Colin Moriarty - "Journalist do as much as they can to sell games for Nintendo."

Shallow in what sense?

Mechanically not only are its systems inventive, but they are deceptive at the same time. Allowing for plenty of options in their possibility space. There is a clear gap in player efficiency between those that know how to consistently time their kid to squid swim routines, the maps are diverse with their own unique qualities, while still being properly thought out for symmetrical play and options for a host of different weapon types to be successful. Said weapons being different actually has meaningful impact as the games mobility option make any weapon/play style viable in the correct team-comp, and you have genuine escape routes.

Which you don't have in actual shallow shooters like say Uncharted or Call of Duty, where the ADS nature of the shooting slows the game down, and it becomes a game of who saw who first. Never mind the cheap power ups in those games.

Throw in a rank mode with modes that actually require some coordination from your team (yes an area they fucked up with no voice chat), and it's the furthest thing from shallow unless you're wildly ignorant of what the term "depth" means in video games, or shooters in general.

Yeah the game got a good marketing push, it also did well, because it's genuinely well made. Same thing with Rocket League.

What makes it shallow? I'm legit curious I never played the game and you're the first one who said it was shallow.

Are you saying something negative about BOTW? Because if you are, I am going to burn your house down.

BoTW rubbed me the wrong way with the weapon system the first couple of hours I played it. It took me a while to find a way to really work all of the mechanics in combat and find a happy spot to work in. After that, the frustrations subsided pretty quickly and I truly LOVE the game now.

You're talking about a medium that routinely can't wring a review, that even remotely comes close even describing the core gameplay. Not the experience of play, the actual core gameplay. Because I assure you, really think about the reviews you read, and honestly try to pretend they even nail something as basic as explaining what the core gameplay is. Because that's bullshit.

I get where he is coming from and it happens all too often.

Remember when Rooster Teeth called out reviewers dissing fallout 4? Specifically Jeff Gerstmann giving it a 4/5. (I know what a bad score) The problem is RT did a video podcast bashing reviewers saying negative things about fallout 4, all while wearing pip boys on their arms!!! And having ads and other video content about Fallout 4.

With Nintendo, they pick and choose who gets to review their games with captured gameplay. (At least on Youtube) So in a way Nintendo is controlling what people are saying about their games.

It's not cool. For what Nintendo is doing and what gaming "Journalists" do as well.

@KungfuKitten: There's a whole host of reasons to mistrust user scores, primarily because you can't trust the motivation for why they exist in the first place, but also because wherever you take them from, they only represent one particular site and even if you were to aggregate them, they skew even more drastically to the extremes of the rating scale.

But that illustrates Colin's point: is there a motivation to skew Nintendo games higher or is it just consequential?

It's all a hub-bub over very little in the end, but there are elements of it that are worth considering with respect to broadcast and internet media/news generally.

Well there you go.

butthurt insecre cow confirmed.

not sure why cows get so defensive, it's just Zelda... I guess they "Require" the best game this gen or bust.

Splatoon is paint guns meets lazer tag, with a cute art style. I'm sure being free would have helped but ya can't give everything away. Perhaps I am crazy. But if being sane means having your sour perspective then I'd rather be nuts.

Because star fox zero, paper mario color splash, metroid prime federation force, and tri force heroes all got this amazing "nintendo free pass?"

BOTW is literally the first game in a long time people have raved about that's come from Nintendo's camp.

But when they do succeed it's a vast conspiracy. This is so much damage control it's not even funny anymore it's plain sad.

This is System Wars, not "insane conspiracy place".

Just as a reference: I grew up on Sega systems, I didn't really enjoy the Zelda series and I don't really like open world games. And I LOVE BotW. It is just THAT good. Check out my profile. I only played a few hours of FO4 or RDR and I played more BotW than both combined. It's just THAT good.

@jg4xchamp: I choose to not be cynical, because it's the easy way out of exploring the issue. For those who are competent critics, they are not beyond the premises of the position Colin M. is advancing.

I dunno, I think he could have a point. I too have a Nintendo bias as I grew up with them and sure want them to succeed. I don't wanna buy their platforms any longer though so haven't kept up. Played Wind Waker and Twilight Princess last year and thought they were great tbh. Hard to say if the rankings was fair as the industry moves so quickly forward.

When it comes to Breath of the Wild I haven't played it, but followed it a bit and it sounds crazy that he could make a judgment based on a couple of hours. From my understanding the brilliance lies in step by step uncovering the mechanics behind the world and figure stuff out. This process almost by definition takes time so his gut feel review seems pretty stupid.

That said I haven't played it at all so it could be me who is way off :).

You're nuts! Paint gun and laser tag is fun irl, not in a video game. The only ones that would consider the art style as "cute" are 5y old girls using a gaming controller for their first time

Honestly you hit the nail on the head. Wow.

Reviewers always describe the experience which varies from one individual to another. They never bother describing and critiquing the core mechanics which are the same for everyone.

That's why game reviews suck so much. They try to describe an experience like a movie review but gaming is an interactive medium so that doesn't exactly work there.

Who doesn't love squids?

Two things

1. It goes without saying if Nintendo was working on stronger tech, they'd have a more technically impressive game to go with it to boot. So this weird little "it would look exactly like that' misses the point.

2. No, it's still fundamentally fun in video games, because that's what shooters have always been multiplayer wise. The video game version of laser tag.

that's why there are reviewers like angryjoe, the most hated person on SW. He is the one that goes into details of what works and what doesn't.

Too much useless fluff in his reviews and I don't have time to sit 30 minutes to listen to a guy who takes 10 minutes to describe something that would have taken 3 minutes for someone more articulate.

After that, not a single person.

This is what happens when critics are no longer educated in the fields they critique. Movies have suffered the same fate. Nobody talks about cinematography, editing, sound, dialogue, writing, or the nuance of a performance. It's all gut reactions of did I like it, did I hate it.

Cynicism is a by product of actually going through the trouble of gaining knowledge about a subject.

Colin's argument is thin without any evidence, because "hur durr these Zelda games that objectively have glaring issues" isn't an argument, it's the same argument that can be applied to so many games that aren't Nintendo. It's a notion without any backing, it's an argument presented with "well Zelda is totally not a 98", yeah as someone who thinks you can make a good argument the game is an 8/10, I'm inclined to agree with that general statement, but that doesn't mean anything.

98 metascore means nothing, because it's not a score. It's an average using variables that aren't all created equal. Any self respecting math teacher could tell you how atrocious of a concept Metacritics score is.

Does the media have its bias? Sure, but the bias is more a symptom. The disease is that they don't criticize, because for starters they don't know how to criticize games, since they go out of their way to express how little know they know about games.

His channel is called angryjoe*show*. Without the filler, its not much a show.

Great point. Hadn't thought about it this way.

Honestly with game reviews, I'd like more reasoned points. Opinions in reviews typically trail off without any reasoning, explanation, discussion, rebuttal or suggestion. They're just statements with maybe a single layer of reasoning.

It's not really enough for me, personally. That's why I don't read them and wait for essays and videos from a small handful of sources that engage me.

Superbunnyhop, Projared, The Completionist, Matthewmatosis, The gamingbrit, Turbobutton, Joseph Anderson can all discuss their topics without the need of a skit. Varying degrees of run time, but they also do a much better job than just doing the typical game review+x or y features the game is missing.

Not saying Joe doesn't work hard or that he doesn't provide a service, but he's a product review at best. He's only good if you judge your games in a "how long is it" manner. Pure design conversation he is so wildly outclassed.

True dat. Was boasting about the length of his videos in his boo-hoo Nintendo video.

Sound and fury.

Film criticism while definitely regressing, hasn't gotten nearly that bad. You can find plenty of sources for exceptional film critique. For good written games critique? Chris Wagar, Simon Parkin, and after that maybe Tom Chick if you want to enjoy the video game equivalent of Armond White.

@jg4xchamp:

Mark Brown dude! Mark is the man. Can you add him to your lovely list? :)

I agree with him about Splatoon. Game wouldn't sell shit on any other platform.

lol, the salt is amazing here.

Hey Colin, did the Vita outsell the 3DS like it was destined to?

I'm subscribed to like a billion people ;p

But sure Mark Brown's Game Maker Toolkit is great stuff. He can run into some vague descriptions of systems as much as the next guy, but all around it's exceptional stuff.

@jg4xchamp:

I'm okay with a smidgen of vagueness especially when he makes slight digressions, but it's also in favor of keeping videos between 8 and 11 minutes long.

They are great, short little brain stimulations. :)

Did you ever try Sunder? He did a good piece of Shovel Knight level design. Not sure how his other videos fair but that's a good watch. Here

@jg4xchamp: Fair enough, and you may well be right - I certainlu don't disagree that industry reviewers are not cream of the crop, in a number of instances. And there are plenty of ways to poke holes in their credibility.

Where the breakdown occurs between the words expressed and the numerical attribution. Several reviews I read of Zelda all noted the performance and control issues, but dismissed them as inconsequential. How should a reviewer reconcile objective flaws from their subjective analysis? And what is the reason or motivation for allowing one's subjectivity to dominate the final calculation?

It's my view (I won't prescribe it to Colin, but I imagine he'd likely agree) that most reviewers more readily compensate franchises to which they have a natural affinity and dismiss reflecting their criticisms either to further propagate the idolization of their preferred games or, perhaps more offensive, to draw more clicks and generate greater revenue for their outlet. Either way it's disingenuous.

haha people like this dude are just comical. yeah, everyone else's perception is tainted by an insurmountable bias but, oh no, not you. you see through the fog and view their games for what they are. pedestalizing your own opinion in such a way is great way of making yourself look like a clown.

i wouldn't even argue that nintendo games are looked at with rose tinted glasses. i mean, they are easily one of the more polarizing gaming companies, ime the general perception of nintendo's games is typically binary and quite rigidly so.

says he's only played botw for a couple of hours and then claims that to be enough to extrapolate the full experience the game has to offer. c'mon, breh. his assertions come off more like a salty fanboy than a journalist presenting a well reasoned argument.

There is no strategy to Splatoon, its run around until you die, respawn, repeat (with killstreaks of course). There is no meaningful coordination because Nintendo doesnt give the tools (other than "come on" or "booyeah"). There is no voice chat, pre-round planning, or changing during the round, if you are a team of all snipers, good luck. The team comp is never a focus in the game and nobody coordinates together for it to be advantageous. Splatoon is exactly the same as call of duty, its all twitch shooting and the power ups are cheap (some are literally invincibility for shooting the ground). The ranked mode consists of rushing to the point and staying with it, thats not depth, there isnt any working with your teammates in a smart manor. Its really sad when you compare it to games like counter-strike and overwatch where team comp, communication, holding choke points, ect are all important aspects of the game. Splatoon doesnt have anything close to strategic play, its call of duty with ink (which I think ink has a really wasted potential it could have been really strategic to place ink in spots)

Very likely, but i do not really care and neither should you. If you like a game, you like a game.

I agree that the high-profile Nintendo games and the Nintendo hardware in general is favored among most journalists and thus gets a favorable bias, but that's about it. I don't think most of them actively try to push more Nintendo products onto people and the lower-profile Nintendo games are scored fairly.

Mario and Zelda usually have a slight bias to them though when being reviewed. That's probably because those series spark a lot of nostalgic memories with the journalists and critics. That's just a natural bias we all have over games of our childhood. I see a lot of journalists who have been big Sony fans since the PS1 pull the same stuff with newer PS4 games. Gushing over exclusives like The Last of Us and Horizon to a pretty high level. Also the rare one trying to push Killzone as a serious AAA shooter franchise. That's always funny.

Microsoft probably has the least amount of biased journalists. That's partly because the Microsoft platforms never really sold well on their games. The Xbox had Halo and that's about it while the 360 relied heavily on 3rd party games for its sales. Microsoft also has Windows which gives people a lot of reason to dislike them as Microsoft has pulled off some scummy shit with that OS over the years.

You're right, but it wouldn't fit Colin's description. Because several reviewers can recognize "yeah the shooting exactly all that great in Red Dead Redemption" in podcasts weeks, months later. You know, something that is fundamental to what the player is going to be doing on the mandatory content in the game. Something they will have to do if they are going to enjoy the "exceptional" story, and I know this is the part where people pretend that "blah blah subjective"

But, it is a fact that if you try to shoot in Red Dead free aim, that cursor is far too loose n wonky to work properly on analog sticks. It is a fact that due to the auto lock on, you can easily do the wack-a-mole routine, by getting behind cover, then hitting the aim button which automatically locks you on, kill, get back behind cover, and rinse n repeat till everyone does. It's a fact that the enemy outside of throwing grenades don't do much to push you forward or around the map. Anyone saying those are lies, either didn't play the game, didn't pay attention, or really wants to apologize for Red Dead. And that game is what on Metacritic, like a 96? Shit ton of 10 out of 10s, 9 out of 9s.

Point I'm trying to make: The 3 of us probably agree on the bold, the difference is that I think it's merely a symptom. The larger problem, they are just bad critics. The fact that they are blown away by pretty visuals and "the aesthetic qualities of a game" stuff, that without compelling interactions, is just fluff. The fact that they think stories are even on the same level as the gameplay as far as its importance to what makes a good game, speaks of their poor virtues in this medium.

I'm not saying you can't give a game with framerate issues a 10 out of 10, (although I don't think there are control issues with Zelda) or even incapable of arguing why lock on combat can be enjoyable, but that shit requires a well rounded argument, and most reviews do not present an argument. Sterling's review for instance, I didn't give a shit that he didn't like weapon breaks, more power to him on that, But his shrines criticism in how they break immersion, and how he then didn't expand upon it. He never explained how its immersion breaking, the why, the what it makes worse for being the way it is. None of it. Ditto the weapon breaks, that he needed a video to explain (poorly), when his profession and years of experience should have translated to him being more than capable to do it in written words.

They learned one way to do a review in the 90s, and never actually got better at this shit. And their defense for it all, the get out of jail free card "it's all subjective"...when in reality there are plenty of objective understandings about video games that they should recognize. On a fundamental level a critic shouldn't necessarily be useful if I agree with them or not, their true value is if they can elevate my knowledge and understanding of the medium. The best film critics can do that, I doubt anyone can really say that about Eurogamer, Edge, or anyone.

Can't speak for CoD (well, the new ones after MW2) but in Uncharted seeing your enemy first matters for jack shit. Even in UC3, arguably the weakest MP they made in the series (though after 2 years of support it got somewhat better) with unbalanced run and gun mechanics, it didn't matter for jack shit. The amount of times I avoided death and got killed after being seen first and seeing the enemy first (respectively) was ridiculous.

Unless you have a 1HK weapon, of which there are only a few in each game, it actually gives you a lot of chances to run away (mostly thanks to the sheer verticality of most maps) + the rolling mechanic.

In turf war? sure.

In Squad battle or Tower Control, yeah no dice. As someone who played with a group on skype, there are plenty of advantages to being coordinated. More to it the nature of the game mode dictates that a more unified team will roll over a weaker one, and given how weapons work in that game, you have light team comp elements that other games don't have.

A fundamental design failure on Nintendo's part for not having basic features? I agree

But, it's not because of how the game actually plays, it on the opposite side absolutely allows for that stuff.

"And it's all just rush to the point" is a lazy description for any game mode like king of the hill or CTF or assault, yeah if you play carelessly sure. But when playing in a proper group, it's a non issue. Otherwise, sure, I agree that it's missing basic shit that would have only improved the game. But it's not a shallow game, the complaint is more feature set, not gameplay depth.

This is objectively wrong. Because even Quake is twitch shooting, but Quake allows mobility and has bigger health bars. CoD is all low TTKs, where in Splatoon you absolutely modify how long it'll take to kill you, or how fast you move in ink, and in CoD you have no escape paths, in Splatoon so long as there is ink in the area you can always give yourself an escape path. And those abilities are on a timer, and one offs. They aren't a by product of rewarding the player for playing uber conservative (Like camping in MW1 n MW2), they are more in line with Ults, admittedly yes, Overwatch is more committed to its class based mp nature. Throw in the part where one is a game of hitscan weapons, and the other is projectiles. And you have plenty of fundamental, objective differences that "Cod with ink" is a really shitty and wildly incorrect description.

Try again sport.

my goodness this guy just goes on and on making assertions about nintendo's reputability and resultant positive bias without giving any support to those claims. lol why are we taking what this guy has to say seriously.

"there's just no way that's a 98...NO WAY."

yup, rock solid argument there lol

Bullshit, once you get a M4 (UC2), or even a Fal for that matter,and you had that perk that improved your ADS, you were golden at wrecking people unless you really suck at shooting. The basic rolling will save your ass for a little bit, but as far as TTKs are concerned, it's definitely shorter side of things.

4 is a little bit better in the sense that you seem to have more health to work with in mp than usual, but then it also has those mystical shits, which are LOL territory.

Bro. I played, literally, hundreds of hours between all 3 MP modes (UC2, UC3, UC4). In none, did I ever at any point feel that as soon as I saw anyone it was an insta +1 kill for me or that being seen was an insta +1 death for me. And it really wasn't. If people knew how to roll away and use the level, a chase was always needed (which sometimes backfires, of course).

UC2 got somewhat broken after patch 1.5, but not to that point.

Also, if you're dying to mysticals in UC4 you're doing it wrong. Roll away bro! Roll away like a glorious duck (that's what ducks do right?)!

Well he did play one hour of breath of the wild. Obvious expert.

I think back to the times certains teams absolutely decimated my team and I strongly disagree. I don't even dare go into rank mode anymore.

That said, yes people can master any game but Splatoon does indeed have strategy. Matches aren't a toss up, there's no blue shell to even things out. If you suck or you're new you will lose to the best players.

I love how the assumption is that i must be dying to them, I don't, I'm pretty solid at the game, but I don't care for a lot of things in modern mp games. Perks are inherently lame because they separate the players who didn't play a lot from the people who did. Static games like Halo, Unreal, Quake, whatever are all around better mp games, because

A: the skill at the game is the true selling point
B: It's actually balanced on some level. So you and me playing isn't a product of well I played more, I have cooler shit. That's a non-issue. If you can actually outgun me and use the tools better, you'll win.

So that's my beef with mysticals or buddies. Does it add some chaos n fun? Sure, same way items do in Mario Kart n Smash Bros. But Mario Kart isn't exactly balanced, and skillfull n balanced play in smash is when those items are off. It's the same reason I thought the chopper was bitch tier in CoD4, really? You need a chopper to get kills for you? It made kill streaks in that series unimpressive. Where as getting a killing frenzy in Halo always feel satisfying.

And I dropped UC3 like a bad habit, but UC2 was easy street. Between that op as **** melee, to that ADS perk you could only get away from so much. Especially on the maps that let me get a dragonov.

Overwatch's asymetrical stuff works, because you're just one piece on a team of 6.

Thats assuming youre playing with friends. I dont know many people who shelled out for a wii u, so I havent played with people I know (though I shouldnt have to use skype to fix the game). Even if there are elements of team comp, there is no way to implement it when there is no way to coordinate

again there are no proper groups, everyone runs around mindlessly. This may be a difference in opinion because I'm playing with randoms, but its never been smart play. Just because the aspects are there doesnt make the game smart when you cant use them. It devolves into mindless run-and-gun gameplay. Also playing with friends always makes a game better

Ink is the most strategic the game gets I will give it that, but it never changes the running around, lone-wolf mentality. I think splatoon also rewards people for camping (ive seen quite a few people hide in ink behind corners and pop out, which is worse cause you actually cant see them at first). It has the mentality of a call of duty game, thats more what im referring to. The its CoD with ink statement was a gross simplification, I was in the middle of something and didnt want to launch into a rant, that ones on me.

The song I sing in my head when the Internet goes bananas over video games' review scores.

I think he might be right when it comes to this gen with Nintendo.