Machocruz said:
Undue praise warrants undue criticism
Stop calling games the best ever in their genre when you aren't experienced with the genre enough to make that declaration. And most reviewers aren't.
I think you make an awful presumption that a person cannot declare a game to be the best in a genre because of some nebulous concept like "experience". Citizen Kane is heralded as the greatest American Film of all time and yet, having watched it 70 years after it was made I find it hard to believe this is true.
What a statement like this misses is that the word "Best" is relative. To make assert that one can incorrectly claim something has the status of best implies the following:
1) Someone has played all games this game shares similar traits with (for example, playing every game ever made that might fall into the Real Time Strategy genre - a feat that would require playing
dozens of major titles along with hundreds of smaller or independent titles)
2) Said games can have their quality judged subjectively and without ambiguity.
When you start going down either path you quickly run into problems. For example, I think that Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a better game than Deus Ex. It has better mechanics, better technology, better controls and so forth. But even if I can recognize that the recent interpretation is the better game, were I asked to pick which game I
liked the best I'd tell you it was Deus Ex.
In the end, any declaration that something is the best comes with the implied caveat of "that I've played myself".
Still, you hit the nail on the head with your opening remark. If you play a game that you did not like for some reason, it can be galling that other people seem to adore it. You start to wonder what is wrong with people when they can love something so
obviously terrible. To put it another way, I hate coconut. It is, in my experience, the
worst food one could eat. My disgust is so extreme that should I even detect the flavor in any dish, my instant physical reaction is nausea. So, when I see someone eating something covered in coconut, I'm forced to wonder what sort of madness might plague them that they would not only resort to eating such a meal but somehow
enjoy it.
Perceiving praise as due or not, it turns out, is exactly as subjective as heaping that praise in the first place. I simply cannot stand to play games like Final Fantasy. I think that the praise heaped upon the more storied iterations of the franchise are undue. But I rarely point this out directly because I generally don't think people who love the game particularly care that I didn't.
And, to be perfectly honest, my reason for participating in such threads is because I do enjoy a good argument, even if no opinions are going to be changed. They also help me better understand why I did or did not like a game.
