Darth_Payn said:
At the end there, with Jim looking around for the fly he thought he saw, that may have been an excuse for Jim to show off his good side.
He does have a good profile, doesn't he? He should use that Inspiring Dictator pose more often.
In terms of visual perfection, the only thing that is missing now is for Jim to get anti-reflexive coating on his red sunglasses.
Silentpony said:
Not to bring #GamerGate into this, because Jim doesn't want to comment on that anymore, but doesn't the idea you're offering Jim kinda' reinforce what the protesters mean? The gist of embargoes, as I understood it, was 'trust us, we're not corrupt' and that's about it. I mean yes you did say no favors for reviews, but again, we're only taking your word for it. Now I do trust YOU specifically not to, but the industry as a whole? Are we supposed to look at the obvious backdoor dealing here, review copies, free games/consoles, private time with producers, etc...and just shrug and say 'doh well, that's how it goes."
Isn't the whole idea of 'self-regulating journalism' one of the problems the #GamerGate crowd is pushing against?
Yeah but what are you going to do about it? In this specific case, the publisher/developer's PR department makes the decision, not the reviewers. The reviewer can make a choice in this situation as much as any person on the wrong end of the barrel of a gun.
themilo504 said:
01.24 I?m very disappointed Jim, Guo Jia is a much better strategist than Zhuge Liang, his death is pretty much the only thing stopping cao cao from taking over china, and his weapon is a cue stick that shoots magic pool balls at enemies. #I stand with Guo Jia
HERESY!!!
Lightknight said:
... I'm not going to lie, it's really comforting to have good ol' Jim back and not harassed-by-gamergate-stuff Jim like we had for the past couple weeks.
Please refrain from commenting about things you clearly do not understand.
Fappy said:
Solaire of Astora said:
I definitely understand that, but the fact that publishers and developers have so much influence just gets under my skin a little. Maybe too much, I admit.
Unfortunately publishers/developers have absolutely no obligation to provide any early access to anyone if they don't want to. If the press wants in on the action they will have to play ball. I don't like it either, but short of choosing not to play ball with them (and sending them a message in doing so) there's nothing that can be done about it.
Do you think that if reviewers can outright
refuse to review games whose review conditions are not optimal?
For an instance, say "BC Games" wants you to review it's game "UFO: Cosmosoldiers" and will send you a copy a week before the release date and embargo your review for the release date, to help their market campaign.
Now, a week to review a game is usually not enough time. How many times we have seen Yahtzee say that he could only play less than 10 hours of a video game because he has a weekly release schedule to follow? We know for a fact that certain games like Final Fantasy XIII require at least 13 hours of gameplay for the game to kick into full speed.
In this case, could reviews just state that they it will require a full month for their release to be ready, and instead of rushing to deliver the review as soon as possible, just simply take their time and release the review almost a month after the release date?
grimner said:
So in that sense, yes, this should be the sort of thing that hastage was about. These issues are longstanding and have been denounced by a lot of industry "figureheads". Erik Kain mentioned it 2 years ago in the wake of Doritosgate, Jim has pointed out various attempts from devs to manipulate (both legally and otherwise) the scores, and Eurogamer has had a longstanding policy of disclosing whenever reviews are done in the sort of "friendly events" controlled by the publishers.
From my understanding review scores are a legacy from Video Game Magazines, back when you had a limited space to write about the game and couldn't expatiate too much. Here in my home country we had entire reviews done in half a page for most games, and a two-page (or one page) for bigger titles, so the review scores helped to convey a what the reviewer thought about the game, usually divided between Graphics, Sound, Gameplay etc and a final score.
Right now I think people gotta ditch not only review scores but the entire review model.
Currently there's one guy speaking about the game just like old times, and his opinion is the opinion of the institution reviewing the game, but there's many other things that can be done to play around with the concept. You can break the review in parts (plot, mechanics, sound etc) to have more in-depth opinions about the game, and they don't necessarily have to be done by the same person. You can even get one specific segment of the review where all the people involved in reviewing the game have a brief discussion about their opinions, so the consumer have more context to understand the review and what goes through the mind of those reviewers. You can even include a let's play as part of your review. It's the equivalent of ditching the two-page format review and launching a ten page review and a walkthrough.
But these are just ideas from the top of my head, I'm sure if you bash smarter brains around reengineering the review format you'll get something better. But the thing I want to point out is that everybody seems to notice that there's something icky about review quality right now and nobody seems to be able to point it out exactly what it is or how to make it better.
kaocrat said:
There are a lot of things which should become standard practice across the board in terms of the formatting of game reviews. Somewhere near the top of the article there should be a section which discloses the hardware the game was reviewed on and maybe the circumstances in which it was reviewed (i.e. if it was reviewed at a "Review event" vs at the office vs at the reviewer's home). It might even make sense to disclose what kind of display is being used (this will become more important in the future as games add support for 3d displays, head mounted displays, etc). I would also like to know whether or not a review copy of the game is being played with or without all of the day-1-DLC unlocked. I know some sites do some of these things sometimes, but I would really like to see it as a consistent standard because it would go a long way towards making good use of the review.
Other things which should be reported in *every* review, either as part of a checklist on the sidebar or in the body of the review:
? How the save system works
? How the DRM works
? Whether or not cutscenes can be skipped
? Whether or not cutscenes can be paused
? Whether or not cutscenes can be replayed
? Which difficulty settings are available at start, and which must be unlocked
? Any gifts the reviewer received from the publisher
If a games review site were to consistently implement these standards into their reviews, they could break all the embargoes they want to and get blacklisted by every publisher, and it wouldn't matter, because I would always wait for their review to come out before buying any game.
Great points, mate. I don't think that these need to become a standard into every single reviewer, but nobody ever points to these things unless they are such a problem that they stand out. Save systems are especially interesting because they are a big part of the punishment-reward mechanics.
And yeah, disclosing gifts received with the review copy. This should have gone without saying, but nobody ever discloses this. They don't necessarily mean that the reviewer will be influenced by their value, but I'm damn sure going to get more in the "mood" for a game if I get the game with collector's edition stuff instead of just getting a square plastic box with a disc inside.