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

RedEyesBlackGamer

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Jan 23, 2011
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IvoryTowerGamer said:
RedEyesBlackGamer said:
It is clear we believe different things so I will just say to each their own and respectfully disagree with you.
Fair enough, although to tell the truth I'm not trying to convince you of my own opinion so much as I'm just trying to understand your reasoning.

Do you believe he should finish the game because a game could still be considered good even if the first half is horrible? Otherwise I just don't see how playing till the end would make it a better review.
I personally think readers of said review have a right to understand everything about the game. I think the reviewer is obligated to finish the game, if for no other reason than to give a reader the best impression of a game you can give them. Just because you believe what happens later in a game isn't worth it, that doesn't give you the right to deny potential consumers the information.
 

IvoryTowerGamer

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RedEyesBlackGamer said:
IvoryTowerGamer said:
Fair enough, although to tell the truth I'm not trying to convince you of my own opinion so much as I'm just trying to understand your reasoning.

Do you believe he should finish the game because a game could still be considered good even if the first half is horrible? Otherwise I just don't see how playing till the end would make it a better review.
I personally think readers of said review have a right to understand everything about the game. I think the reviewer is obligated to finish the game, if for no other reason than to give a reader the best impression of a game you can give them. Just because you believe what happens later in a game isn't worth it, that doesn't give you the right to deny potential consumers the information.
Alright, so because there could be someone out there who might actually play through hours of bad gameplay to get to the good part, the reviewer should stick to it until the end.

Seems a bit unlikely, but I think I understand your point now.
 

RedEyesBlackGamer

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Jan 23, 2011
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IvoryTowerGamer said:
RedEyesBlackGamer said:
IvoryTowerGamer said:
Fair enough, although to tell the truth I'm not trying to convince you of my own opinion so much as I'm just trying to understand your reasoning.

Do you believe he should finish the game because a game could still be considered good even if the first half is horrible? Otherwise I just don't see how playing till the end would make it a better review.
I personally think readers of said review have a right to understand everything about the game. I think the reviewer is obligated to finish the game, if for no other reason than to give a reader the best impression of a game you can give them. Just because you believe what happens later in a game isn't worth it, that doesn't give you the right to deny potential consumers the information.
Alright, so because there could be someone out there who might actually play through hours of bad gameplay to get to the good part, the reviewer should stick to it until the end.

Seems a bit unlikely, but I think I understand your point now.
I'm glad we cleared that up.:)
And welcome to the Escapist!
 

Zanaxal

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It depends on the game type. Say if you were playing a rts, you would only need to play 2-3 games to get a impression of the whole game, thats also if your skilled and can note down the mechanical aspect. A pure fps would also only require a little time played (halo half-life etc.)

But if when it comes to reviewing a sandbox game or a rpg it would take substantially longer. For example a lvl 1 rpg character has only 1 spell, you cant review a character at lvl 1, thats like basing a entire movie review on 1 minute of the movie. Its before the end usually that the characters become powerful and the story SHOULD (but its getting rare now) come into its Apex.

As for a mmo, a mmo that isnt pvp based mainly the reviewer would be required to sample the lategame and knowledge of mechanics to have a real opinion. Saying theirs pwetty colors and big cities doesn't cut it, every mmo with any respect has that.
 

Misho-

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bibblles said:
Just like the poll asks.

Now since yahtzee is such a celebrity here, I feel the need to call him out on this. After yet another review where he openly admits to not having finished the game in question, I for one think he's becoming more and more full of shit. Don't get me wrong, I don't sympathize with the games over the reviewer and I definitely am not going to go blow a bunch of money on some game I don't care about to prove him wrong. But should people in such a position be obligated to at the very least finish the game before calling it one of Satan's balls.
Lol Even if the thread didn't mentioned right away, I knew that this was about Yahtzee...

Look, in my opinion, Yahtzee is a valid reviewer and a really good critic. Some people here will get angry just because I think he's a reviewer but it's true. A reviewer isn't a guy that knows everything about all games and shares his/her expertise about the game at hand. It's just a person with a personal opinion trying to be objective about the game sharing their experience about the pros and cons. *Just like a critic isn't just a guy who critizes everything*

(Just watch Gametrailers and Gamespot video review about Bulletstorm and hear their comments about Ishi, just a small example about the differing notes of two 'professionals' at work on the same subject)

Aside from that, isn't it a great example of a game being bad that the person trying to play it and review it couldn't finish it? Either because of frustation or excessive difficulty...


I would agree with you if he didn't play it at all just because he's biased about the game beforehand...
 

the Tadman

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Honestly, it depends on why the reviewer didn't finish the game.

If say a game has a horrible combat system or say it's so buggy that it makes it excruciating to play, then by all means, give the game a "bad score". It isn't like in a movie where a first or seconds act could be bad, but the third act can make up for it. Playing a game takes time, most games you can't breeze through in a day. Not wanting to invest that time in a game that's ,most likely not going to improve, is understandable.

On the other hand, dropping a game because of "the story was slow" or the "voice acting was bad" (seriously people just play ,Arc Rise Fantasia', you'll be surprised) is plain criminal.
 

hardband

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Of course it can be valid! It actually says something about the game if the reviewer can't finish it. The only time it is invalid is when the reviewer has not played enough of the game to really know anything about. Games dont ussually sudenly change at the end. If its bad for the first 6 hours it will likely be bad for the rest. Why should you need to finish a game, if the game in question is so bad that you don't WANT to finish it!
 

SomethingUnrelated

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With respect to time constraints, you have to accept that some people who are reviewing games for a living maybe not be able to finish every game they play.
 

DeathWyrmNexus

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A number of the games in question are 40 hours plus to finish and he has a weekly show. Also a statement that the game was so wretched that he couldn't handle finishing it is a decent review in and of itself. He also makes a point to state WHY he didn't.

If a reviewer does that, I find it more than valid. I shouldn't have to slog through forty hours of shit to find the one candy bar. Holding to the analogy, would I really want the candy bar if it was surrounded in shit in the first place?

Finally, a review is a peak into the game. It isn't a FAQ or an indepth narrative into the whole game experience. If it was, nobody would watch it as it would need to be a couple hours long. The review needs to simply do this: let me know if it was engaging from the beginning or slow to start, if it has decent mechanics that reveal themselves in a timely manner, and finally, is it honestly worth the asking price. Yahtzee tends to do that with rare exception as he is still human, after all.
 

BVBFanatic

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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.
A review isn't so much journalism as it is opinion.

Movies require the viewer to simply sit and observe. Games require the gamer to act, make decisions, engage the gameplay, etc. It is not the same as sitting through an hour-and-a-half movie. A movie is entirely narrative while the game is a combination of narrative and interaction. I.e. they are very much not the same thing and this movie/game analogy is not useful to our discussion.
 

joeychuckles

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Feb 25, 2009
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If a movie is so bad the reviewer walks out, that's certainly a review. Same for a game. A game that isn't sufficiently interesting or compelling to make someone want to play it has only itself (and its dev team) to blame.

I think it's fair to expect a reviewer to give a game enough of a chance to be accurate in their review, but if your game ultimately depends on a really cool ending that players have to slog through hours of crap to get to, it's probably not worth most people's time. "It was bad to the point I didn't want to finish it," is a fine and fair review in my book.

And you can always test the game out yourself if you'd rather not take a reviewer's word for it.
 

TiefBlau

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ItsAChiaotzu said:
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?
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.
I wouldn't mind if a movie critic walked out on a movie that was so apalling it was beyond redemption.

The difference between a movie critic and a game critic, though, is that even if a movie critic finds a movie to be absolute shit, he can rest assured in knowing that said movie only lasts about two hours each time. With a game critic, who knows how long he's going to be stuck playing a POS game? It's certainly going to be more than two hours, and by the time he quits, he's definitely spent more than two hours playing.

One more thing: A game relies on specific mechanics that, for the large part, remain constant. No matter what game you play, once you get a handle on the controls, you know largely what to expect. If you're in a fighter, you know how the gameplay is going to go for the rest of the game. If you're in a first person shooter, ditto. Movies and books aren't like this. They rely on a constantly moving plot that simply can't be adequately predicted (unless you're watching Avatar ZING!) while you just sit back and watch it unfold. There's no systematic structure at play in movies. There are in games.
 

Something Amyss

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Dec 3, 2008
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bibblles said:
Just like the poll asks.

Now since yahtzee is such a celebrity here, I feel the need to call him out on this. After yet another review where he openly admits to not having finished the game in question, I for one think he's becoming more and more full of shit. Don't get me wrong, I don't sympathize with the games over the reviewer and I definitely am not going to go blow a bunch of money on some game I don't care about to prove him wrong. But should people in such a position be obligated to at the very least finish the game before calling it one of Satan's balls.
Finishing the game is unlikely to make anyone think higher of it, if they're already to the point of putting it down.

A reviewer should play the game to the point they have a sound grasp of things. They do not need to finish the game to get to that point, unless there is some amazing change of mechanics or naarrative near the end. Say, for example, Bioshock turns into a third person parkour about bees and the dangers of unrefrigerated meat, then yes. That should probably be part of the review.

But honestly, game play is more involved than a lot of other media one would review. A movie might last two hours (with rare exceptions). CDs cap out at 80 minutes. Most novels and books for entertainment purposes cap out at 500 pages.

People ***** and moan if a single playthrough of a single player mode is less than 6 hours. That's not even factoring the interactivity (Since you can fail, might need to explore, and might not go at the same pace). And then there's longer games. It's hard to expect the same level of response from people reviewing games where all elements involved could take 20 hours or more, compared to 90 minutes or so.

Plus, while Yahtzee is an entertainer more than a legit reviewer, most of the reviews seem to call this game rather tedious. I think this is something that, at least sometimes, needs to be underscored.

Most games should give you a good feel in at least an hour or two. Maybe more depending on genre. If they're getting and giving us a full experience, they don't need to complete the game.
 

RedEyesBlackGamer

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Jan 23, 2011
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TiefBlau said:
ItsAChiaotzu said:
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?
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.
I wouldn't mind if a movie critic walked out on a movie that was so apalling it was beyond redemption.

The difference between a movie critic and a game critic, though, is that even if a movie critic finds a movie to be absolute shit, he can rest assured in knowing that said movie only lasts about two hours each time. With a game critic, who knows how long he's going to be stuck playing a POS game? It's certainly going to be more than two hours, and by the time he quits, he's definitely spent more than two hours playing.

One more thing: A game relies on specific mechanics that, for the large part, remain constant. No matter what game you play, once you get a handle on the controls, you know largely what to expect. If you're in a fighter, you know how the gameplay is going to go for the rest of the game. If you're in a first person shooter, ditto. Movies and books aren't like this. They rely on a constantly moving plot that simply can't be adequately predicted (unless you're watching Avatar ZING!) while you just sit back and watch it unfold. There's no systematic structure at play in movies. There are in games.
I've already answered the question, but I'll bring it up again. It isn't about the reviewer. It is about the reader. It is a reviewer's responsibility to give potential consumers the best impression of the entire game as possible. While a single reviewer might give up on a game in the middle of it, his readers, already interested in said game, expect answers. How is the metagame? Does it hit its stride later? Any mechanics that take off later in the game (aka the combo system in Hperdimension Neptunia)? It is the reviewer's job to inform his readers, not to entertain himself.
 

TiefBlau

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RedEyesBlackGamer said:
I've already answered the question, but I'll bring it up again. It isn't about the reviewer. It is about the reader. It is a reviewer's responsibility to give potential consumers the best impression of the entire game as possible. While a single reviewer might give up on a game in the middle of it, his readers, already interested in said game, expect answers. How is the metagame? Does it hit its stride later? Any mechanics that take off later in the game (aka the combo system in Hperdimension Neptunia)? It is the reviewer's job to inform his readers, not to entertain himself.
As a reviewer, Yahtzee informs his readers just fine. I'm sure playing the game to completion every time would be a nice advantage, but it's not an obligation. Sure, it's unprofessional of Yahtzee, but Yahtzee was never really much of a professional to begin with.

If we're specifically talking about MindJack here, Yahtzee's message has been pretty clear: This game sucks. If you were playing it, you would have quit too. Everything else is entertainment value. It's perhaps one of his least opinionated reviews.
 

Captain Booyah

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I voted 'girl scout cookies' because there wasn't an option for 'it depends'.

I mean, one of the most arrogant things you can think of doing is playing a game for one hour, then declaring 'it's shit' as though it were fact; because obviously, one hour isn't enough to fully explore the game's world, its mechanics, its features, etc etc. It's like trashing a book ten pages in. The ball hasn't even got rolling yet. However, if you've played a game three quarters of the way through or even halfway, and then give up, there shouldn't be too much of a problem with that, because it really depends on content anyway: if the review's statements can be clearly led back to the game, it's no more invalid than anything else.

Example Time: I never finished Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. I only made it halfway. That is because I hated every second and I was lucky to even get that far. If anything, that shows that I thought it was so bad I couldn't even bring myself to finish it, which says a lot more in a review than what a witty insult ever will.

However, if I had to write a review on it, I think I'd be pretty qualified to do so. Even just making it halfway gave me more-than-sufficient knowledge on its characters, tone, cutscenes, graphics, sound, etc., which would be exactly the same even if I had decided to finish it. The only thing I wouldn't be able to fully comment on would be the story, because I hadn't seen it all the way through; but again, I had seen some of the plot, and would be able to make an educated guess on the rest of the story, e.g.: 'So far, Warrior Within has a lot of plot holes, due to its use of time travel; therefore, it hasn't been thought out very well, and I doubt that would change much by the end.'

So yeah, I could forgive Yahtzee for this. If anything, the Final Fantasy XIII review was pushing it. What was it, five hours, or something?
 

HentMas

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bibblles said:
Now since yahtzee is such a celebrity here, I feel the need to call him out on this.
i find this claim funny seing how most of "Yahtzee related threads" are about how he is "Wrong" or "not as interesting/smart/funny as everyone else claims he is" which leads me to believe you are either trying to latch on to his name to promote your thread, or... no actually thats it, you are trying to latch on to his name to promote your thread!

and i find it even more funny, because its one every so many minutes, which would make him the least popular guy in the web

this poll is interesting in its own right, there are many MANY ways of looking at it, but you feel the need to bash on some guy that got famous because he made some videos in the web??, this trolling scheme always falls flat in its back because well, NO ONE CARES ABOUT YAHTZEE

that said, YES i think people can review a game without finishing it, i have, my brother haves, my sister haves, you have, EVERYONE and its dog haves why? because we can always give our opinion (read REVIEW) and if in our opinion the game was more painfull to be played, than to, say, i dunno, turn it off and never play it again, well thats one opinion.

besides i´m going to let you in on a little secret, Yahtzee is... come closer!, Yahtzee is an "entertainer" his reviews are meant to be as offensive and shocking as he can make them he has said so himself seeeveral times in previous videos, also, he actually criticizes the games because no one laughs at a game being praised (again, his words), the amazing thing is that in every thread made about him EVERYONE says something along this lines, but still people "think" they are deffending him instead of pointing out that no one should take him seriously

for reviews? genuine reviews? whatch the main page untill it says "REVIEW: KILLING KILL KILLA´ LXVII: THE KILLER" then click the link and read that!, THOSE are genuine reviews.