What you do you think you mean, exactly, when you say "complete experience"? And how do you define value? The time it takes to beat a game? The raw amount of content? Dragon Age is stuffed with content, but the vast majority of it is filler combat not worth one battle experienced, much less a thousand or so.

The notion that because a game is shorter than another it doesn't have as much value is deluded, frankly. Hotline Miami is extremely short in comparison with any of the Final Four, but I would argue that its quality and originality makes it superior to any of them.

What good is a 60 hour game if, for the most part, you do the same sh*t over and over again? Or, if a game is better for the four hours it lasts than that 60 hour game ever is in all its grand obesity, which game is superior? Obviously the better game; if it truly is good, truly better than the others, then you'll want to play it again and again, or, perhaps, it will be so good that you will be satisfied immensely by a short and excellent time spent with it.

I felt that Braid was a great game, and provided much more "bang for my buck" than any Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, or Borderlands title ever did. I have not played Journey or The Walking Dead, but that's beside the point; your claims are inherently flawed.

One more reason why I object to gun ownership. I know it's practically impossible to take them away in US now, but it is one of the reasons I have no interest in spending a prolonged period of time in US.funsohng

Not really... many options there... could, for example, reward with tax incentives the surrendering of firearms... or simply use bigger guns to make the people with smaller guns turn in their guns... if, for example, homosexuals were to unite against this issue, who knows the progress we could see...

I feel like I'm being skull f*cked trying to read through that. jg4xchamp

Bachoo, I Have Your Father

Teloofa en Manabra
Te Calla Moofoo Nabra
Est Panepas
Le Barito
Maynoo Cadabra Es En Lico Springs
Baloofa Ten Estraba
Pachoo Que Le Hudabra
Benchookoo
Le Manoofoo
Hadabadas Eh-da Lacka Ching

In the seventh century of the war, when men were fallen, battled, and estas whores and vagrants made their way unto the lika-falk streams
Then came a sudden rushing
A feeling
Beyond preparation
And all fell without elation
In the dawn of the
Sudden Things

Forever I regretted the thousand year difference between She and I (for evermore, evermore, I must refer to Us as such) and slapped a liptant daisy on each and every line I crossed. What then of it, my brothers? Was the world made so much different? So much different you and I and the circles we've established, so much different for the words and for the language that we've used? I think it not so mad a science.

Madness cried the fiend, utter madness! For what is this that you have brought before me but other than and other that the thing I saw once proffered, the answer and the question tied in bundle quite extricate! I know, I know, I have foreseen and have foretold. The end of the world my darling b*tch, occuring in a glass.

Then the various professors and digniteries were shot through their massive swollen heads with any variety of sniper's rifles, executed on the grounds and place that Chuck-E-Cheese first fell.

Then Daffy Duck, rising from his penambulant and increasingly pretentiously titled place of rest came to the forefront saying:

LO THOU ART A BISCUIT, F*CK.

I KNOW NOT SO MANY WORDS YET, F*CK.

Vengeance, mad sweet vengeance, sick in design, lovely in execution, oh the flowing walls of MATHALEE how I'vee and seen thee fall!

Bachoo, thou too art fallen!

Bachoo, I have your father!

And ne'er again, yes, ne'er again, shall the Savannahs so be opened!

weekendly three potters take an hour to tie down arrangements of flowers for the afternoon. Nestor calls; Kingdom Animalia gathered in the roots of a cypress. Shield and soldier by the African stars will advance. A scholar has been stabbed to death. Swarthedly loving the reeds from the thin silt growing she takes the water into her mouth and spurts it out over the surface. The logs gathered tightly together.

Observance of ritual and rite you know it must be so simple that the blood and the anger and I knew it was him before she told me that she was in the hands of another knew for a certainty that there was something afoot now he is in her mouth lips and fingers and body and all and the great chapel opens its doors once more where the sages remain unattendedly digressing into subjects of aquafiers and the purification of southeastern swamp waters easier to than the west where we agree there has been a changing of the guard Adam Pestrama takes ounces of displeasure in the goat-rod affair knowing little of what the television says yes I said I will happily be there in the way by the road and the Queen of South Afrique and the Table of Bembus with her lips she was looking her eyes were too wide how can they so open be dishonest dark blue pools lightening with the sun and when I laid her down I loved to see her eyes expectant body flush squirming she could not remain wide awake her eyes drifiting into a nothern void black space over the tundra stars peeking in in their colors I knew I could no longer wait push push push there was nothing to do or remain or to say open hours open quarters the shopping fashlay on the sunday when there was nothing and the lunch and the warm light in winter skylight early night going home to the place where wait monday coming by rocket-ship to yesterday hazzabir purple sun-fall clouds a murkey blue and the swamp water semi-purified swimming and the clean fresh-fleshed gator alive twisting tumbling wanton of the nations. Increasingly sorrow in midnight regale await for the courtyard the moonlight attache'.

University callards soon after a rain frogs carry over, sonambulant plains, in the doctra-nation-after-swimmish-affairs we notice unusually a moment auf-clears and the way that you looked to me I think was impossible to wonder about I asked you take take it you told me al eye, in the worst of purse-way-shuns alabastard pale the Mountain of Horace the green elem faters, never I knew a less honest affair I was with you at the pool hwne the man grew his teeth we sat and I showed you the table with my feet, smooth like I wanted you then to suck me lips soft and wet moist I want want very so I could have savannah skyline the aspermint toll was fately crusacia, never anull, coobamat loshers, hooke-hooke! Lammafole.

Obviously insane, this writings constitute the last and desperate pleas of a drug-addicted nutjob predicting Earth's very demise. Far from looking forward to it, or even simply dreading it, this classical psychopath seems to relish the idea that the apocalypse itself shall be consumed by another; that, in the wake of its destruction, a new apocalypse shall arise to take the place of the prior. He anticipates not the end of the world, but the end of all worlds and every; each fire, each explosion, that ever has occured, signals to him a new age, a rise. He should be committed, immediately.

Those more perverse individuals among you who have contemplated the demented and somewhat latinate constructions of this obvious terrorist should consider turning yourselves in to authorities immediately, rather than facing implication in his simply inevitable future crimes against humanity.

To summarise it more adequately:

It's sad that art has reached the point where it is considered lowly to allow cohesion, flow, or meaning to interfere with the process. I have long since stopped working with any medium other than the human flesh - and yet my performances were labeled pornography - my great works splayed out like Playboy models, my ideas censored, when they had originally been lain so bare. -

But what Jethro has done here takes pornography and elevates it - schizophrenic ramblings across a spectrum of nonsense - unadultured thoughts without destination, a package sitting at the bus stop, waiting, as children starve in Africa, and a lone wanderer stares at the heavens and sees nothing, nothing, nothing, looking back.

-

May God have mercy on our souls.

Subrosian

HHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAH WHAT THE **** HAHDHHHD **** FACEDD NORWEIGIAN HOOKERS DOING BLOW ON MY ****ING COCK HAHAHHAHAHHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHA **** TIS SUCK DICK MOTHERT CUCK

So, if I happened to love a game and write a glowing review about it it's bias? Isn't that what glowing reviews are all about? I admit I tried so hard to find flaws but I coudn't and I put my Halo bias aside. I stand by my review and I appreciate all of your constructive criticism.A_zombie

Bias is inevitable in any piece of criticism. It doesn't have to be referred to as "bias", as that has negative connotations, so call it your "frame of reference", or whatever you want, but inevitably there are going to be gaming experiences that a reviewer is more predisposed to than others.

Somebody might play Dragon Age, having never played a decent role playing game, and think it's the absolute tops. Having played games that aren't composed primarily of filler combat and meaningless on-rails choices, I found it abysmal.

It seems to me you went into your Halo review with a similar predisposition (not of a genre, but of the series, to point) and there's nothing wrong with that. I'll say that I did not find your review to be particularly meritorious, but that is no reflection on you as a critic. It doesn't mean that you don't have the chops, or didn't deserve to write your review, as some have intimated in this thread.

What I did appreciate about your review was that it made no attempt to be a clinical evaluation of a product; you obviously enjoyed the game and expressed that position clearly and concisely, and that's more than most paid game reviewers, bogged down as they are in describing each and every feature of a product as if they were advertising it, seem regularly capable of.

The point of a review is to show people who haven't played it what it does good and what it does bad. No game is absolutely perfect and you should be able to say some flaws a game has, more often than not if a game is good then it overcomes these flaws. But to mindlessly gush about something with all positives tells the reader nothing. It doesn't help them get a good grasp of things as tastes differ.

A reviewer is always slightly biased, sure, I can agree with that. But a proper review is able to hide these biased opinions and just write the facts. A little bit if gushing is fine if the game is really THAT good. But paragraph after paragraph of gushing and hyperbole isn't good. It's not good practice or good english. Balance is essential.

seanmcloughlin

I agree with your essential point, that reviews, ideally, should be critiques of a game. But that process cannot be reduced to a feature by feature evaluation. That's what a product reviewer does, not a critic. A critic evaluates a game through his (hopefully well-developed) frame of reference and makes of his overall feeling on the game a clear and open statement as to its quality. In the case of any review I've ever written the reader can, at the very least, come to an understanding of whether I thought a game was bad or good, sometimes with very detailed reasons, and sometimes with general rants. But the careful focusing of these feelings into language is the central purpose of a review, not a standardized, ultra-formal recital and examination of each and every facet of a game. If I think a game is complete sh*t I'm not going to waste my time and the reader's going over each and every one of its failings. That would take whole books in a handful of cases.

Great Hotline Miami review, by the way, Jethro. Had I seen that while it was still on sale, I probably would have bought it.

DarkLink77

Do so at some point. It's really quite something.

[QUOTE="jethrovegas"]

What about a nice summary sentence at the bottom (or the top, if scrolling down is also an imposition)? "This game is sh*t" or "buy it right now", you know?

Slow_Show

But how that's any different from a score? Either way it's an imperfect summation of the author's thoughts; it may be less imperfect, but you as a consumer also lose the convenience of being able to scroll though a nice fat metacritic list. And again, it's not like a score is mutually exclusive.

You lose the convenience, but I consider that convenience to be extremely reductive. I am a game critic of sorts, and I wouldn't want the only thing a gamer ever sees of my work to be a single number on an aggregate site. Not being read takes a toll on the ego. Also, I don't view games only as products, but as art, and so my perspective on the issue is not solely that of the consumer, trying to get the best bang for my buck, or whatever. I want to know what a game contributes to gaming as a whole, what it changes, what it challenges, where it stands in its genre. A numerical score cannot provide that information, and while, yes, the two are not mutually exclusive, the one is a reduction of the thought behind the other, and an affront to it, honestly.

Do another thread in OT pleasethemajormayor

It will happen. These things have to gestate, you know.

A clearly biased person shouldn't have a featured review then or be allowed to do the review. It's like when they let Greg Miller do the Uncharted 3 review at IGN. Such Hyperbole had never been uttered before.

seanmcloughlin

Everyone's biased. Some people are more critical or level-headed than others, but that doesn't make the less critical ones somehow ineligible to review. I reviewed Hotline Miami this issue and basically "gushed" about it, and I have every right to. Moreover, I described it as running counter to trends that I personally (a qualifier a critic should never have to use) see as negative in gaming, so it was a clearly biased review, yet I will gladly defend it as a piece of criticism. It's not about biased or unbiased; it's about having reasons to back what you say. The Halo 4 reviewer did not go into much more detail than "I'm a Halo fan, this sh*t is f*cking awsum"(which I, for the record, think is f*cking moronic), but he clearly stated his reasoning, and also explained that he was not just a fan but a die-hard one, i.e, someone unlikely to be very critical of the game in question.

Pretty easy to say "okay, this guy's a die-hard Halo fan, this review isn't something that I want to read" and leave it at that.