Split Second Velocity, but not that I think positive reviews would have saved the game, I think 2010 was a clusterfuck for developers stemming from 2008 holiday release season which was stacked with quality releases that all underperformed expectations despite modest sales and decent reviews. It was because of that 2008 holiday season that developers started sweating releasing their titles around Call of Duty's release, so come 2009, developers pushed their late 2009 releases to early 2010... so in order to avoid competing with COD, early 2010 was one of the most packed release windows we'd ever seen, so by avoiding competition they ironically created one of the most competitive release windows. Worth noting this is the same year that once Red Dead Redemption and Super Mario Galaxy 2 released, nothing else mattered after that.
As for Split Second Velocity, nothing could have been enough to outshine the months of releases that came before it, and despite the rest of the year being rather tame, Red Dead Redemption and Mario Galaxy 2 just couldn't leave much room for anything else to be considered after that. Also worth noting, Blur released from Bizarre Creations. These two racers were often mixed up by people really paying neither mind, again, the year was an awful year to get noticed, and both games would lead to the failures of their developers.
That being said, reviews were mixed, but one constant regurgitated complaints was the game's AI rubberbanding. Now as someone who loved the game, I found the AI rubberbanding made it an intense white knuckle racer, and the vehicular combat was better off for it. Seems kind of unfair too because if there's any racing game that deserves to have this mentioned it's about every Mario Kart game ever made, but those are all widely praised, quite a double standard. And I don't want to say this criticism is unfair, whatever, it stunk to me of reviewers being terribly unoriginal, and essentially just copying off each other in a very unprofessional manner. Reviewers don't seem content to give their own opinions, just wait for someone else to set the tone and copy. No surprise issues like review plagiarism have surfaced over years because honestly it's gone unchecked forever. But even beyond that, it was exposed that game reviewers were using some kind of Google community feature to coordinate their review criticisms and scores which I dunno if that was ever addressed or if these asshats in our gaming media just continued such behavior under the radar.
And it really makes me wonder when shit like Ryse reviews came out on the XB1 launch. The game got railed. I understand the XB1 was already fighting a losing battle from their launch priorities with Kinect, a less powerful system, their always online DRM whatever, but the game reviews shouldn't have been a motivating factor to needle a game to death for proxy reasons. Given the reviews were so bad across the board, I was curious how bad it was when I grabbed it cheap just to see how bad it was... to my surprise, it was actually pretty damn awesome. But one thing I remember from the plethora of condemnation the game received in its time was nonstop criticisms of players being inundated with invisible walls, like oh they are all running into them by accident. I never once encountered such an issue my whole time playing. But, it's more of a problem with game reviewers and it got brought up over and over again.
I fully expect the millions of man-children who make up the gaming community to believe things about games they've never played and to regurgitate those feelings as if it's the truth... well, that's just an inherent feature of the gaming community we'll never get away from. Professional game reviewers on the other hand, it's their job to make independent reviews, and they've been increasing less capable of doing such as years gone by.
If people remember the fallout of the Kane and Lynch GameSpot review debacle, where the GameSpot reviewer was fired after giving the game a less favorable review, and worth noting the site had taken a large sum of ad revenue to promote the game, there was a major upheaval among gamers about the ethics of game reviews and influence of ad revenues. Funny enough, I felt prior to this game reviews were at their best. Lots of great games are not universally loved by everyone, reading the variances was a positive things, if someone liked a game for whatever reason, or didn't like it, you could read reviews and make a determination by what people liked or didn't whether it still suits their needs and make better informed purchasing decisions.
These days I feel game reviewers have less creative independence or capability to give their own take before it just becomes everyone saying what everyone else says because their too afraid to exercise any editorial independence. Then there's the issue of readers of gaming sites who flip out if a game got a 8/10 and saying they'll never come back again because of how offended they are the good score a game got wasn't better. Now, content creation panders too much to viewers bias confirmation that reviewers are essentially left to tell people what they want to hear. Ironically, while everyone else was praising the shit state of Cyberpunk 2077 launched in, GameSpot gave it a 7/10 and people went apeshit, and even then that game got a GS score that was very generous to what everyone soon discovered was a fucking mess of issues but at least that reviewer was more honest about the game than all the others. And everyone else that gave the game a great review should have taken heat but I'm sure they were thankful CDPR took most the ire after launch, there was no accounting for all the reviewers showing no backbone about the game's shit state. Instead this stupid narrative like it was only bad one consoles, PC was fine... no, fucking no no no, dumbest fucking line ever uttered and it's been uttered a lot.
I don't even know if I can ever trust game reviews anymore because the social dynamics of reviews are complex, but safe to say reviewers at large are incapable of giving independent reviews not influenced by either the other reviews of other professional game reviewers who get their reviews out first, and trying to balance that with pandering to the bias confirmation of their audience that expect a game to do well based on its hype.
All reviews now are bullshit. It might be superficial but mostly if a game catches my eye, I'll mostly just watch gameplay videos, just long unedited gameplay videos to see if it looks like something I'd like. I mostly skim game reviews just for red flags of anything problematic in performance and functionality, then after that I drown the rest out, jump in to see for myself.
What I miss most about older gaming media is there were so many games and not all had the big budgets behind them, finding something enjoyable was a bit of a hunt. And in early days of YouTube my favorite content creators were people who'd be like - oh, here's a game you probably never heard of but I'm going to tell you why you might like it. It was people sharing the things they enjoyed with others. Now everyone is a goddamn killjoy Nazi telling others why they shouldn't enjoy the stuff they'd might enjoy without being lobbied to death to feel otherwise, everyone has to have an opinion on everything gaming related and that opinion can't be anything between high praise or utter condemnation cranked to 11.
Lastly, I want to blame system warring gaming fanboys. Not at large, they'd pretty much always existed for years, but since 8th gen onward, I feel more and more of these people have have infested the ranks of professional game review sites largely due to the influences of NeoGAF acting as a Sony fanboy safe-space circle-jerk while also acting as the water cooler for industry insiders. Back when professional gaming sites and YouTube personalities shamelessly regurgitated the carefully curated talking points on NeoGAF into their content and this is certainly the point where independent thinking in the gaming community died for good, without a doubt.
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