tegan

I Had a Random Thought (About Video Games)

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I just spent ten minutes clearing out my Steam inventory by selling off dozens of stupid Steam Trading cards for a few cents each. Then I went to the next tab of my inventory and found this.

 

hotdamn.png

 

Hot damn. Apparently the hat economy is still going strong.

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Over the last 5 years, there have probably been more 60-80 score games I've loved than 80-100 score games, but there's still a lot of trash in the 60-80, so it's a more or less meaningless number for me.  My current obsession, Warframe, scores a 68 on Metacritic, mostly because it's a game that been actively developed for around 3 years and all the reviews are from much earlier in the development period. 

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The idea of paying for characters in a game that's designed to be competitive is such a mind boggling concept to me.  I've never been into the competitive scene for any game so maybe I'm just making things up but what Twig says makes a lot of sense to me.  Take the classic EVO moment 37 when Daigo perfectly parries Justin Wong's entire super.  That kind of technique requires intimate knowledge of the other character's moveset.  Imagine if he had to pay for Chun-li, he might not have been able to pull of one of gaming's most iconic moments.  Players like that might main a small number of characters, but I'm sure they've at least tried them all to figure out their strengths and weaknesses. 

 

Gaming is weird.

 

Yeah I think this is exactly right. I've found the fastest way to learn how to play against a hero I have difficulty dealing with in DOTA is to play that hero a couple of times, and see how other people stomp me. Restricting off characters like that strikes me as anti-competitive, and just generally kind of a bad deal for your community.

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Generally the games that hit the 80-100 are incredibly safe, and have incredibly broad appeal. There are some pretty boring games in that range - like Dragon Age Inquisition.

 

I can't think of any 50-80 games that I love though, but I also don't know my favourite games' metacritic scores. 

 

Just having a quick look, Wonderful 101 and Driveclub are enjoyable games in the 70s. I also own Alien isolation, but I've not played past the 3rd chapter. Should not have started that game on hard. It's crazy hard!

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I know that Deadly Premonition had a pretty terrible Metacritic score, and it's high on my list of fav games ever.  I'm one of those people who tend to seek out others opinions on a game after I've finished it, and have noticed over the last couple of years that a lot of games I liked scored in the low to mid 70s.

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Holy fuck, someone not only found Driveclub enjoyable, but enough someones found it enjoyable to give it the 7/10 of approval?

 

I'm Blown Away.

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Do you all like data? Do you like analysis of data? Prompted by this discussion, I just went through my two hundred-some Steam library and noted everything's Metacritic rating, plus whether or not I loved the game. Would anyone be interested in a post about what I learned?

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I've never really used Meta Critic or Rotten Tomato. But I will use steam user reviews. I like to see how the opinions balance easily one or two funny reviews, and how many people are posting their thoughts and how many hours they have played.

I'm not sure if it's the best though, plenty of reviews either end up with "this sux" or a novel length meditation on what it means to be a new entry in x series as thought by TrueRedditGamer#92020.

 

Anyway it seems super weird to even want all the champions from League. Maybe I'm the weird one here but I thought most people pick one or two roles to specialise in, pick those heroes, grow that pool, and then start buying some of the cheaper heroes of other roles for diversity. Like my partner only plays mages and supports, while I mostly play the same with a few top fighters and junglers thrown in. I don't like how slow it is to get a new champ that's for sure.

That new Hots hero Cho'gall seems pretty fun but he's a single hero with two ability sets split between two players and only controlled by one player. That sounds pretty chaotic and fun but I have no idea how you'd go about having to buy, or queue as him.

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I use Metacritic exclusively for movies, because Metacritic can differentiate between polarising and mediocre movies much better than Rotten Tomatoes can. I still read reviews.

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That new Hots hero Cho'gall seems pretty fun but he's a single hero with two ability sets split between two players and only controlled by one player. That sounds pretty chaotic and fun but I have no idea how you'd go about having to buy, or queue as him.

They're currently running a thing where you can ride along with someone who owns cho'gall as the other head even if you don't have him, and if you win two games together you also get the hero for your account.

 

Once you have him, the quest turns into a big chunk of gold reward for spreading the love to two other players. It looks like they really want to push this guy. I can't blame them, it's a very unique and fun design. I had a lot of fun (and some frustration) earning him with a friend.

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The problem with Metacritic is that it pulls from a load of different sites and weights them differently, but a) pulls from some really crappy sites, and sunglasses) does not disclose that weighting.

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They're currently running a thing where you can ride along with someone who owns cho'gall as the other head even if you don't have him, and if you win two games together you also get the hero for your account.

 

Once you have him, the quest turns into a big chunk of gold reward for spreading the love to two other players. It looks like they really want to push this guy. I can't blame them, it's a very unique and fun design. I had a lot of fun (and some frustration) earning him with a friend.

Oh that's super nice! He's pretty much the only thing that is making me want to dip back into Hots right now so maybe I'll just bug my boyfriend to get him so he'll be the mage and I'll be the legs. Then we can talk to our pro gamer friends and become elite Cho'gall comp gamers  B)

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Oh that's super nice! He's pretty much the only thing that is making me want to dip back into Hots right now so maybe I'll just bug my boyfriend to get him so he'll be the mage and I'll be the legs. Then we can talk to our pro gamer friends and become elite Cho'gall comp gamers  B)

The legs are doing the hard part btw. Positioning is king in all LoMas.

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There's fewer lords on the field, but one of the lords is ~2x as strong as a regular one. It costs some mobility but makes for great pushing power.

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I do used to check metacritc not because the scores but just because it was a quick way to check several reviews of the same game.

 

I do think that several games which I enjoy or like are mostly like stay in the 70% below (or slight higher) on metacritic such FF type 0 HD, FF XIII, Elminage Gothic, Dynasty Warriors (and Samurai Warriors) but maybe for differente reasons, such few outlets doing a review of it  per exemple. But anyway, I don´t mind this scores at all - even on steam, where player reviews are more dynamic (FFXIII start at very low but rised up to positive) some games such Attila, which have mixed reviews is one of the Total Wars which I liked a lot.

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Do you all like data? Do you like analysis of data? Prompted by this discussion, I just went through my two hundred-some Steam library and noted everything's Metacritic rating, plus whether or not I loved the game. Would anyone be interested in a post about what I learned?

 

Sure, go for it.  That's the kind of thing I would think about doing if I didn't have any games I'd rather play right now. 

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... but none of them really clicked for me until I ended up getting Singed at some point....

Man, Singed is the one thing I miss most about LoL. Sometimes I wish I could just import him directly into Dota. I know people (myself included) like to give LoL a hard time for making all their lords clones of each other, but is there another character in LoL or really any LoMa that plays like that glorious goofball? You spend the entire game running in circles near enemy players and if they ever try to kill you you can just walk away and they can't even chase you. Seriously, if I remember right you spend 20% of the game tossing people into your team and the other 80% running around farting purple shit in the general vicinity of the enemy. It's hilarious, and it almost makes me want to install League again.

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Yeah BB has a BIT of what Singed has, and when he was first released I was stoked to have a Singe-alike, but alas.

 

He is legit my absolute favorite League champ for all the reasons you mention. ):

 

(I also like Rammus a lot, just because GOTTA GO FAST!

 

And Sona because I love being a roaming healing bomb.

 

And Kog'maw, mostly just cause he's a cool gross monster. And I bought the butterfly skin and it was hilarious.)

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BB is great fun for sure, and I don't want to imply he is a less fun version of singed, but he's really only similar enough to remind me of what I once had.

 

I'm glad we are all on the same page on this.

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Do you all like data? Do you like analysis of data? Prompted by this discussion, I just went through my two hundred-some Steam library and noted everything's Metacritic rating, plus whether or not I loved the game. Would anyone be interested in a post about what I learned?

I went through my Steam Library, which by pure coincidence, contains exactly 200 games with Metacritic ratings. I labeled each one as "Love it" or not. My definition of "Love it" is vague and completely arbitrary, but suffice it to say there are lots of games I've liked, and plenty I've played for dozens of hours, that didn't make "Love it".

70 games were marked "Love it", 130 weren't. The average Metacritic score of beloved games was 82.4, and the average score of unloved games was 79.2. The distribution of the data is best illustrated by this graph:

loveit.png

 

I'm quite surprised by how clean the graph is, it makes things very easy to interpret. Clearly Metacritic score is linearly correlated with whether or not I will like a game, but that correlation is very weak.

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