If a game is shit then they do not need to finish it. Why? Because it's shit that's why. It's not going to get better just because they finished it.
Poll: Can a review be valid if the reviewer did not finish the game in question?
- Thread starter Lord Doomhammer
- Start date
I review games and to be honest, I tend to play for about 3 or 5 hours then make up my mind about it. A review is work, you don't have time to stuff around playing a game all day and if a game is crap for the first 3 hours chances are it ain't getting any better and even if it did a player still has to endure a lot of crap game play to get to the good stuff so the game still deserves a bad review. Saying a game that's crap can be redeemed by a good ending is a stupid argument, games are meant to be fun and you can usually tell how much fun a game is going to be within the first hour.
Funny thing is, I can't recall off the top of head a single game that changed for the better towards the end. I can remember several cases of the opposite, though (looking at you, Indigo Prophecy). So I guess reviewers should try to play untill the end, if only to warn us not to bother after that point of no return.Necator15 said:
Yes, a reviewer can review a game without finishing it. If the game is so distasteful that one simply cannot bother reaching the end, the fact that all a reviewer wants to do is stop playing is as important a note as a game that a reviewer simply could not stop playing until the end.
Yes.
You could hardly argue that Halo gets markedly improved in later levels. The gameplay remains the same throughout, and everything you need to know, including vehicles, has been learned in the first level. In fact, most shooters don't introduce a new mechanic in the endgame that requires you to play more than at most half.
A case could perhaps better be made for RPGs/MMOs/RTSs, which on occasion will introduce a game-changing device near the end or when a high enough level has been reached that makes the whole game a different experience. If someone reviewed WoW without getting to level sixty to review the fast travel system would be lax.
My next point would be about the game itself, outside of genre. Some games are truly awful. I knew within about twenty minutes of playing [PROTOTYPE] that it wasn't a good game, and I was proven entirely right. I still finished it, but then I'm not a professional game reviewer with a backlog of twenty games to finish before I even get onto the big titles. Some games you really can tell if they're good or bad very quickly, and MindJack looks like it was the sort of game where you could do that. Combine that with the gameplay point above and suddenly there seems to be very little reason for him to go to the trouble of finishing it.
Also, some games I presume really do reach the point where even without the knowledge of a backlog they must just be vaguely unplayable. From what I've heard of FF13 it is such a godawful game that even reaching twenty hours is a monumental achievement for a regular gamer, let alone someone who hates the genre. If I told you you had to play something that you hated, and it would last like eighty hours to finish it, you probably wouldn't be too happy.
When there's a good game, he finishes it, when he doesn't like it, if there is nothing to learn from it, gameplay or story wise, there's no reason for him to play it, and he does have a backlog to finish. People prefer the big popular titles to be reviewed as soon as possible, instead of left for months.
You could hardly argue that Halo gets markedly improved in later levels. The gameplay remains the same throughout, and everything you need to know, including vehicles, has been learned in the first level. In fact, most shooters don't introduce a new mechanic in the endgame that requires you to play more than at most half.
A case could perhaps better be made for RPGs/MMOs/RTSs, which on occasion will introduce a game-changing device near the end or when a high enough level has been reached that makes the whole game a different experience. If someone reviewed WoW without getting to level sixty to review the fast travel system would be lax.
My next point would be about the game itself, outside of genre. Some games are truly awful. I knew within about twenty minutes of playing [PROTOTYPE] that it wasn't a good game, and I was proven entirely right. I still finished it, but then I'm not a professional game reviewer with a backlog of twenty games to finish before I even get onto the big titles. Some games you really can tell if they're good or bad very quickly, and MindJack looks like it was the sort of game where you could do that. Combine that with the gameplay point above and suddenly there seems to be very little reason for him to go to the trouble of finishing it.
Also, some games I presume really do reach the point where even without the knowledge of a backlog they must just be vaguely unplayable. From what I've heard of FF13 it is such a godawful game that even reaching twenty hours is a monumental achievement for a regular gamer, let alone someone who hates the genre. If I told you you had to play something that you hated, and it would last like eighty hours to finish it, you probably wouldn't be too happy.
When there's a good game, he finishes it, when he doesn't like it, if there is nothing to learn from it, gameplay or story wise, there's no reason for him to play it, and he does have a backlog to finish. People prefer the big popular titles to be reviewed as soon as possible, instead of left for months.
If a game is so bad that the reviewer couldn't finish it, I would rather they move on to reviewing a game that I might actually play.
So, you think they should have to finish the game just because your Dad hates his job?RedEyesBlackGamer said:
No, they have a job to do. My point was that reviewers have a nice gig compared to most people. Why is it wrong to expect a reviewer to have finished a game when I read their review? If they can't be trusted to finish a video game then I don't see why they should keep their job.IvoryTowerGamer said:
Some games are just too shitty to finish or are just too long due to time constraints. As Yahtzee has said before he's not a reviewer, he's a 'critic.' And are there any games YOU haven't finished for whatever reason?
Their job is to review games. If a game is so bad that they want to stop playing it half way through, how is trudging through the second half going to make their review any better? Like I said in my other post, I'd rather have them move on to something that might actually be good. That would be a much more productive option. It's better for their audience, too.RedEyesBlackGamer said:
Journalistic integrity, for one. See how much credibility a movie critic who walks out of movie has, none. There are reviewers who take their job seriously, like Micah C. Reviewers are not given multiple projects at a time. So I don't see your point. I'm sure an editor loves hearing that a reviewer dropped a game to play something cooler.IvoryTowerGamer said:
Well, I don't play too many different games because of a limited budget, and there have only been a few games that I've never finished. I say this because I can still believe that the reason a reviewer wouldn't finish a game is because it really is THAT bad. If it's because there wasn't enough time, then he should delay the review until he could finish, if he just got bored, then fine. I listen to Yahtzee more when he says that he couldn't finish a game because it was murderously bad.
This.Necator15 said:
Exactly this.
End of the day, reviews are largely pointless because there's such a huge gap between what one person likes in a game and another does, and the scoring scale seems out of whack in most places (Hello Steam... I'm looking at you!) To be a critic, you can stop playing the game as soon as it rubs you the wrong way. People will tend to take the word of a critic over a review, simply because the only "scoring" involved is "how many times was this game given praise, versus the suggestion that the developer needs to be sodomized brutally?".