect score. Just saying.

Did it seriously? Where was this?

A pinnacle of role-playing games with well-designed mechanics and excellent story-telling, Dragon Age II is what videogames are meant to be.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/reviews/8701-Dragon-Age-II-Review

For extra hilarity, compare it to various other recent RPGs that are better than DA2.

 

[SargentToughie]

A pinnacle of role-playing games with well-designed mechanics and excellent story-telling, Dragon Age II is what videogames are meant to be.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/reviews/8701-Dragon-Age-II-Review

For extra hilarity, compare it to various other recent RPGs that are better than DA2.

Just reading the header is enough to make me laugh. I KNEW there was a reason why I went escapist comatose for about a year or so.

 

[ManOwaRrior]

Things I heard about ign:

- they are biased towards the XBox 360
- they are biased towards the PS3
- they are paid of by all the major publishers
- they give popular games (from said publishers) bad scores to ignite flame wars
- they have bad writing (as clearly, all of us are perfectly capable of differentiating between good and bad writing)

Things I know about ign:
- their video player is still garbage
- I sometimes don't agree with their scores
- sometimes their scores don't match their reviews
- sometimes, they post silly articles

So all in all, there is really nothing especially bad about them in my eyes.
I find it funny how people can't get over Chobot's tongue, or that they think her presence in ME3 biased the games score (if she wasn't in it, people would just say EA payed them off).

 

[ThePenguinKnight]

The majority of the reviewing world is so flawed that it seems rather odd that IGN would be singled out.

 

[CityofTreez]

Not whole. I don't understand how they give game likes MW3 a good score, but w/e.

 

[Sanguinedragon]

They're a bunch of sub-par writers who try to get traffic by stirring up bull shit.

Pretty much this. Their review for "I Am Alive" had me wondering if they had a monkey trying out the game.

The thing about that review which makes me suspicious is that it's an XBLA exclusive and yet they got their reviewer who is a self admitted Sony fanboy to review it. I can't say I disagree with him since I haven't played the game myself and from what I've seen of the game his criticisms seem to have been valid, but that doesn't negate the fact that he had biases and they still got him to do that review.

it isn't xbox live exclusive, i got it on ps3

 

[xplosive59]

Don't like IGN but some of there articles on non-gaming related stuff is good, for example I read an article on prog rock ages ago and was expecting it to be about the obvious eg Rush, Pink Floyd, King Crimson etc but no it was a damn solid list (Caravan, PFM, IQ, UK, Focus and Gentle Giant all mentioned) and I give credit where its due. There reviews are poor though, not as poor as other sites such as gamesradar where almost every game is a 10 unless its mediocre where it gets a 1 or a 2.

 

[Iron Criterion]

They're a bunch of sub-par writers who try to get traffic by stirring up bull shit.

Pretty much this. Their review for "I Am Alive" had me wondering if they had a monkey trying out the game.

The thing about that review which makes me suspicious is that it's an XBLA exclusive and yet they got their reviewer who is a self admitted Sony fanboy to review it. I can't say I disagree with him since I haven't played the game myself and from what I've seen of the game his criticisms seem to have been valid, but that doesn't negate the fact that he had biases and they still got him to do that review.

it isn't xbox live exclusive, i got it on ps3

It was at the time of the review. It was a 360 exclusive for a few months.

 

[arnoldthebird]

I read their review's, because some of them are decent review's. A lot of the time the article will give praise but end up giving it a 7, and then other time's the article will be very meh and end up with a score of 9. The articles are stupid, but they also give some news. I go to IGN, but like every other site you read their content with a grain of salt, and completely ignore some of the other shit that gets written.

 

[00slash00]

scores should just go away completely. they are absolutely meaningless

 

[TehCookie]

I can't say IGN is worse than other sites but things like this piss me off:

Until Arc Rise Fantasia I've never played more than an hour of any Japanese RPG.

Then why is he reviewing a JRPG?

(full review)
http://wii.ign.com/articles/111/1112284p1.html

 

[bullet_sandw1ch]

i fully believe IGN is just plain stupid. i came to realize this with Ninja Gaiden 3 and RE:ORC. they arent the best games, but they didnt deserve the scornful reviews they got, even if the consensus on ORC was it was good if you had friends, crap otherwise.

 

[Dogstile]

I've always thought people hated IGN because they nitpick certain aspects of a game and blow them out of proportion, even if its something that will only bother you for a second or so, or they'll make something up completely. It annoys me when they do that.

 

[SomeBritishDude]

There's no point trusting a site like IGN for reviews.

People say their handed money under the table but personally I don't think it's as blatant as that. You just have to look at how their site functions. IGN get's as much if not more views for their previews and trailers than they do their reviews. If there were give, say, a Bioware game a really low score (6 being low sadly) then Bioware is less lightly to give them and exclusive first look or whatever. So they get less traffic.

It's just in their own best interests to give big games from big companies perfect scores. Plus these guys get no love for giving a big game a bad review score, you know what the interenet is like. They must get pretty bad hate mail as it is.

They're still a crap site with crap reviews but looking at how their site and other sites like it are structured I can see why they are the way they are.

 

[bullet_sandw1ch]

This is why I like reviewers like Angry Joe or Yatzee - they don't just say that "its good" - they usually say WHY a game is good. They give context to their opinions.

i agree with you, but i think yahtzee is more focused on lambasting the games he plays, instead of talking about what's good in the game. if he was just the a tiny bit more positive, i would agree with him all the time.

 

[Volstag9]

They're ignorant because... "You can't spell IGNorant without IGN!"

LOOOOOOL!

*ahem*

Perhaps they aren't ignorant, but rather just biased. Plus I don't really agree with many of their reviews. They also are probably guilty of changing their review's score based on site traffic and money.

They've gained such a bad reputation now no one seems to take them seriously. Watch a review of CoD game, then look at the comments section. They are full of flame wars and hate.

I think you'll find hate and bias with every reviewer though. It's all just opinion anyway. I watch people like Yahtzee more for the comedy than the actual review.

 

[DirgeNovak]

I think it's the complete opposite. They rate games much too high. They're basically a hype machine. Example:

I really liked Uncharted 3, but once I finished it, I said to myself: "This really didn't deserve the 10 it got from IGN." Controls were much worse than in U1 and U2 - having replayed through both just before U3 came out, I found aiming to be really bad compared to the other games, especially pulling off headshots, storyline didn't quite work since it raised tons of questions the game never answered and two characters get kicked out of the story halfway through for basically no reason, the villains' motivations and true identity are never really revealed, etc. Yet none of those things are mentioned in IGN's review.

Mind you, this might only be Greg Miller's problem, since most of the IGN reviews I have problems with are his. His Dead Space 2 review still makes me laugh and cry at the same time. It looks like a nine year-old wrote it.

At IGN in general, from what I can gather, if a game has good production values, it gets a dithyramb, an insanely high score and free PR for the publisher. If it has subpar production values and/or is a different experience to most mainstream games, it gets shat on and lit on fire.

Personally, I mostly use Destructoid and GameRevolution for reviews, then watch GameTrailers' review to get fresh video footage. Then I typically have a good idea and can make a decision whether or not to buy the game.