[QUOTE="Kevin-V"]
Supreme Commander is a beast. We write reviews for everyone that would conceivably be interested in playing the game, not just those with high-powered machines and one-day-old hardware. Nowhere in the review do we act as if everyone has a "piss-poor pc," but it would be an absolute disservice if we didn't take performance into account. You may be fortunate enough to have the most recent and expensive hardware, but our review is aimed at anyone who would consider spending fifty bucks on Supreme Commander, not just those so proud of their system requirements that they place them in their forum signature. Subcritical
First, I'd like to know how a reviewer is going to determine how many points to take off? How old of a machine should be considered worthy of playing a game? Why does the reviewer think they have the power to determine what hardware a developer should design for? Wouldn't it just be better to say that a game will run poorly for older machines, and let the general public decide whether or not to buy the game?
When did Gamespot come up with the idea to even take points off for games that have high system requirements? I'd like to know how may points you took off for FEAR. FEAR came out in 2005. Its minimum system requirement for RAM is 512mb. Many average people didn't, or still don't have 512mb of RAM. Did the game score suffer because Monolith and Sierra decided to make a game that requires at least 512mb of RAM?
When Gamespot writes a review for a console and gives the game a great score for graphics after the reviewer plays the game on an HDTV, what considerations do you make for the multitude of people that don't have high-end HDTV's? The game may look like crap to them. Sure the console is capable of producing the great graphics, but the TV is part of the experience, and hardware for console gamers. So when a reviewer is lauding the graphics of a console game, like with PC reviews, they should mention that an HDTV makes the game look best, and lower end TV's won't look as good, and as a result may affect the overall experience with the game.
I think the best way for Gamespot to handle this is to inform people how the game runs on low, medium, and high-end hardware. Just like they should let people know what to expect from an Xbox 360 game running on an old TV. Not everyone has HDTV for their console.
Gamespot is judging the quality of the game, not the quality of hardware required to run a game. Judging the quality of hardware is a slippery slope with many parameters open to debate. Who put Gamespot in charge of determining how a game should run on given hardware? Pentium III, Pentium II? Geforce GTS, on board Intel Video?
Doing that is bad news, my friend.
You ask a lot of questions as to the methodology that GameSpot should use to deduct points for games that simply run poorly on average gaming rigs. I personally think, as with regards to criterion like Gameplay and Tilt, that is completely up to the editor to judge whether the fault is enough to be detrimental to gameplay on a wider scale.
PC Gaming should not just pander to the elite, the ones that either have the funds, or sacrifice much to become part of that community. Though that sounds like a normative statement, for a gamer, especially for online play, it is more fun for you to play a larger community in an online match than it is a smaller community. It's difficult to say otherwise. And for single player games (ie. Oblivion), having a large and active community may increase the livelihood of your game through user-created content, mods and other such alterations.
Dude, you're asking for GameSpot to create a new level of standardization upon their existing framework, but sometimes that takes away from a person's opinion. Sure it's great to get some objective information and let the audience decide, but a large point of a review is to see how an industry professional sees a game, given their experience and know-how (or else they would not have been hired to do what they do).
And you asked, "Who put Gamespot in charge of determining how a game should run on given hardware? Pentium III, Pentium II? Geforce GTS, on board Intel Video?" My answer is that you do. You put GameSpot in charge when you read their reviews, visit their website and spread the word (go advertising dollars!). GameSpot is not a definitive or divine measuring tool for videogames, they are simply one source, and they become as powerful as you or me make it.
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