Gaming News, Reviews, Podcasts, And More
We have a gameplan this week but that doesn’t stop us from spending the last 45 minutes of the podcast yammering about movies, anime, comics, video games, super heroes and other stuff. We can’t help ourselves!
24:23 – The Nintendo Switch’s myriad hardware issues
42:35 – Game companies don’t want anyone fixing their hardware but them
51:23 – Nintendo wins lawsuit against maker of flash carts
57:12 – Valve won’t count your review score for any Steam game you obtained for free
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Valve really hates me. At least they hate the way I use Steam. They also hate others like me. It’s sad really, but that is the impression I have received from Valve’s recent changes to Steam.
So let’s explore who I am and why that means that Valve hates me. I am a gamer. I love to play games. I have spent many hundreds of dollars on games and who knows how much on consoles. I bought a $1,000 gaming computer four years ago that is still going strong. I have bought a few hundred dollars worth of PC games and play them quite often. The PC is probably my most played gaming system. I have 206 games in my Steam library.
Despite all the above, Valve hates me.
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It is a story as old as time. A game critic criticizes a highly anticipated and fan loved game. Metacritic attempts to aggregate the review and messes up. Then angry gamers freak out in the worst possible manner.
So let’s lay out some details. Michael Thompson wrote a critical review of Uncharted 4. In this he writes that U4 is an inevitable but unneeded fourth installment in a game trilogy. He criticizes it further by stating, “The games have always struck me as garish more than gorgeous, more interested in overwhelming the senses than communicating with them.” Overall, this is nothing more than someone who is not a fan of the series writing up his thoughts. Something that is ultimately harmless. Sadly, some people don’t see it that way.
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On this week’s show (episode 167) hosts Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight discuss the latest GamePolitics poll (“Which type of game review most influences your purchasing decisions?” – 13:49), Polygon and Kill Screen’s reactions to a nearly all male jury for this year’s Game Awards (25:50), Kotaku being blacklisted by Bethesda and Ubisoft (40:10), and YouTube’s new fair use initiative (52:35).
Earlier this week, Ben Kuchera of the Penny-Arcade Report got into some trouble over a review he wrote about the game Beyond: Two Souls. In that review, he found the gameplay to not be engaging or fun and the story to be derivative and weak, to put it mildly. However the main point of contention was not his final opinion on the game, but rather on the fact that he didn’t play the game all the way through.
This got me thinking, does a game reviewer have to play the whole game in order to write the final review? Should game reviewers be forced to play terrible games all the way through before telling the world they are terrible? Would you expect your friend to have played a game all the way through before telling you to not waste your time or money on it? Would you be willing to sit and play a game you are not enjoying all the way through before saying you are done? Why do we have such high expectations of game reviewers when we don’t set the for ourselves or close friends?
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