tegan

I Had a Random Thought (About Video Games)

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Ha, I'm just saying that I can't agree or disagree with your conclusions without axis labels except to say the lines seem pretty close together, so there isn't much difference.

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Ha, I'm just saying that I can't agree or disagree with your conclusions without axis labels except to say the lines seem pretty close together, so there isn't much difference.

 

If you were being serious, I hoped that the title made the Y axis clear. The rest is basically a scatter plot with a line fitted to it.

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I guess that looks more or less as I would expect mine (I'll see if I can find the time to do mine), which is that the experience in subjective enjoyment is not heavily tied to any critical consensus.  It's tight enough that the Meta number as a predictor is more or less of no value. 

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

Yup! He basically only plays ranged DPSy mages and some supports across all LoMas. There is no way we can trust him with the legs of a close range brawler since melee range is so totally not his thing.

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I haven't really enjoyed Twitch streams until now, watching Rainbow Six: Siege streams while waiting for the beta to open up for everyone. It helps that there is so much creativity in how people play the game. There seems to be a lot of flexibility in how they breach and how they prepare for a breach.

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I only put stock in Metacritic scores in terms of technical - and, to a lesser extent, mechanical - competency. The best example of this is Bioshock Infinite, which has a 94 on Metacritic. For sure, it's very technically competent, but it's also one of the dullest, most conflicted (both morally and mechanically) games I've slogged through in years. In fact, I saw plenty of reviews that agreed with my take on it, but all of them were either video essays or articles without scores attached.

 

On the other hand, some of the most interesting and original games I've played in recent years have probably been in the 60-80 range. Thing is, if you're trying something new, your game is bound to be less polished and mechanically rigorous than other, more fleshed-out genres, and that's the easiest thing to mark a game down on.

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I only put stock in Metacritic scores in terms of technical - and, to a lesser extent, mechanical - competency. The best example of this is Bioshock Infinite, which has a 94 on Metacritic. For sure, it's very technically competent, but it's also one of the dullest, most conflicted (both morally and mechanically) games I've slogged through in years. In fact, I saw plenty of reviews that agreed with my take on it, but all of them were either video essays or articles without scores attached.

 

I agree with all of that about BIoshock Infinite. Somewhere I read an interesting article which pointed out something about some of those glowing 90% reviews (about BI specifically). Some of the reviews notice the flaws, they complain about them. The review "reads like a 7/10", right up until they give it four and a half stars. It's like they're not rating the game based on how good it is, but how closely it conforms to the platonic ideal of a AAA videogаme.

 

Side note: What do you mean about mechanically conflicted? Mechanically, I felt it was stripped to the bare bones of a two-gun regenerating health shooter, there wasn't much left to be in conflict.

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I think your conclusions are wrong...the graph makes its look like metacritic is completely useless. There is almost no different in the scores between those you loved, and those you didn't love.

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I think your conclusions are wrong...the graph makes its look like metacritic is completely useless. There is almost no different in the scores between those you loved, and those you didn't love.

 

I think it's a very odd idea that your tastes should conform to an average of a bunch of reviewers, especially games reviewers.

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I think your conclusions are wrong...the graph makes its look like metacritic is completely useless. There is almost no different in the scores between those you loved, and those you didn't love.

Um...

 

Clearly Metacritic score is linearly correlated with whether or not I will like a game, but that correlation is very weak.

 

 

 

I think it's a very odd idea that your tastes should conform to an average of a bunch of reviewers, especially games reviewers.

I think it's odd to expect that your tastes should be so divergent from a bunch of game reviewers that what the reviewers think has zero correlation with what you think. If everyone's tastes were that unrelated, there would be no such thing as consensus. People wouldn't agree that Half-Life 2 and Tetris are good, and Colonial Marines is bad.

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Um...

 

Haha! My bad, I guess I missed that bit. 

 

I also think it'd make sense that my likes are similar to those who also like the same things. Especially when it's averaged out to minimise the outliers.

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I think it's odd to expect that your tastes should be so divergent from a bunch of game reviewers that what the reviewers think has zero correlation with what you think. If everyone's tastes were that unrelated, there would be no such thing as consensus. People wouldn't agree that Half-Life 2 and Tetris are good, and Colonial Marines is bad.

 

Come on man, give me some damn credit.

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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.

There's apparently a community around that game that passionately argues it's the best driving game either.

If you were being serious, I hoped that the title made the Y axis clear. The rest is basically a scatter plot with a line fitted to it.

I would've preferred a histogram tbh :P

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Several of the reviews for Just Cause 3 I have read have talked about performance issues and the reviewer said what video card/system they had. This has me wondering, is there some sort of check review sites do to make sure reviewers can actually run a game? I have an i5, 8 gigs of ram and at GTX 970, hardly a crazy system and am having no performance issues, I am just wondering what the minimum a review needs to review a AAA high fidelity game. 

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Were the reviewer's specs near the min?  Or were they at the recommended level?

Ars reviewer was using GTX 770 min was 670. The game seems to have performance issues but it raised the general question.

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I would say that good PC review sites list the specs they are using in the review, but I don't think there's any standard there, no.

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I agree with all of that about BIoshock Infinite. Somewhere I read an interesting article which pointed out something about some of those glowing 90% reviews (about BI specifically). Some of the reviews notice the flaws, they complain about them. The review "reads like a 7/10", right up until they give it four and a half stars. It's like they're not rating the game based on how good it is, but how closely it conforms to the platonic ideal of a AAA videogаme.

 

Side note: What do you mean about mechanically conflicted? Mechanically, I felt it was stripped to the bare bones of a two-gun regenerating health shooter, there wasn't much left to be in conflict.

 

Yeah, that's the way most high-profile review sites operate in my eyes. Or, more cynically, it's how their userbase wants them to operate. Another example: Carolyn Petit's much-loathed review of GTA V should've been way lower than a 9, but Gamespot just isn't the venue for "that" kind of review.

 

I don't remember exactly what I hated about BI, mechanically. Besides the dissonance between the protagonists' morals and the excessive amount of killing (but then that goes for most AAA games, don't it), I just remember thinking the way they handled guns and plasmids (whatever they were called) was kind of bad? But I don't remember enough about the game to elaborate on that more.

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I branched out a bit tonight and visited what was pretty much an american college-town attempt at a korean pc-bang. There were only two people there besides myself, so my impressions are stunted, but it was interesting to experience a demonstration of local game's culture. I tried Splatoon for 15 minutes then ended up playing the first 40 minutes of Shadow of Mordor on a pc while the other two fellows played Rust. I realized that I was there to be social more than anything else, but I don't know if that is why other people would go there. They had good music. I'd like to have sat and drank a beverage and talked games with some strangers, but that wasn't close to happening.

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