Doing some lunch time catch-up reading, and chanced across these two Escapist articles on games and their related reviews, criticism and word of mouth thereof. In Twitter We Trust and 1984 out of 10.
I find it rather surprising that the author of "In Twitter We Trust" actually relies on his Twitter hive mind - aka the people in his social network - to provide the decision-making info on whether he should try a game. To me, this smacks of following a very insidious form of groupthink, in which you closet yourself with like-minded folk and wade around in a tiny comfort zone.
But folks are different, I guess, and some people like to make decisions on gut feel, trusting to other people's emotional reactions, rather than through any structured logical process.
This simply won't work for me. For one thing, my tastes may meander far from the mainstream, and for another, I barely have any social network, let alone reliable game playing ones whose opinion I could/would trust.
So the next natural thought that occurs is: just how do I judge a game, then?
Well, I used to just type the name of the game + review into Google and scan through a bunch of reviews. These days, it's easier to shuffle along to Metacritic.
1) Check the Metacritic score.
Despite the second article's mournful criticism about the lack of a properly objective 1-10 scoring system, if one reads the metascore on a relative scale of 50-100, one can get a fairly good reading of the pulse of a game's popularity across game reviewers.
A 90+ score means it probably is pretty darn good and is a well-known company that may have possibly greased a few pockets here and there. 75-89 is decent. 60-74 means the game is middling to average, with possibly a few bugs and design problems here and there. 55-59 is on shaky ground. 45-54 means it's full of suck with one or two redeeming features. And below that, don't even bother - crap game, crap company that the reviewers didn't mind insulting for life, etc.
I'm fairly tolerant of giving most games a try, so anything 60+ passes the initial quality check. Below that means I must be really curious about a certain aspect and the game must be really cheap.
2) Check the metacritic User score and specific comments posted below.
This is generally unreliable, as it's a very small subset of users who bother to post, and most of them are either staunch lovers or haters to go through the trouble. The value is in comparing how far it deviates from the reviewer score.
A low reviewer score but high user score means it's a cult hit. A small subset of folk really love the damn game, and hopefully, in the comments below, you might be able to figure out exactly which aspects they like the game for.
Conversely, low user score and high reviewer score means something's possibly awry. Are there bugs and startup errors that prevent a portion of players from even getting past the install hurdle - would my system and I get affected by this? Maybe it's great for the first week, and then turns into a bundle of suck - which reviewers with their limited playtime would tend to miss.
If they're vaguely in agreement, then you can estimate if the game reviews, which will soon be read, are overhyping or underhyping, by how comparatively lower or higher the user score is.
3) Skim the selected comments from the reviews.
That gives some brief baseline coverage as to what various people thought of the game, and what the game features.
4) Check out IGN, Gamespot, and some random middle-score to low-score reviews.
I tend to avoid the highest scorers unless I'm curious to know what's so fantastic that a reviewer will gush about it. For a game that I'm totally hyped up about, I'd have read all the previews and reviews anyhow.
Despite the general sentiment that IGN and Gamespot are unreliable corporate review sellouts, I find both of them are quite useful in their description of general game features, to help me visualize what the game is about. I don't actually give much thought to the specific score (metacritic has already helped me with the numerical average). Subjectively, I find IGN to cover more the positive and negative aspects with more accuracy, Gamespot's descriptions tend to have more holes. User comments are also helpful to gauge the factualness of the review.
The random reviews give a sampling of what other folks thought about the game, and the low score ones on what the reviewers didn't like.
5) Mentally consolidate all the info gathered and do a gut feel "Do I want to try this game out?" versus a price comparison to see if it's worth buying at the current price.
My tastes are fairly eclectic. I like good FPSes, especially those with some sort of innovative gimmick. I'm not a terrible fan of 'great multiplayer play!' because the number of online FPSes I play regularly online can be counted on one hand, I need a semi-decent singleplayer.
RTSes are fine. As long as the camera isn't completely broken, the build tree and units are passably interesting, and the story is ok, I'd consider it. Lousy graphics and resolution is a minus, because in this day and age, all the eye candy is getting better.
Other strategy games I'm often intrigued by, though I know I can never maintain a hardcore focus on them for long, but it's just for the sake of trying them out. Ditto MMOs, adventure, sports and other indie games. Not a platforming fan, so it'll have to be good and different and talked about to consider.
6) If still undecided, try out a beta version or a demo if available.
I love games that offer this. It really helps to get the game clear in your head. I tried the Osmos demo and liked it enough to pick it up cheap. I tried Eufloria and didn't (too simplistic for the price.)
I wanted to pick up DEFCON, it's had rave reviews on metacritic, and right now, in a pack, it's priced at abt $2.50-$5.00 usd, which isn't horrible. Tried out the demo and decided against it. Objectively, it's quite aesthetically pleasing - haunting music, simple visuals, deep theme, and a strong multiplayer pvp challenge with considerable depth.
It just doesn't do much for me. It has a slow pace, with moments of aggravating micro (in the RTS sense of click unit, click order, click target, repeat on X amount of units) crunched into tense seconds. The depth is revealed in multiplayer challenges - and I have zilch people to play with (not going online to get beaten up, thanks.)
And ultimately, its design theme is aptly summed up by one 6-scoring dissident in the metacritic user comments. "The only way to win is not to play."
That's exactly how I feel playing DEFCON. Two opposing AI countries and I sat at relative peace for about 15 minutes, despite the DEFCON timer ratcheting down. The blue AI sent 1-2 ship fleets at me, which I surrounded and destroyed with my 3-5 fleets on standby. We sat, we waited, we waited some more. I got antsy and sent some fighter planes at the green AI's bases. They sent planes back, which got shot down by my anti-air. We waited some more. Finally I got impatient enough to test out sending a nuke, which triggered the obvious MAD retaliation chain, and the blue AI got into the act as well, and I ended the game before all the missiles had hit because it was painfully obvious that an aggressor would end up with all his cities in nuclear ruins, and if I didn't aggress, then we would just sit there locked in "finger over red button" standoff for all of eternity until my computer monitor blacked out or CPU gave way. It's a moral message, to be sure, but not a $5 game.
Gratuitous Space Battles was something I else I was attracted to. The graphics weren't to my taste, but the premise sounded spiffy enough. Alas, on trying it out, there was way too much fiddling with small objects to design your own ship and stat reading and tweaking sliders and designing AI combat scripts. Ie. Design for 30-60 minutes, hit the "Play" button and watch it all resolve (or not - return to drawing board.) Some folks like that sort of strategic play, I don't. End of game purchase consideration.
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As to 1984 out of 10's complaint, I'm afraid I don't see what the big issue is. Seems like it's human nature to not to want to say anything bad, so you have to read scores on a relative, not absolute, scale.
On a score of 1-5, practically everyone puts 4's if they vaguely liked it. They put 3's if they're neutral or so-so about it. 5's are the one's you know they want to highlight. And they must really not be happy in order to score 1 or 2.
So just map the 5-10 or 50-100 score back onto a 1-10 absolute scale if it makes you happy. What's the big deal?
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