Poll: Can a review be valid if the reviewer did not finish the game in question?

[FernandoV]

I care about Yahtzee. And I don't really believe we can define Yahtzee so narrowly as either a reviewer or a comedian. He plays a game, tells us what he likes and doesn't like and makes some jokes in between for the sake of it. He's not exactly reviewing the game; he's simply telling us what he noticed as far as gameplay mistakes; story blunders, etc.

yes of course, he is a human being after all, its just that i find it funny that people have so much rage over him because of what he does, he didnt finished the game? BLASPHEMY!!!!, he didnt liked the game i liked? BLASPHEMY!!!, he is bashing a game for forgetable flaws? BLASPHEMY!!!, i watch his reviews and more often than not i agree with what he says, i remember that i played "Alone In The Dark" and stopped playing exactly at the same stage he did, because of the same things he said!, and his "review" wasnt even out, of course i laughed my ass of when he reviewed the game because i could relate to it, its the people that "blind" themselves on certain things they like that cant posibly imagine a guy that rants about a game on the web is right, i mean, i loved Fallout: New Vegas but i didnt liked the exact same things he bashed about in his review, i didnt liked "Saints Row 2" even thought he praised the game to bits, but i recognize that what he said was true (funny and what GTAIV should have being), the way he says them is what makes his "reviews" funny.

i like his show, but i woulnd put up a "shrine" around him, i agree with the things he says, and i believe he is exagerating most of the time, but bottom line, if he didnt liked something that i did liked i wouldnt care because after all its his opinion, and everyone can have his own opinion about anything.

there are hundreds of haters on this site, but they are the ones that take him too seriously, the others that i have seen dont "praise" him, they just laugh at his reviews nodding and saying "so true" and often point out that he "exagerated" somewhere, or that he missed an important part of the game, and funnily those are the ones that actually like him!

i laugh at the guys that say "EVERYONE ELSE TAKE HIS WORD BLINDLY" because i have never seen anyone here that genuinely deffended him or actually said "HE IS THE BEST REVIEWER EVER".

that was my point

I agree; the point of watching Yahtzee or any other reviewer/critic/etc for that matter is to get a feel for a game; it's important to form your own opinion because you'll find that you might love what the majority of reviewers/people dislike.

 

[pulse2]

Take Lair in its original form for example, would you need to play to the end to realise the controls sucked? Or play all 100% of the missions to realise its repetitive? Or See all of the levels to realise the graphics weren't particularly outstanding?

Still.. that's a blanket statement that will excuse someone who just didn't play the game, try to figure the game out, and still hates it. If you reviewed Lair and said: "The controls suck, the game is repetitive, and the graphics are terrible - and I have this from a brilliantly reliable source by the name of MajorGeneral, who has imparted his wisdom to me on our xbox fan-site" - then I'd have no problem whatsoever with the review.

If, on the other hand, you claim the same - and imply that you have played the game, see massive change in the controls since the patch, and that all aspects of the graphics are horrendous and terrible.. then obviously your review isn't very good. And now your honesty as well as your credibility as a reviewer is on the line.

But the way to avoid that problem is to be clear with what you're saying and why, isn't it. If that's not good enough for people who simply want to hear others agree with the opinions they already have.. well, life must be hard, I guess. Specially when there are literally hundreds of reviewers out there who craft an opinion based on the general forum-noise even before the game is actually out.

Maybe so, but that goes back to the point I made about reviewing anything, for every one person that didn't like something, others did. There were lots of proffessional reviers bashing Monster Hunter for example, stating the controls made it unplayable, missions got boring / repetitive etc. Thankfully I disregarded thier 6/10 ratings and played it anyway, to realise it has become one of my favourite games, more fun to play then even Gears in my opinion which recieved 8, 9 and 10 ratings. So I could simply say that reviewers were talking from thier behinds because THEY didn't like the gameplay.

Its a two sided arguement tbh, as far as I'm concerned, not finishing the game in order to review is sometimes no different from finishing the game, I've sometimes seen more accurate and proffessional reviews from none completionists then I have from completionists, an example of that being classic game room on youtube. Mark is never biased, a game REALLY has to be bad in order for him to critisise it because he tries to find the fun elements out of every game no matter how others recieved the game.

 

[Akihiko]

Depends on the game. As much as reviewers really should play the entire game before reviewing, in some cases with really long rpgs which take a good few weeks to complete, it just isn't viable. I think the review should only review the part of the game they've played though. So if they only played the first 5 hours of an rpg, review those first 5 hours. Don't preach how boring the entire game is, when it's quite probable it will get much more interesting later when the story has started to get going, and more abilities are available etc.

Quite frankly though. I think reviews in general are pretty useless. A big proportion of the games I love, got mediocre reviews from critics, just because they didn't like the genre or whatever. On the other hand, all those big shooters, like Halo Reach, CoD, gears or whatever, which got 9s, I don't like at all. It's just a shame so much is placed on reviews these days honestly. A lot of people who listen to reviews thinking they're set in stone will be missing out on potential games they may enjoy.

 

[nipsen]

Its a two sided arguement tbh, as far as I'm concerned, not finishing the game in order to review is sometimes no different from finishing the game, I've sometimes seen more accurate and proffessional reviews from none completionists then I have from completionists, an example of that being classic game room on youtube. Mark is never biased, a game REALLY has to be bad in order for him to critisise it because he tries to find the fun elements out of every game no matter how others recieved the game.

he definitively has preferences, though. But agree or disagree - he's good at explaining his point of view, without insisting on taking his word of faith alone.

That's really the minimum level before you can call something a review, imo. Before that, it becomes a.. glorified opinion or something

 

[Beryl77]

In my opinion, it entirely depends on how much the reviewer has played. If he has played 1 hour of a 10 hour game, then it's not enough(except in some rare cases). If he has played 8 hours of a 10 hour game, then I think that he can make a decent review. He can say that even after 8 hours the game didn't get better and even if it gets better in the last part, most won't care about that. Very few people would buy a game if it only gets good in the last part.

 

[MAUSZX]

I don't think thats a big deal, if the game is way to long, It could be fine not finished the game. Even if your review is based on a good story, you can choose not to finished because what makes a good story is not always the ending, but if the story is involving enough that would be, besides you can't talk much of a detail of the ending.
I made a poll recently about bad endings, a los of people talk about bioshock and fable, those are good games, that doesn't mean the ending ruin the game experience right?

 

[Sovvolf]

Yes, however only if the review is negative. In fact it adds a whole extra level to how bad it is if the critic or reviewer couldn't actually force them selves to finish it.

You can't give a positive valid review if you couldn't even force your self through the entire game. There are a few exceptions to this rule, MMO's being one of them. Some are games where the story isn't the main part of the game and thus, you can still give a valid review so long as you've spent at least a good enough time in the game to get to know everything. I'm talking about games like Just Cause here or Sports games that don't really have a story.

 

[pulse2]

Its a two sided arguement tbh, as far as I'm concerned, not finishing the game in order to review is sometimes no different from finishing the game, I've sometimes seen more accurate and proffessional reviews from none completionists then I have from completionists, an example of that being classic game room on youtube. Mark is never biased, a game REALLY has to be bad in order for him to critisise it because he tries to find the fun elements out of every game no matter how others recieved the game.

he definitively has preferences, though. But agree or disagree - he's good at explaining his point of view, without insisting on taking his word of faith alone.

That's really the minimum level before you can call something a review, imo. Before that, it becomes a.. glorified opinion or something

Thus the reason you can never take reviews as religeon

Yeah, his preferences are obscure though, which is why you love him even more as a reviewer, the typical reviewer likes COD or Bioshock or something cliche like that, but here we have Mark and his favourite game is Cosmic Carnage....what the hell is that? Lol. Just goes to show that he can find a gem is games that we would otherwise never fathom considering being our favourite game, let alone picking up at all even if it was right in front of our faces.

 

[Vault boy Eddie]

Do you need to finish a game to say for example, how horribly buggy it is? Did the developers make the beginning of the game buggy and the finale a masterpiece? I think you only need a sample of the game to review it right, unless of course you plan on focusing on the game's story or something.

 

[Arcane Azmadi]

Looks like the overwhelming majority comes down on the side of "yes".

Really, you don't have to finish a game to know whether it's good or not. If you can't finish it because it's too hard then, assuming you're not a 10-thumbed simpleton, you are perfectly justified in saying the game is bad because it's sadistically hard to the point that it isn't fun, even though you haven't finished it. If you haven't finished it because the game is just so BAD that you simply can't take any more, then you're perfectly justified in writing it off as being, well, BAD. "It gets better later" is not a good excuse unless it gets a LOT better and not very much later. If it takes longer than the end of the tutorial level to get good, the game is just badly designed and should not be cut any slack for improving later. If a man smashed my fingers with a hammer, I wouldn't let him off the hook just because he bought me an ice-cream after he was done- in fact, I wouldn't stick around long enough for him to buy me an ice-cream, I'd run to the police as fast as I could.

 

[ItsAChiaotzu]

Yahtzee is not a reviewer.
Yahtzee is a comedian.

That is all.

Yahtzee is a comedian that reviews games.

Was that too much for you? Can you only fit him in one category inside your OCD brain or something?

I don't get you people. "Yahtzee's not a game journalist. He's an entertainer. Therefore we should laugh at his jokes and ignore his opinions." What the fuck kind of twisted logic is this?

The argument is that people shouldn't take Yahtzee's "reviews" seriously, because his role is primarily a comedian, and the main focus of his comedy "act", is to exaggerate the flaws in a game to create comedy. He is not employed by the Escapist to write serious reviews, so people shouldn't argue about his "integrity", because integrity, in this case is sacrificed in the name of comedy.

 

[Trolldor]

Yes, on the sole condition he couldn't finish the review because of the quality of the game, and not because of time constraints.