Idle Weekend January 22, 2016: Reaching a Consensus

[Chris]

Idle Weekend January 22, 2016:

Reaching a Consensus

The Weekenders take on their meatiest discussion of 2016 (so far) in their handling of critical consensus. Does it hold games back? Does it mess with game reviewers' tender hearts? Are Kane and Lynch the real MVPs? Does it necessarily suck if you go to Mars in a broken spaceship? What about settling those deserts in Kharak?

Discussed: Tharsis, Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, Mario and Luigi: Paper Jam, Ace Team, The Good Wife, Kane and Lynch

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[AndyS]

Man, exact ditto on the Soma question, I was scared to death in the game until I toughened up and just ran and took a death. Then I knew what the worst was and the rest of the game was pretty tame. And I was also on the verge of quitting , I mostly survived by streaming the game and being on skype with some friends watching.

 

My favorite moment was when I was getting really cocky about the game. I grabbed a keycard and re-wrote it so it would open an elevator which the evil being was guarding. So I went to the computer , re-wrote the keycard but forgot to pick it up afterwards and freaked out when the monster was chasing me and I couldn't get the elevator open and then it hit me, I forgot the damn card, I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of it all. And my friend told me he was laying on the couch watching me play and also freaked out when he saw me not pick up the card afterwards, he told me he was screaming to the monitor in vain in his living room. Great times... haha Good game, everyone should try it!

[Bjorn]

Out of curiosity, do you guys know it was an Thumbs forum member who made that Objective Reviews site?  It seems like that was very close to the time that Danielle joined the cast, so it could have been an easy thing to miss. 

[Chris]

Out of curiosity, do you guys know it was an Thumbs forum member who made that Objective Reviews site?  It seems like that was very close to the time that Danielle joined the cast, so it could have been an easy thing to miss.

I almost gave them a heads up about this during recording, but it moved on too quickly for it to be worthwhile. On a side note, it's a bummer that the site is no longer up!

[Bjorn]

That is a bummer, I didn't realize he had taken it down.  The internet has a bit less joy in it now.

[juv3nal]

On the topic of games in which a death changed your relationship to a game: this was entirely designed as part of the game and not some spontaneous reaction on my part, but Planescape Torment deserves a mention.

Your character is immortal (mostly) and in fact volitionally "dying" (rather than being forced to via scripted sequence) is required to progress at one point, but the first moment you're made to realize that is a pretty neat revelation.

[Problem Machine]

There's actually quite a few games now that get around the narrative obstacle of death by writing a curse of undeath into the story. Most prominent among these is Dark Souls, but of course there's also Planescape Torment and a not-very-well-known Genesis/Game Gear game called Chakan: The Forever Man.

 

Some time back I wrote some thoughts about how death tends to be a disappointment in games, and why new approaches to death have successfully dodged these issues.

 

I also wrote about The Swapper -- didn't really get into the death mechanics much there, but if you're interested in The Swapper you might enjoy my thoughts on that too.

[OBAMA_TookMy_VCR]

I bought Tharsis the day it came out and one the 2nd day I had 5+ hours on it. Im glad I watched the guys play it on IGN before I tried a game. I feel like people don't like it at first because it takes so long to learn. After the first 3 hours of playing it, I finally figured out how to make it to Mars most of the time. I would recommend anyone that wants to play it to watch a tutorial first. Once I get all the trophies on it Ill be done playing. I think it was worth the $12

[sclpls]

I think the critical consensus is really driven by gaming audiences, and I don't know if there is anything to be done about it. But the phenomenon of people yelling at reviewers for dinging games that they haven't even played yet (but of course were greatly anticipating) is so weird. Of course it is driven by all that emphasis on previews. Certainly book and movie reviews don't work that way.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Well I think a slow change is already happening. More and more popular sites are drifting from scores and direct metrics of games. It's not a hard switch but it's certainly a drift from trying to quantify a games 'objective' quality and matching sites against each other.

[rincewitch]

Re: Death mechanics-- The Secret World has pretty standard MMO death mechanics (when you die, you appear as a ghost at an "Anima Well" and can choose to either respawn right at the well or go out into the world and find your body to resurrect there), but unlike a lot of similar games it actually incorporated this into the game's story as an explicit ability of the player character so you'd get things like, e.g., a villain realizing that killing you is a waste of his time and just trying to bury you under rubble to slow you down instead. And for a while, the game's fast travel system was to just kill your character with the /reset command and choose the anima well closest to your destination to respawn at, although eventually they added a proper fast travel system.

 

Most pertinent to the discussion of death mechanics that change your perception of a game, though, is that some of the game's investigation mission involve killing yourself, appearing at an anima well as a ghost, but then actually exploring the world as a ghost instead of just making a bee-line for your body and coming back to life. As a ghost, you could often see spirits, other ghosts, weird birds and various other supernatural phenomenon invisible to the living. So in that case death literally makes you see the game's world differently, providing you with key information necessary to solve a mystery.

 

So sometimes, when I was stuck in an investigation quest there didn't seem to be any information about where to go next, I'd just type /reset and watch my character keel over dead so I could see if anything looked different as a ghost. :V

[Bjorn]

So sometimes, when I was stuck in an investigation quest there didn't seem to be any information about where to go next, I'd just type /reset and watch my character keel over dead so I could see if anything looked different as a ghost. :V

 

That's really cool, I didn't know that was how death worked in the Secret World.

[Problem Machine]

Didn't WoW kind of dabble in stuff like that? I don't know if they ever did anything very interesting with it, but I do remember there being some things you could see as a ghost you couldn't normally.

[feelthedarkness]

i definitely think "7s" are the best games. usually it's a sign that it has some rough edges, or is trying to do something specific that alienates the widest possible audience. which for me, is also where the real art lives. i think all truly great creative works have that "warts n all" quality. it can also be a sign they spent more time trying to develop some specific quality rather than smooth out all the rough edges. i think STALKER and ALPHA PROTOCOL are kind of quintessential 7s that are truly great. both were sort of panned at the time, but over time the consensus has shifted. 

 

i can't think of many/any games that i've played that have been so irreparably broken that i couldn't deal with it for fun underneath. i've got a particular fondness for Obsidian game, which get a bad wrap. not to go down this rabbithole, but i've had just as many total breakdowns in Fallout 4 that I did in FNV (most of which went away after i fixed that CPU Core usage thing in the INI files). 

[sclpls]

Another classic example of a really special "7s" game, Dragon's Dogma. Which had a lot of kinda harsh reviews but is really unique and amazing, and has a much better reputation now compared to when it was released.

[Plyem]

I played Kane and Lynch 2 after listening to this. I finished the campaign in two hours and it was terrible. I tried to think of the terrible shooting as being a result of having bad weapons and not being Sgt. Super-Murder-Machine but apparently every enemy has the skills the player lacks and their weapons are top of the line military hardware. The bad shooting would be a lot more forgivable if the enemies also had the same problems as the player, or similar, and if the firefights weren't still standard cover-shooter firefights. 

I think the 'shitty camcorder' style COULD be good but this game kinda does nothing with it. Once I shot a bunch of propane tanks and there was a ton of video errors and the sounds got blown out, which was cool, but that happened once and the enemy was STILL shooting me with their laser-guns while it happened. The game has the cutscenes jump forward in small chunks to save on animation skip over unneeded parts of the cutscenes, which would be nice to move things along, but there is no real 'shitty camcorder' effect to go with it so more often then not it looks like the game is just bugging out and breaking.

I gave them a chance, but Kane and Lynch are no MVP.

[osmosisch]

This episode really hammered something home to me: Danielle is so great in one-on-one conversations. A really great, supportive conversation partner. I love the little interjections that just get snowed under in a context with more participants.

 

Similarly, the two-person format also brings out the best in Rob because he seems a lot more at ease knowing that he'll be able to get his point made.

 

Loving the show, guys.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Similarly, the two-person format also brings out the best in Rob because he seems a lot more at ease knowing that he'll be able to get his point made.

 

Now that you say that I also think that might be part of why the show can feel so chill too. Both get to take their time and just let the other person talk.

(I'm also lovin it  )

[Chris]

This episode really hammered something home to me: Danielle is so great in one-on-one conversations. A really great, supportive conversation partner. I love the little interjections that just get snowed under in a context with more participants.

 

Similarly, the two-person format also brings out the best in Rob because he seems a lot more at ease knowing that he'll be able to get his point made.

 

Loving the show, guys.

Yeah as much as we miss Danielle on Idle Thumbs, I agree—Rob and Danielle really make the most of the two-person format in a way that's pretty different to what we do on Thumbs Classic, I think.

[quantum_leopold]

I thought the discussion of critical consensus was a little off due to the apparent assumption that critical consensuses are just spontaneously occurring natural phenomena. To the extent there is such a thing as a critical consensus (and I think this can be overstated--every critically beloved game has its detractors, and every critically panned game has its advocates), I think it is much more often a natural result of people with similar perspectives encountering a game and coming away with the same impressions, not a creation of grading rubrics or some a priori knowledge about what "everyone" is likely to think about a game.

 

To take Rob's Kane and Lynch 2 example, I can understand how he could play that game with its unpleasant characters and its awkward and unsteady controls and find something to appreciate in the realism of the difficulty of shooting people and the appropriateness of these mass-murderers being shitty people. That is a totally valid, justifiable opinion. But Rob's experience does not make it any less likely that most other critics who played that game did not appreciate the awkward shooting and despicable characters, no matter how realistic either of those may be, and were thus disappointed by the game and not inclined to recommend it to others. It's funny that Rob later mentions that he has worked to correct a tendency to tilt his reviews away from his true experience of a game and more towards what some player might have found enjoyable in a game, because it seems like, with respect to K&L2, he is disappointed that the critical response to that game failed to do exactly that. It may just be that, although there are some things a player could like about K&L2, most of the people who happened to review it were not those people, and therefore it generally got poor reviews which came to be perceived as a critical consensus against the game.

 

I suspect that, more often than not, many people not enjoying a game is the cause of a 'critical consensus', not an effect of one. To the extent these consensuses are a result of people with similar backgrounds and similar preferences coming to similar conclusions, I'm all for more diversity in reviewing to get me different perspectives on what games I might appreciate, particularly when reviewers can point me to reasons I might enjoy things that most other people would say aren't worth my time. But I think that's a problem with critics, not consensus.

 

(Finally, not that I have any dog in the K&L2 fight, but I do think a quick look at its metacritic page is informative about the notion of critical consensus. Under metacritic's framing, it received from critics 5 positive reviews, 2 negative reviews, and 18 "mixed" reviews; user reviews are even more evenly split, at 27/23/25. Maybe the problem isn't so much with what critics actually say as it is with how the community rounds the edges off of these things and internalizes that the response to a game without consideration.) (Of course, you may point out that metacritic's classifications of reviews are arbitrary and meaningless, which is totally fair, but I would argue that no matter how arbitrary metacritic's ratings may be, they are probably the most common citation when people are referring to what the consensus about a game is.)

 

(edit: words)

[Badfinger]

On the topic of games in which a death changed your relationship to a game: this was entirely designed as part of the game and not some spontaneous reaction on my part, but Planescape Torment deserves a mention.

Your character is immortal (mostly) and in fact volitionally "dying" (rather than being forced to via scripted sequence) is required to progress at one point, but the first moment you're made to realize that is a pretty neat revelation.

Whenever I hear questions or comments about interesting views of death or death as a mechanic, Planescape Torment is the first thing that springs to mind to me as well. It was the quintessential "death" game and maybe still is.

 

Didn't WoW kind of dabble in stuff like that? I don't know if they ever did anything very interesting with it, but I do remember there being some things you could see as a ghost you couldn't normally.

Yes! As soon as another MMO was mentioned, that sprung to mind as well. I like that they played with the "death run" mechanic, even if it only ever happened once or twice. In Vanilla WoW you had to be dead to get a quest from a ghost, and it was a questline that helped unlock one of the highest level instances in the game (Blackrock Downs) AND was a critical quest in getting your Onyxia Key, which was the iconic raid boss at game launch (shortly replaced by Ragnaros, but for that moment the pinnacle). How bold is it to put something in the game people could and would miss that's so critical to end game progression?

 

 

Regarding your Kane and Lynch conversation, I think citing Jeff Gerstmann and then proceeding to talk about the critical consensus surrounding the game as a whole may have unintentionally tarred what his review actually was and said at the time. The damning thing about the controversy about his eventual firing was that he didn't hate the game. He gave it a 6/10, which is a "bad" review in 2007 sure, but isn't the death knell of giving the game a 4 for being playable but worthless (PLAYABILITY SCORE: 8, NO CRASHES) . While I'm not surprised now when he calls the game "garbage" (I mean, reviewing it indirectly got him fired I'd be mad too), the tag line for his review is "Kane & Lynch: Dead Men has a lot of promise, but nothing in this game works out nearly as well as you'd hope." and he cites characters and storytelling in the first paragraph of his review before he mentions "gameplay issues" as something hamstringing it.

 

While the journey sounds interesting at first, and has a few bright points, it's weighed down by bad storytelling, a real lack of character development, and a host of gameplay-related issues. The end result is a game that squanders much of its potential and just doesn't come together as well as it probably should have.

 

The metacritic critics scores are actually even stronger towards "mixed" than you found, quantum_leopold. Under XBox 360, which was the most reviewed platform, there are 10 positive/ 41 mixed / 6 negative. There are twice as many negative user reviews for 360 than positive and mixed combined.

[Badfinger]

That last post was so long, but I thought of a question for you Rob and Danielle that I want to ask since you are both reviewers. This would probably be an email if I was diligent enough to actually turn my podcast musings into emails-

 

Do you talk with other people reviewing a game while in the review process? Do you do it always or often? If yes, have you ever purposefully sequestered yourself from talking about any games while you were reviewing? Do you think "comparing notes" drives people towards that critical consensus and is that actually negative, even if bouncing experiences off another person is probably a positive part of evaluating media in my mind?

 

Reflecting on your conversation about Bioshock Infinite, I remembered I finished that game in a single day, if not specifically one basically continuous sitting. I hadn't intended to, I just got to a point where it made sense to keep going and finish it. Is it possible a significant percentage of people not reviewing games actually consume them in a manner closer to the review-style blitz than we (myself included before today) think? I don't think of myself as someone that does that, but I totally did for a game I didn't know I wanted to play that way until it happened.

[N1njaSquirrel]

When you started talking about The Good Wife, I misheard it to be The Good Life, which is a fairly successful old british sitcom. I was really confused at first, because I don't remember any of what you said happening in the good life. Let alone a continual through-story. Funny!

[Valorian Endymion]

Rob´s story about Call of Duty was almost a reenactment of the main concept behind the Edge of Tomorrow movie (or the manga, All You Need Is Kill, which the movie was inspired):

 

The manga and the movie feature a character which find himself stuck in a groundhog day loop, where he fight the same battle over and over again, dying at different moments, but keeping all memories. Until he became so good at it (in a process much like Rob described) that manages to figure out what going on

[rincewitch]

Didn't WoW kind of dabble in stuff like that? I don't know if they ever did anything very interesting with it, but I do remember there being some things you could see as a ghost you couldn't normally.

 

Yeah, there's a few things like that. I think being dead is one of the ways you can see the ghosts hanging around in the Lordaeron ruins? And there was that questgiver in Blackrock Mountain you could only see while dead. And probably a few other quests that just kill you outright so you can do some ghost stuff? It's all much less integrated into the lore than in TSW, though, since if WoW characters could actually just casually saunter back to their bodies and come back to life literally nothing that happens in the story would make any sense whatsoever anymore. In TSW, player characters (and NPCs with similar abilities) swallow a magic bee and get superpowers, and turning into a ghost and coming back to life are explicitly one of those abilities-- so at one point when you're fighting rival agents who have also swallowed a bee, they keep on coming back every few minutes because there's a portable Anima well nearby.

 

God, TSW had so much cool story stuff. Too bad the actual gameplay sucks so much. :V