Jimquisition: Stupid Sexy Bayonetta

Kuro Serpentina

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klaynexas3 said:
Kuro Serpentina said:
It seems you misunderstood the nature of the site
From what I hear its not actually porn site. I believe its official stance is that its a site solely used to allow people to show off tattoos in a similar manner to the said moments of fanservice in the game (Somewhat like a peepshow I have been told)
As for the whole keeping video games and porn separate angel you and a few others seem to be pushing... I find that adorable~ The subject that has been crossed long long ago~ In fact without the union of video games and porn, we wouldn't have JRPGs or even our modern day video game story telling methods
It would take me an age and a half to explain, so I advise you look into it yourself, as its a very interesting subject
Even so, he still has the right to be uncomfortable with that happening outside of the context of maybe the website. What he likes in one context he doesn't have to enjoy in another, that's what I'm arguing. Whether it's porn or just some lewd photos, just because he likes it on a website, doesn't mean he has to enjoy it in a game.

And when did I say to keep porn and games separate? I simply said that it might be his personal choice to want the two to be separate, and it's not a hypocritical thing to desire. And it's not like he was saying censor games like it either, he's simply not wanting to play them, so it's not even saying that all games have to be separate from porn, he just doesn't particularly enjoy that aspect in it and will avoid it if he can. I can handle a little fan service, a little nudity, hell, I can handle a majority of things that could be imagined being put into a game, but I know that not everyone feels the same, and so I can understand if someone doesn't like it. All I'm arguing is that it isn't fair to give the reviewer so much shit for not enjoying a part of a game that he might enjoy in other contexts. It's throwing a temper tantrum is what it is.

And I know that a fair amount of JRPG developers started out creating eroge visual novels. I know this because I partake in said visual novels. And so one could argue that this form of story telling got translated into JRPGs which is where you wanted to go if you wanted to play a game with a good story back in the old days, so yeah, it is arguable that porn started major story telling in video games. That doesn't take an age and a half to explain, that's just small connections and a tid bit of history.
He is indeed more than welcome to his opinion
That said, I get the feeling that there may be more to this whole I am sadly not aware of...
How irksome... I hate the feeling of not knowing enough stuff
 

Thanatos2k

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Cronenberg1 said:
Thanatos2k said:
There is a difference between saying "I have personal problems with Bayonetta as a character" and "Everyone should have personal problems with Bayonetta as a character, I'm docking the score to show this to you and to punish the developers, and if you think otherwise I'm deleting your comments."

And this is why game journalism needs to be reformed.
Reviews aren't journalism, they are the reviewers personal opinions. 100% objective criticism is boring and impossible. If a reviewer has a problem with the depiction of a character in a piece of media then they should be able to include it in the review without fear of ridicule.
A bad review is a personal opinion. A professional review attempts to be objective criticism.

What almost every single professional game reviewer out there fails to realize is their purpose.

A professional review is not supposed to tell me whether the reviewer liked the game. A professional review is supposed to tell me whether *I* will like the game. You do this by objectively analyzing the technical merits of the game, comparing and contrasting the game with others like it, and then perhaps going into what does or does not work about the story/characters/etc from a structural level. NOT injecting your own personal ideology, because your ideology is probably not my ideology and thus serves no purpose in informing me properly about the reviewed game. If you want to mention what elements of the game may be of interest or disinterest to me then so be it (ex: feminists may not like the themes in this game = ok. This game has sexist themes = not ok) but keep your politics in your pocket.

Game reviewers almost never understand this, and most go with a "This is what I liked and didn't like" review which is of limited use to anyone. That's why people in large consider game reviews to be a joke.
 

able_to_think

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I hadn't heard about the Polygon thing or that ridiculously stupid response from Nintendo fanboys. I don't usually agree with Polygons reviews and editorials very much so I don't visit their site. I've found reviewers that share my tastes and gaming sites I like so I go to them for my news and reviews and ignore the ones I don't like.

That's why I find this response by so dumbshit fanboys. If you don't like something then don't seek it out and ignore it when it comes up. If you don't like Anita Sarkeesian than don't follow her on Twitter and don't click on articles about here. It's really really easy and it'll make you happier because you're focusing on positivity. Also, the only opinion that matters in the end (at least as far as reviews are concerned) is your own. If you like a game that other people don't then you should just be happy playing it and feel sorry that the other person for not having as good a time as you.
 

Seneschal

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Jun 27, 2009
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Renegade-pizza said:
Never played Bayonetta, PC master race and all that,but I agree that developers should be allowed to create a character like that. Its simple artistic freedom.
Huh?! The artists' freedom isn't being contested at all. There has been no demand for the artists to be reprimanded, censored or, god forbid, fired.

On the other hand, the freedom of a critic to say "I'm uncomfortable with this particular artistic choice; I find it tacky, cheap and exploitative, diminishing my overall enjoyment of the game," without his publication being accosted by mobs trying to cut off their funding, is being contested.
 

Kuro Serpentina

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daspooch77 said:
Kuro Serpentina said:
It seems you misunderstood the nature of the site
From what I hear its not actually porn site. I believe its official stance is that its a site solely used to allow people to show off tattoos in a similar manner to the said moments of fanservice in the game (Somewhat like a peepshow I have been told)
As for the whole keeping video games and porn separate angel you and a few others seem to be pushing... I find that adorable~ The subject that has been crossed long long ago~ In fact without the union of video games and porn, we wouldn't have JRPGs or even our modern day video game story telling methods
It would take me an age and a half to explain, so I advise you look into it yourself, as its a very interesting subject
Uh, no. It's YOU that has misunderstood the nature of the site. Hardly a surprise, since you're going on "from what I heard", as opposed to looking into the matter yourself.

The site he is a 10 year member of is SuicideGirls. It's not a tattoo show-off site or a "peepshow" site. It is women doing nude photo shoots, in very sexualized situations, and many photo shoots involve 2 girls in "softcore" sexual encounters. There is no misunderstanding the point of SG, lol.

So yeah, there is a point to be made about the review's author being a decade-long member of a porn site, while at the same time docking points from the game from a self-righteous "anti-sexualization" standpoint.
From reading your comment through, I get the feeling your agreeing with me...
If that's the case, I doubt it wouldn't hurt you to be more polite about the affair
 

Phrozenflame500

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I'm of the opinion that if Bayonetta existed in an industry that wasn't constantly mired by problems with women people would be praising it for it's expression of female sexuality.

My analogy in this case is with female pop stars. When Madonna came on the scene and practically invented the whole phenomenon people did (and still do) praise her for doing this new, bold thing that challenged previously held prudish views of women. But now that it's pretty much commonplace for pop stars to perform half naked it's become less "brave expression of power" and more "oh they're using sex to sell again".

This dissonance between the individual product and it's wider cultural context is one of the main driving forces behind the whole sexism spat. Feminist critics occasionally dismiss a product purely on cultural context and not the product itself. Conversely, the public sometimes mistake a critique of a product's context as an attack on the product itself. This inevitably leads to miscommunication and that leads to these huge dramatic messes.
 

EternallyBored

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Jun 17, 2013
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Thanatos2k said:
Spushkin said:
Thanatos2k said:
There is a difference between saying "I have personal problems with Bayonetta as a character" and "Everyone should have personal problems with Bayonetta as a character, I'm docking the score to show this to you and to punish the developers, and if you think otherwise I'm deleting your comments."

And this is why game journalism needs to be reformed.
If I find a reviewer obnoxious, I just don't use his reviews as source of information when picking my games. There must be a gazillion different voices out there when it comes to game reviews.
Unfortunately that reviewer you ignore submits his score to metacritic, making or breaking the careers of game developers.
You would need more than a single low review to do that, not to mention that is a problem with metacritic and publishers using it as a metric for bonuses, not critics. Mediating reviews on the chance that it will push a metactritic score below an arbitrary threshold feels like a form of review blackmail, "you need to keep your scores within a certain range or you'll be hurting the developer".

I fully place the blame for this on publishers, and I don't think reviewers should need to curtail their criticism because they were guilt tripped into it by a broken system of assigning bonuses that should never have happened in the first place.
 

CaitSeith

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MarsAtlas said:
snip
...That maybe many people don't play games for masturbation material but for a difference experience?
snip
Maybe they should learn that themselves. Many people don't play sexy games for its masturbation material, but for a different experience from the non-sexy games (which are most of the games out there).
 

Thanatos2k

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EternallyBored said:
Thanatos2k said:
Spushkin said:
Thanatos2k said:
There is a difference between saying "I have personal problems with Bayonetta as a character" and "Everyone should have personal problems with Bayonetta as a character, I'm docking the score to show this to you and to punish the developers, and if you think otherwise I'm deleting your comments."

And this is why game journalism needs to be reformed.
If I find a reviewer obnoxious, I just don't use his reviews as source of information when picking my games. There must be a gazillion different voices out there when it comes to game reviews.
Unfortunately that reviewer you ignore submits his score to metacritic, making or breaking the careers of game developers.
You would need more than a single low review to do that, not to mention that is a problem with metacritic and publishers using it as a metric for bonuses, not critics. Mediating reviews on the chance that it will push a metactritic score below an arbitrary threshold feels like a form of review blackmail, "you need to keep your scores within a certain range or you'll be hurting the developer".

I fully place the blame for this on publishers, and I don't think reviewers should need to curtail their criticism because they were guilt tripped into it by a broken system of assigning bonuses that should never have happened in the first place.
A single low review screwed Obsidian. Look it up.
 

CaitSeith

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Thanatos2k said:
Spushkin said:
Thanatos2k said:
There is a difference between saying "I have personal problems with Bayonetta as a character" and "Everyone should have personal problems with Bayonetta as a character, I'm docking the score to show this to you and to punish the developers, and if you think otherwise I'm deleting your comments."

And this is why game journalism needs to be reformed.
If I find a reviewer obnoxious, I just don't use his reviews as source of information when picking my games. There must be a gazillion different voices out there when it comes to game reviews.
Unfortunately that reviewer you ignore submits his score to metacritic, making or breaking the careers of game developers.
Is that still a thing? I thought that by now the publishers had already relaized how crappy is to use Metacritic and reviewers' scores to measure success. As far as I know, now they use sales numbers.
 

DrOswald

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Kuro Serpentina said:
While I agree with Jim about the points he was making, the reasons he were making the points seems a bit off
From what I've heard about the Polygon review thing centres around a certain level of hypocrisy from the reviewer, who is known to often visit a smut site where women in various arrays of undress post up for viewer enjoyment, which reach and even surpass the levels of "Fanservice" Bayonetta has become partly known for; which has let many, quite rightly in my opinion, to call foul on the reviewer for condemning it while indulging in an extremely similar thing in his own time.
Makes the whole thing sound a tad disingenuous.
As for the whole discussing of these sorts of things, yeah that would be awesome... however the whole mess that the community at large is currently embroiled in is in no small part due to a lack to out right refusal to discus things
I fail to see the hypocrisy there. He doesn't like his erotica and his video games mixing. The erotic stuff in Bayonetta isn't to his liking. Hardly seems like hypocrisy to me.

And I say this as a massive lover of Bayonetta the first. I am going to be getting Bayonetta 2 day 1.
 
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Trishbot said:
Tony2077 said:
i love the series it just is a very small bit annoying the second is on a system i really don't have any interest in
I'm going to be very snarky and pick on you for a bit, but only because I like you.

I hear this often, but the truth is you DO want a Wii U. You want a Wii U right now, in fact, because you could then play Bayonetta 2, one of the best games of the year, and a series you claim you love. You would like nothing more than a Wii U to play Bayonetta 2.

You just don't want to PAY for a Wii U because it's an expensive piece of hardware, you may have already spent that money on a PS4 or Xbox One, and you would PREFER to have the game on a system you already own.

But you do have an interest in the system.... for Bayonetta 2. A highly desirable game is on a system you don't own, thus you are interested in the system, just not to the degree of giving them a few hundred dollars for it.

But if the Wii U was totally affordable and the game was in your clutches? You'd be totally interested. GAMES are what make people interested in systems, and the Wii U, for better or worse (mainly for your wallet), is a vastly more interesting system with a stellar game like Bayonetta 2 exclusively on it.

I mean, I don't have a Wii U either. But I'd be lying if I said I'm not more interested in the system now than before Bayonetta 2 swept the floor with all those perfect scores.

Silentpony said:
I guess I would ask, and forgive me if this details the conversation, but why are the writers Bayonetta given such a pass? I mean Bayonettas sexuality, her sucking and humping of things, theyre almost irrelevant to my larger thought really. It's not WHAT she does, it's why no one looks at the men behind the curtain.
People have. And the answer was, well, there were many people behind the curtain... and not just MEN. Bayonetta in this game was designed by a FEMALE fashion designer, along with all her outfits and costumes.

For example, when Mass Effect 3s ending pissed everyone off, the rage was directed at the writers. How could they write this?! No one stepped up and said the Reapers have agency and Shepard made his/her choice so deal with it.
That's because the Reapers were slaves, and they had no agency, thus nobody brought that up because it doesn't exist.

When Lara Croft was almost raped, everyone was disgusted someone wrote that in a game. No one just shrugged and said the bad guy was just confident in his sexuality. He has agency and choose this life.
Well, the game was also written by a FEMALE writer as well. Beyond that, the in-context situation is hardly sexual. If you fail, there's nothing sexual... he just flat out kills the main character. More importantly, he's a no-name thug, a video game obstacle, and thus nobody CARES about his agency or sexuality because he's ultimately NOT IMPORTANT.

When the new assassin creed demo had no women, everyone called it terrible and non inclusive. No one said well it was the women's choice to not be assassins. They decided to not be in the demo and we should respect that choice.
But there ARE female assassins in the series. Hell, there are female assassins during the French Revolution as HISTORICAL FACT. The most famous French assassin was a woman during that time period. Also, the lack of women wasn't so much of an issue as it was the REASON we were told they weren't there: "they were too much work." THAT was what most people were upset with.

Dead or Alive extreme beach volleyball? Absolutely terrible! sexist! Disgusting. No one steps forward and says it's their choice to dress up in skimpy bikinis and bounce around in slowmo. No one respects Helena or Kasumi for their confidence in their bodies. Nope, they're sex doll.
It's not their choice. It's the developer's choice. A developer with a repeatedly poor history of representing women, and continued litigation involving women in the work place. There is a point to Bayonetta's sexuality, and it actually defines their character. I own every Dead or Alive game, and practically NONE of their (mostly interchangeable) outfits contribute to their established personalities. Also, I don't think people can choose to "bounce in slowmo". I've tried it. I can't get it to work...

But Bayonetta strips naked and grinds her enemies to death with her crotch? GOSH! what strong female characterization. How respectable. How progressive and confident she is!
No one bats an eye that writers made her this way. No one asks why she strips, it's just part of who she is, forgetting who she is isn't up to her.
Actually, she weaponizes sex, making it one of her many means of dispensing enemies, thus turning it from something forced upon her to something SHE forces upon OTHERS. And people did ask why she strips; it's even explained in-game how her very outfit is made from her own magic hair, transmuting into alternate forms and beasts and monsters. It's one of the few games that DOES answer why she does it. She is never not in control of her form or sexuality, which is the key difference. She is not the docile recipient most of the time like most other fanservice women.

I would go so far to say Dead or Alive Volleyball is a progressive game compared to Bayonetta. Yes DoA is trash, but it's not trying to hide it's naughty bits behind artsy filters or smoke monsters DoA isn't trying to pretend it's here for anything but cheese shots and doesn't throw in boss fights as part of a needless delaying tactic between strip shows.
It's called Dead or Alive VOLLEYBALL. It totally hid its pervy dress-up simulator behind the veil of "it's a volleyball game, REALLY!" The fact that you had to UNLOCK stripper pole dances as REWARDS meant that they hid the naughtiest bits behind fluff and stuff. It did it's very best to be softcore while not having the guts to actually commit to its one-note gimmick of sexual pandering.

It's honest that this is fap material, pure and simple. where as Bayonetta has to pretend it's erotica, i guess so as not to piss off family friendly Nintendo or the moms who bought Wiis for their toddlers.
Bayonetta 1 was exactly the same way and was NOT on Nintendo systems; it was on the systems that GTA, Duke Nukem Forever, and, yes, Dead or Alive Volleyball were on.

There's a lot of great material out there that can be both smart AND erotic, fun AND sexy, mature AND silly, naughty AND nice... Bayonetta's not even the first to walk that balance.
Wow. If this was a moba, there would be a "legendary kill streak" announcement for that series of points. Well put.
 

VoidOfOne

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Thanatos2k said:
Spushkin said:
Thanatos2k said:
There is a difference between saying "I have personal problems with Bayonetta as a character" and "Everyone should have personal problems with Bayonetta as a character, I'm docking the score to show this to you and to punish the developers, and if you think otherwise I'm deleting your comments."

And this is why game journalism needs to be reformed.
If I find a reviewer obnoxious, I just don't use his reviews as source of information when picking my games. There must be a gazillion different voices out there when it comes to game reviews.
Unfortunately that reviewer you ignore submits his score to metacritic, making or breaking the careers of game developers.
Ahem. No one submits his or her score to Metacritic. The people in Metacritic look up the reviews and take the scores and use them in their calculation for their weighted score. So it's not the review site's job or responsibility to give the scores to Metacritic.

Now as for "making or breaking the careers of game developers," that is not the responsibility of reviewers. That lies solely on the management side of developers and/or publishers. The score is there, and the companies may or may not use that to determine how they should proceed. Whether they take the scores to account, be it for good or for ill, right or wrong, has nothing to do with Metacritic or game review websites.

Also, if a game you really enjoy doesn't get high review scores, that does suck. But you can't expect everyone to enjoy the game you like. For instance, I dislike The Last of Us, the Game of the Year of 2013 across many review sites. And I don't think they're wrong in saying so. And like Jim, I'm a big fan of the Dynasty Warrior series (more so the Orochi Warrior series), of which don't get rave reviews. And I don't think the reviewers are wrong in not liking the game. That's how it goes, in any entertainment industry.

So it may mean that the games you like get made less and less. That's how it goes, once again, in any industry. But to blame reviewers for this seems misplaced, at best.
 

EternallyBored

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Jun 17, 2013
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Thanatos2k said:
EternallyBored said:
Thanatos2k said:
Spushkin said:
Thanatos2k said:
There is a difference between saying "I have personal problems with Bayonetta as a character" and "Everyone should have personal problems with Bayonetta as a character, I'm docking the score to show this to you and to punish the developers, and if you think otherwise I'm deleting your comments."

And this is why game journalism needs to be reformed.
If I find a reviewer obnoxious, I just don't use his reviews as source of information when picking my games. There must be a gazillion different voices out there when it comes to game reviews.
Unfortunately that reviewer you ignore submits his score to metacritic, making or breaking the careers of game developers.
You would need more than a single low review to do that, not to mention that is a problem with metacritic and publishers using it as a metric for bonuses, not critics. Mediating reviews on the chance that it will push a metactritic score below an arbitrary threshold feels like a form of review blackmail, "you need to keep your scores within a certain range or you'll be hurting the developer".

I fully place the blame for this on publishers, and I don't think reviewers should need to curtail their criticism because they were guilt tripped into it by a broken system of assigning bonuses that should never have happened in the first place.
A single low review screwed Obsidian. Look it up.
No, Obsidian got screwed by a single point on metacritic, not a single review, Obsidian was screwed by multiple reviews docking points below the bonus threshold for the games many technical glitches, the game had numerous issues that put it at that line, not just a single rogue reviewer injecting an ideological opinion.

Which goes right back to this basically being review blackmail if you want to use it to try and justify the elimination of reviews that deviate from any sort of average baseline.
 

geizr

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I played part-way through the first Bayonetta. I didn't like it so much, not because of the over-the-top, overly dramatic action animations, or the saucy sexiness of the main character, or the fact the main character was female; in fact, I loved all those qualities about the game, and they were the reason I bought it in the first place. No, the main disappointment to the game (and the reason I just couldn't get through it) was the flow-breaking load times. OMG! This was a game that cried out to have a fluid flow, from beginning to end, in every aspect, and the extreme load times just pulled you so far out of the rhythm that it was impossible to stay immersed in the game. That lack of flow just completely ruined the game.

However, having said that and watched Jim's video, I'm very tempted to give the game a second chance. Perhaps temper my expectations from their original elevated position and just deal with the game in its own pacing and idiom.

But I do have to add one thing: holy shit! When will the game community finally grow the fuck up!? I mean, various people at various times for the past 15 years have been saying the same thing over and over again, and the message just doesn't seem to be breaking through the concrete. People, just cause someone doesn't like what you like, doesn't buy the particular electronic device that you bought, or just has a different opinion from you, it's completely OKAY! There's nothing wrong with you, personally. They're not attacking you in any way. No one is judging you just cause you happen to be different from the rest of the crowd. Just have what you have, be happy with it, and give others the latitude to do the same. Quit trying to force the Universe to conform to your ideology. Live your life, accept your choices, be comfortable in your own skin, and get on with your own happiness. Quit worrying about how you measure against others and inventing these crazy metrics to somehow prove you're more superior to others. This faux alpha-male meritocracy bullshit is purely 14-year-old mental and emotional immaturity in its rawest form. No one gives two shits cause it's not important, and the only person not being happy is you, cause you won't let yourself be happy from worrying over all this pointless crap. In the end, we all meet the same fate. Live life, have fun, and let others do the same. Also, treat others with the same respect and dignity that you wish to be treated (and if you want to be treated like crap, don't be shocked and amazed when that's exactly what you get in response to treating others like crap).

ADDENDUM: that last rant is just a general rant. It's in response to the point Jim made at the beginning of his video, not any post in this forum.
 

Kohen Keesing

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Renegade-pizza said:
Never played Bayonetta, PC master race and all that,but I agree that developers should be allowed to create a character like that. Its simple artistic freedom.
Seconded and seconded.
I never got to play a Bayonetta, but I look at things like this from an audience-niche-market perspective.
There will always be people, like me, who enjoy seeing slightly sexualized or even absurdly sexualized females in videogames, Nilin of Remember Me as the former and Bayonetta as the latter. It kind of pisses me off when people outright state "Females in videogames should never be shown to be sexualized or put on a pedestal because.... well, what if I want to play a game like that?

If I want to play a game about being hacked up by chainsaws, I have Manhunt and The Evil Within as of late - If I want to race cars,I can play Forza, and if I want to race cars I can get out of to shoot people up then I can play GTA. If I want to play a game with a somewhat sexualized male lead, there's DmC to an extent.

But If I want to play a videogame with a strong female lead who is slightly sexualized, then where do I go? There's the aforementioned Remember Me, and Bayonetta, Heavenly Sword is applicable If I can get a time machine, and maybe Mirror's Edge if you're really Puritan about what you consider sexualization.
It's a market that isn't being looked into too much, but games like Bayonetta having the sales and interest they have shows that there's an audience for those games.

The only problem I have - and Thank fucking God for Jim mentioning it - is when the female character is ONLY there as eye-candy and appears to have no intelligence nor driving force in the plot. But even then, just because I don't enjoy sexualized 'numbskulls' like Juliet of Lollipop Chainsaw, other people DO like characters like her, so there should be games created to satisfy that market.

Perhaps we can have an ESRB tag for, I dunno, 15+/17+/18+ "For Slightly/Moderately/Explicitly Sexualized Characters"
Then all the people who don't want to see scanty buxom ladies and lithe muscular dudes don't have to be offended by the games I want to play, but I can still have the market of games there.

And whenever anyone on the internet complains about having to see things they don't want to see or see characters represented by or representing things they don't like, I just remember the old saying: A Cat Is Fine Too.
 

Neonit

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erttheking said:
neonit said:
I cant be the only one thinking that lowering game score for something that is quite obvious and subjective is stupid.

Quite stupid.
Oh you mean subjective like whether the game is bad or good? Because that's kind subjective. And it's what reviews are talking about.
Yes, luckily there are also things that are objective, like, for example performance, amount of bugs, fluidity of controls. In fact, every game genre has a set of their own genre-specific qualities.

If you think that professional reviews are 100% subjective opinions, then you haven't really been paying attention.... or you've been reading low-quality reviews.
 

daspooch77

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Thanatos2k said:
A bad review is a personal opinion. A professional review attempts to be objective criticism.

What almost every single professional game reviewer out there fails to realize is their purpose.

A professional review is not supposed to tell me whether the reviewer liked the game. A professional review is supposed to tell me whether *I* will like the game. You do this by objectively analyzing the technical merits of the game, comparing and contrasting the game with others like it, and then perhaps going into what does or does not work about the story/characters/etc from a structural level. NOT injecting your own personal ideology, because your ideology is probably not my ideology and thus serves no purpose in informing me properly about the reviewed game. If you want to mention what elements of the game may be of interest or disinterest to me then so be it (ex: feminists may not like the themes in this game = ok. This game has sexist themes = not ok) but keep your politics in your pocket.

Game reviewers almost never understand this, and most go with a "This is what I liked and didn't like" review which is of limited use to anyone. That's why people in large consider game reviews to be a joke.
This, a MILLION times, this. Lazy, self-obsessed reviewers are given a pass too often because.. I don't know, exactly. How did we get to a point where people are more concerned with defending lazy-minded reviewers than consumer advocacy?