Why Jim Sterling's Mario Kart 7 review is bullshit.

Geekosaurus

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Just by idly flicking over this thread I can see it's taken a somewhat childish turn somewhere down the road. Anyway...

What can you do to the Mario Kart series to radically alter it? If you change too much then it's no longer Mario Kart. And, more to the point, why would Nintendo want to? Seeing as all of the other Mario Kart games have sold well, why would they risk losing money and fans on an instalment that tries to radically change the game?

I don't think anybody should blame Nintendo for not changing enough or adding enough to the game. If you want a game that isn't Mario Kart then buy a different game. When you buy Mario Kart (and this probably goes for COD games too) you know exactly what you are getting beforehand. There's no use in complaining about it. Your time would be better spent trying to find a game that you do like.
 

Siris

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I read his review. I thought he made valid points. I know, on the internet too.

 

Something Amyss

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The Red Dragon said:
How dare Jim Sterling give HIS honest opinions about the game. HOW DARE HE!!!1!

Also, have you even played the game yet OP?...Well, have you?
But Jim is bias! He is bias he is bias HE IS BIAS!

(It's really hard to intentionally type the wrong word over and over....)

Besides, it is not the job of a games reviewer to actually give an honest estimation of the game, it's his job to boundlessly praise the games I like in order to remind me that neither my nor my favourite developers' shit stinks.
 

TheDooD

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Mario Kart isn't something I can really see being fun on the long term with a handheld. The last good Kart game was on the N64. Somebody can like a series over another even a reviewer. Dynasty Warriors went from something close to a historal fiction action game to something rivaling DBZ in its level of batshit crazy. Hell Nintendo should be making more F-Zero games then Kart imo anyway because they know clear and well Capt Falcon carried memes for years and was extremely popular.
 

Woodsey

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He enjoys Dynasty Warriors though.

The clue is in the fact that its a fucking opinion. If you do not consistently agree with a reviewer then don't fucking read their reviews; find a publication/reviewer that frequently what you think.

Him simply having a different opinion does not make the review "bullshit". If he had made stuff up or ommited points that would have contradicted him, that's bullshit, but if he enjoys one series then he's not going to label it "stagnant", is he?
 

Something Amyss

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Geekosaurus said:
What can you do to the Mario Kart series to radically alter it? If you change too much then it's no longer Mario Kart. And, more to the point, why would Nintendo want to? Seeing as all of the other Mario Kart games have sold well, why would they risk losing money and fans on an instalment that tries to radically change the game?
That's fine, but don't expect it to stack so well against other titles that have changed and progressed over the years. That seems to be the crux of the matter.

Siris said:
I read his review. I thought he made valid points. I know, on the internet too.
Hell, I HATE The COD series, and I thought his points were well-argued on MW3, as well. And he gave that a much better score. I'd hardly go out of my way to praise a COD game, but after the whole "He gave Mario Kart a 5 but COD a 9.5 he is BIAS!" crap, I was inclined to check out the review and see what he actually said. And while he'll never convince me to buy a COD game (I don't think God Herself could), I did find his arguments well-constructed and overall valid.

Now, is he 100% right? It's a little hard for a non-COD player to judge whether I agree with him OR whether the points he makes are all true, but enough of them are. And that much is true whether I like the game or not.
 

Atmos Duality

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It does seem quite contradictory to deride a game for being highly derivative of its previous entries, and praising another series which in itself is NOTHING BUT derivative. I enjoy the Dynasty Warriors series too, but I still only own one game in the series for a reason; they become repetitive instantly.

Kopikatsu said:
Aren't there only two ways to develop video games?

Way 1. Make each successive game more 'accessible' to a wider audience. This is the route most developers take because...why would they want to make the same or less money on a sequel? (Which is likely to have cost more and possibly taken more time).

Way 2. 'Cult Classic'. Sales take a back seat to vision and the developer continues with their series as it is, thereby securing their little niche fanclub.

The only game that I can think of that defied both of these is Dark Souls.
There were examples of games that defied that convention...from the previous console generation. Not so much today. Off the top of my head, Metroid Prime 2 vs Metroid Prime 1. MP2 is MUCH harder than MP1; the opposite of being more accessible. The light and darkness mechanics made getting around half the game far more difficult, and that's mixed in with the series' requisite wanderlust.

I just think AAA publishers have lost their balls; but they don't need to worry, because they have ours firmly in hand. They know we'll happily shell out for the same game year after year.
 

Dexiro

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believer258 said:
So what's your take on Call of Duty?

EDIT: Guess I'd better add a bit more substance to this. Releasing the same game with minor tweaks is not good. I like Call of Duty. In fact, I like it a lot. I've defended it on this site at times. But that's getting really hard to do when even I'm hard pressed to spend any money on the newest one when MW1, MW2, WAW, and BlOps are all sitting in my drawer, all played to death (mostly single player, fuck the haters)

No matter how much you like Mario Kart, adding a few new levels and a handful of other features that do almost nothing to change the game is not good. It doesn't make for a good game, it breeds mediocrity. You might think it's fun, and that's fine. Buy it and love it. I thought Mario Kart Gamecube and DS were both fun and played the hell out them, blue shells be damned. And were I to have a 3DS at the moment, I'd get Mario Kart 7, mostly because I'd be having a hard time finding other things for it (rimshot!). Still, the series has long since stagnated, and needs a few low review scores so Nintendo will up their ante and make something new next time instead of releasing a map pack and a reskin.
While Nintendo might not change their formula much they do consistently give us some of the best level design and most polished gameplay I've ever seen, there's absolutely no way you could accuse them of being lazy with regards to that. They don't change the gameplay much but the new tracks they add are almost guarantee'd to be brilliant.

We'd all love for them to take more risks and make more big changes to their franchises and nagging them to do so is a good thing but atleast they're doing something well. Maybe negative reviews are a good thing because they could convince Nintendo to start mixing up the gameplay a bit more :D
 

Jezzascmezza

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I read the review, and while it seemed harsh, at least he justified the "undesirable" review score.
But then again, he did give a very good score to a game which I believe innovated very little (MW3; sorry I had to bring up COD in this thread), so it would be possible to accuse him of being somewhat hypocritical in that regard...
 

anthony87

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*sigh*
http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lvf0qxV8vP1r3gqwio1_500.jpg

Seriously OP, calm the fuck down. What really pisses me off about threads like this is that there's so many of them on the internet right now. When watching things like Jims "Hate Out of 10" video I think to myself "There can't really be people out there who are so stupid that they'll get so butthurt over a review score can there?". Well done internet, you've proven me wrong once again. Then again...when did 5/10 aka AVERAGE become a bad thing?

"Average

adj.

Being intermediate between extremes, as on a scale."

That seems alright to me....then again expressing my opinion will probably get me chewed out by the OP. If you dislike his review score that badly how about you grow up and write your own damn biased fanboy review?
 

ThunderCavalier

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You DO realize that Jim and Yahtzee are both highly opinionated and a bit biased as to what they expect out of games, right?

Yahtzee is funny, and I do agree with most of his points about what video games should have, and I also do like how he does criticize some games, but overall I don't believe his opinion on games is the 'defining' opinion, otherwise I don't think I'd be a Halo fan at all.

Jim is well-versed on the video game industry's operations, and thus I respect his opinion regarding how companies tend to sell their games or other products in an attempt to weasel more money out of the gamers. However, as we've seen befoer, he's also massively opinionated and a bit biased, so I'm not necessarily jumping over his actual game reviews. I do agree that Dynasty Warriors and Kirby are still awesome series.
 

Dexiro

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believer258 said:
Dexiro said:
believer258 said:
So what's your take on Call of Duty?

EDIT: Guess I'd better add a bit more substance to this. Releasing the same game with minor tweaks is not good. I like Call of Duty. In fact, I like it a lot. I've defended it on this site at times. But that's getting really hard to do when even I'm hard pressed to spend any money on the newest one when MW1, MW2, WAW, and BlOps are all sitting in my drawer, all played to death (mostly single player, fuck the haters)

No matter how much you like Mario Kart, adding a few new levels and a handful of other features that do almost nothing to change the game is not good. It doesn't make for a good game, it breeds mediocrity. You might think it's fun, and that's fine. Buy it and love it. I thought Mario Kart Gamecube and DS were both fun and played the hell out them, blue shells be damned. And were I to have a 3DS at the moment, I'd get Mario Kart 7, mostly because I'd be having a hard time finding other things for it (rimshot!). Still, the series has long since stagnated, and needs a few low review scores so Nintendo will up their ante and make something new next time instead of releasing a map pack and a reskin.
While Nintendo might not change their formula much they do consistently give us some of the best level design and most polished gameplay I've ever seen, there's absolutely no way you could accuse them of being lazy with regards to that. They don't change the gameplay much but the new tracks they add are almost guarantee'd to be brilliant.

We'd all love for them to take more risks and make more big changes to their franchises and nagging them to do so is a good thing but atleast they're doing something well.
Infinity Ward and Treyarch are both doing something very well. They're making Call of Duty games. And those get slandered all the time because they are the same game with different levels. I don't see how Nintendo gets off the hook and they don't.

Maybe negative reviews are a good thing because they could convince Nintendo to start mixing up the gameplay a bit more :D
...and that is exactly what my last sentence said.
Ah yeah :D It does indeed.

I wish I'd actually played the CoD games so I could give a fair judgement but if their level and gameplay design is on-par with Nintendo then I'll be very very impressed.
 

Hyper-space

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leet_x1337 said:
Zachary Amaranth said:
Yeah, I'm pretty sure he was super serious when he called Dynasty Warriors the Citizen Kane of gaming.
He also wrote an article on Destructoid itself proclaiming Dynatsy Warriors to be the best game ever, so...if you were being sarcastic there, he probably wasn't.
Are you shitting me? What is this? The no-sarcasm Zone?

The reason why he said that Dynasty Warriors is the "best" game evar, was because of his joke about the game being the Citizen Kane of its medium. There had been a torrent of comments saying that this and that game was the "Citizen Kane" of its genre, to the point where it had become a joke. Thus, he proclaimed that Dynasty Warriors was the Citizen Kane of video-games.

BECAUSE IT WAS A JOKE.

GET IT? JOKES? SARCASM? HOW MORE OBVIOUS DOES HE HAS TO BE?

Fuck me, this is as bad as when all the feminist blogs started to rage when he made a joke about Patrick Bateman.

EDIT:
ThunderCavalier said:
he's also massively opinionated and a bit biased, so I'm not necessarily jumping over his actual game reviews. I do agree that Dynasty Warriors and Kirby are still awesome series.
Hes a video-game critic/reviewer, HES SUPPOSED TO GIVE HIS OPINION BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT THEY DO.

Reviewers are there to give you an opinion on the game and its up to yourself to judge whether you go by the review or not. Reviewers are not there to give some ultra-objective rundown of the game, because then they could not say anything about the game (i.e. if its bad or good).

Don't go to reviewers expecting them to say your mind for you, they are not there to validate your opinion of a game. Reviews are simply tools for the reader to use (and this also goes for things like Metacritic and RottenTomatoes), that's it.
 

TJC

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as I said to the Hate out of Ten video of Jim, sequels should rarely get more than 5 out of 10 because they rarely do anything for gaming in general. Rehashes of old games, throdding on safe ground, doing nothing but stagnate. Why bother with an entire new game in this day and age of DLC? I guess even Nintendo realized this even during SNES times and never bothered to sequelize their games on the same console (at least until Galaxy, that is).

Okay, so we have a new hardware and we need new content (or at least decent online capacities) so making a Mario Kart makes perfectly sense but really what does Mario Kart add aside from a few cosmetic changes?

Nothing. And thank fuck for that because I like my mario kart the way it is. I'm gonna enjoy the hell out of it. Still, as a game, I don't believe it deserves more than a 5 oder a 6 because decent graphics, good track design and perfect controls are average for gaming. No AAA studio should go below that. And average is 5 or 6.

Also, stop complaining about scoring for the love of god. If you want validation, go to a Nintendo fanboy forum, they'll pat your ass for liking someone. In the further reaches of the interwebs (and life in general), enjoy your shit, no matter what others say and stop bitching because they don't. It'll make both you and us happier.
 

v3n0mat3

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The sad truth of Nintendo and its place in the video game industry

>New Halo game is released

REHASH SUCKS FAIL 0/10 STOP MAKING THESE GAMES THE SERIES SHOULD DIE etc. etc. etc.

>New Mario/Zelda/Kirby/Starfox/Mother/Pokemon/what have you

FUCKING GOLD THANK GOD THEY DIDN'T CHANGE ANYTHING 9000/10 GAME OF THE YEAR ALL YEAR EVERY YEAR

Don't get me wrong, I do have some fun with Nintendo games, but when you call one series that only has, what? 4 or 5 sequels (some with various changes/innovations) a rehash failure vs calling a new game in a series that has done nothing different (worth noting) in the ballpark of 20 years or less, with 100+ sequels (that's just the Mario games) the best ever is not only unfair, it's ignorant, really.
 

Sahasrala88

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So apparently giving a game a score of 5/10 means he hated it, at least according to the people whining about it. You people need to realize that 5/10 is average. Not brilliant but not terrible. If you actually READ his review he gives completely valid reasons for not liking the game. On some issues I agree with him. The items like Blue Shells make the game incredibly unbalanced, often punishing players whose only crime is racing well. I don't think he's trying to troll people or be sarcastic. I believe that the review is his honest opinion.

The reason he gave CoD a better score is because, although it's very similar to previous games in the franchise, it keeps the stuff that was good while improving on what already existed. I'm not a fan of shooters like CoD, but I can respect that people enjoy each game that comes out when it builds on and makes efforts to improve the experience. Nintendo has kept many things that are stale and bad in the Mario Kart series and haven't really added any significant improvements to the gameplay. That is one of the main points that Jim Sterling makes in this review. It's a 5/10, it's average, deal with it.
 

BoredRolePlayer

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Aku_San said:
The sad truth of Nintendo and its place in the video game industry

>New Halo game is released

REHASH SUCKS FAIL 0/10 STOP MAKING THESE GAMES THE SERIES SHOULD DIE etc. etc. etc.

>New Mario/Zelda/Kirby/Starfox/Mother/Pokemon/what have you

FUCKING GOLD THANK GOD THEY DIDN'T CHANGE ANYTHING 9000/10 GAME OF THE YEAR ALL YEAR EVERY YEAR

Don't get me wrong, I do have some fun with Nintendo games, but when you call one series that only has, what? 4 or 5 sequels (some with various changes/innovations) a rehash failure vs calling a new game in a series that has done nothing different (worth noting) in the ballpark of 20 years or less, with 100+ sequels (that's just the Mario games) the best ever is not only unfair, it's ignorant, really.
I'll give you the Mario, Zelda, Kirby, and Pokemon being repetitive and me wishing they change it up some more after playing it (Hell I refuse to touch Twilight princess because I know it's going to be ocarina of time in HD). But to be fair Mother(And Starfox) only has three(Star fox had 5 not counting the "remake") games and only two rehash the "collect the songs" plot point, while pokemon still...uses...the...same...stupid...plot...point...every...game *RAGE*. As I was saying I can agree that it gets stupid when people go ape shit on a new halo game and not for Nintendo, but to be fair Nintendo doesn't really do yearly releases to the degree of Madden, CoD, (almost Battlefield but Dice said NO to that), and what ever else gets yearly releases. It gives the feeling Nintendo takes time to make the game great (kinda like Halo and I'm not even a fan of that franchise but can enjoy the work that felt put into it). Also about the Mario thing, you say 100+ sequels but not all of them where platformers...hell some where edutainment >_>.

But you did make a good point none the less.