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I know this is a year old but you know what I realized before you finished going over the fives? at this point they write reviews for clicks thats why they review their toilet paper. It's the video game review equivalent of buzzfeed articles
Wired did the same thing that guy did on Myst for Hogwarts legacy, literally gave it a 1 out of ten because they did not like JK Rowling's opinion on certain issues.
All you had to say was "IGN" and I already knew their ratings are akin to scribbles on the wall inside a "treatment facility" where they house the mentally unbalanced. ...And I have to say I kind of feel I'm insulting the mentally unbalanced made scribbles.
I'm literally shocked that Myst has such a low rating. We love Myst in Bulgaria. Back in the days, there was a gaming show on TV called "Mist" which started around 9 pm and went till 4 am. They had everything - video game discussions, consoles, mobile games, anime, movies even a DJ was playing sick house and techno beats in the background. And after midnight, the host started playing adventure puzzle games like Myst 4 or Siberia or Schizm etc, and you get to phone in and tell him what to do in game. It was absolutely legendary. Sadly, the host passed away a few years ago... RIP Roro.
This is so so endearing, I loved hearing this, thanks for sharing. I think there's a certain love / hate relationship for those games, I always felt like it was unfair how badly rated they were. They were truly pieces of art. Eastern europe also made many of them ! I do know that the company that made Schizm and others in the series was Polish.
I own Myst, Myst 3, Pyst, and have never managed to finish any of them. Great story games, but just not for everyone. Myst plays like ... putting all the clues to the end of the deep elves (Dwemer) in Morrowwind onto one island and that is the game.
Yup...blew me away that anyone could give that game a low rating...yeah..it was arguably a slow burn towards the mid-point, but WOW the whole setup was chilling af...and the twin brain for the xenomorph?! Pure. Unadulterated. GENIUS 😎
I will never forget that the reviewer for Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky rated the game a 4.9 after getting stuck on arguably one of the easiest dungeons given the point in the game, getting frustrated and dropping the game right there
Review objectivity and the nonsensical review score shenanigans is something I've been struggling with since the 90s. I remember Diablo got a 5/10 one time, Xbox Magazine gave Dead Space a 6/10, and the infamous 9.6 Fortnite review inspired a whole Twitter account to document all the games that were lower rated than "Flosscraft". Great video. Kudos to you and your collaborators!
Honestly though... the fortnite score was only infamous because older millenials and Gen X have a superiority complex. Fortnite appeals to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, but it does so to MASSIVE success. Anybody looking at that and saying that fortnite is trash... is just showing their own bias.
If Shinji Mikami didn't want a 3/10 he wouldn't have made such a boring, annoying and frustrating game. Why should you be forced to try and complete a level with no starting health when you have no hope of survival and will just need to reload a minute later? What's fun in fighting the same annoying demon creatures over and over again when the fight was old the second time you tried it? Why, oh why, did Clover Studio put so much money into such a risky joke, and why did no one see that the joke didn't have a real punch line at any point in the development?
@@reallycool Uh... what?... Godhand is considered an underrated cult classic, it has some real flaws but also some great strengths, it's an important landmark of Clover becoming the far more action heavy Platinum, and the game certainly isn't a 3/10.
We need a reviewer matchmaking service, where you input your own ratings for a bunch of things and it matches you with the reviewer whose tastes match yours best. That way, you get the next best thing to trying all the things yourself : the opinion of someone who thinks like you.
As an objective review is imposible, embracing the idea of the opposite: a completely non-objective review but from someone that has the most similar taste posible. Actually sounds good
@@lepercolony8214 Well We ARE talking about art here, not politics or science. In art consumption, the most important thing is to find more of what you like and avoid things that you do not. That's the whole reason genres exist, after all.
I'm telling you all the school grading system messed us all up. A C (70%) was "average" while an F (50%) was "failing" so a 5 out of 10 isn't "average" in our minds it's "failing"
I disagree. The school grading system isn't judging your work from 0% "bad" to 100% "good", with 50% being "average", it's determining how much of the work you did right. If you only did half your job right at, say, a real job, you'd get fired, because that's a failure, not the average.
@@lamenwatch1877 That's right, but the mentality of grading systems, which score you based on how well you completed an objective, have affected the way we see game reviews
21:40 there are actually three versions of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter that are wildely different games. The PC version is a highly tactical FPS. PS3 & Xbox 360 is a third-person arcade. PS2 & Xbox is a first-person arcade.
OH MY GOD THAT HOCKY GAME SEGMENT HAD MY JAW GLUED TO THE FLOOR. its even funnier when you realize that the first treyarch game is the lowested rated ign game yet for a long time they would give every cod game both good and bad a glowing review.
And they gave it a zero, but gave the Switch Fifa 23 Legacy Edition a 2, despite that being the same game as the game in 2022, and 2021, and 2020, and 2019 So yes, a game that was released a second time is worse than a game that was released annually over 4 years literally without any change at all. And even the reviewer jokes that unlike EA they dislike just copying last year's review.
Genuinely, and Exile is possibly my favourite in the whole series, it's one of the greatest pieces of art and architecture ever made and it changed my life :) I wince when I think about how that game was maligned, and failed to make the money needed to keep Presto Studios alive, and reviews like the one at 30:29 helped to really ruin its release.
That point about games getting better reviews once the franchise is popular is so true. Dark Souls got OK scores from most outlets when it launched, and it got lower scores from reviewers who didn't get it. Overall it landed in the 80s for most outlets and averages (brought up by the likes of Gamespot and Edge giving it glowing reviews because the individual reviewers connected with the game and recognized how special it was), the game was seen as a niche difficult Japanese game that not many outlets gave a ton of attention to, especially with Skyrim just on the horizon. Then it blew up over the next two years, especially UA-cam reviewers who couldn't stop raving about it as the word of mouth spread. Later, Dark Souls 2 came out amidst the peak of excitement and every single big outlet gave it very high scores, which got it into the 90s and into "universal acclaim", suggesting it's an improvement over the original. Cue DS2 being the most divisive, mixed game in the franchise with those same UA-cam reviewers mostly either tearing it apart or giving it mixed reviews. Journalists 100% review games based on hype and how high the expectations for a game are, they really can't be trusted.
There's a lot to be said as well about reviews used essentialy as advertisement for new games I don't know if this is still a thing, but back in the day there was the threat of the "blacklist", where certain reviewers or entire websites just wouldn't receive early review codes because they were negative towards some high-profile title (Jeff Gerstmann and Jim Sterling come to mind)
I saw a Kotaku writer today who posted a bunch of 'funny moments' on their Twitter before posting their brand new review of High On Life. It felt like they were nothing more than a part of the hype machine FWIW: I've been blacklisted by Ubisoft in the past, it happens
Honestly that's still a thing. Even "popular you tubers" will get offers to review a new title. But if they give the game a bad review, or even one that isn't glowing, that company will lose interest in that UA-camr. That's something that all these UA-camrs have to contend with; it's part of the review business. The only reviews I can trust are ones made of older games; games that are not making any sales or money any more.
I'ved landed on IGN a few times looking for walkthroughs for stuff like collectibles, and I honestly would have thought that the atrocious web design would be enough to deter anyone from actually reading the reviews on that site.
How I score things; (10 = Perfection. Even with context impossible to achieve.) Don't bother looking for this score. 9 = This is what AAAA+ games with time and resources invested into it should be. 8 = Fantastic. Very hard to fault, unless I'm nitpicking. 7 = Good. Not great and may have some flaws, but still recommend. 6 = Decent. It is fun but not enough to remember for the right reasons. 5 = Average. Take it or leave it. 4 = Mediocre. It works, but not something I'd go back to. 3 = Bad. It's functional .... just about. At best I'd run with a concept, but incompetent execution. 2 = Poor. Will remember this for the wrong reasons; might even be so bad it's good. Probably an asset flip. 1 = Shit. IT'S. JUST. BAD. Barely playable dumpster fire. So bad it's burned into your memory. 0 = Irredeemable. Game does not work and its existence feels like (or even is) a criminal offense.
Used to just browse ign scores to see all the worst ones, because that's just the sort of thing that stimulated me back in the day. Seeing Explorers of sky get a 4.9 was one of the main reasons it took me so damn long to get around to playing it, and I'm a little sour over that ngl
@@anguset bro, the joke is that "stimulated" usually has sexual undertones, it's like saying "that's what she said" in response to something meant to be innoccuous Gen Z knows what stimulated means
The Myst reviewer just doesn't get it. Puzzle games, visual novels, slower paced atmospheric games, aren't necessarily "fun". They're enjoyable. It's like a quiet walk in the park or reading a book, where they want something akin to playing a sport. But a lot of people don't like sports.
The fact that the just dance review calls it "not a game" as though dance pad style games hadn't already been around doing the exact same thing for a while-
Nah not really though, just dance really is just dancing, dance pad games aren't really dancing, idk having grown up on both one of them does feel significantly more like a video game with more direct input for your actions and just dance felt more like a workout CD, still it IS a game as it does give you a score on how well you copy the dance so.
In the 1990s in Germany, video game magazines lived from their personalities. Take the magazine GameStar as an example, back then the most sold magazine. You had for example Mick Schnelle, who sadly died in the 2020s. When you saw him testing a simulation, you knew that he was qualified. He lived simulation games. Not a typo. Probably he had more technical expertise about planes than even plane engineers just by how much he knew about those games. And similar examples go for the other genres, although not to that extreme. When someone reviewed a game, the redaction would discuss it afterwards and then come to the conclusion of what score to give, in order to keep it in line with other scores, but the reviewers almost always knew what they played, were experts on the genres. And they didn't shy away from controversy. Once they published a multiple pages article about a developer complaining about their supposedly low score (which was in the 80s, meaning it was a top game for genre fans). That is how video games journalism was back then in Germany: Independent. Investigative. Fair. With not only reviews, but background stories also (one was on how the id software developer with the nickname "Levelord" designed the Quake III levels so they are fun and balanced, another was on violence in games, then one on legality of circumventing DRM, etc.).
5:30 On the topic of games that can no longer be played, it is VERY important that digital copies, documentation, and information about old "lost" videogames are not deleted from the internet. Similar to real life history, there is value in keeping records of things that have passed - even small things.
we shall never forget the Sonic Unleashed and Doom 2016 reviews showing that the ones who reviewed those games have clearly never touched a controller in their lives 😂
@@ikaguraBut that's not what got the brunt of the criticism from IGN. They clearly couldn't handle a game for literal children with the footage used for the day stages
I started digging into reviewer's Twitter profiles, seeing that a lot of gaming website game reviewers have credits on news websites that don't have gaming on them. I then realized that game reviews are just another writing gig to them. That Cuphead review that couldn't make it past the tutorial was from a website on investing, and not a gaming website.
This was super interesting! IGN is a meme level company but it was great to explore why. Maybe I'm misremembering but I believe the whole seven being so low came from the original release of Destiny, since it was the first proper hype delayed game that came from a dev that was too big to fail.
Myst DS guy gave Sonic Free Riders a 7.5 out of 10 A game that is completely unplayable and lacking in every aspect that defined the Riders spin-offs, it's just completely baffling to me How does IGN select their staff for reviews? It's insane
And because of these reasons you said, the hungarian IGN actually removed the scoring system from both movies and games about 2 years ago. They said that most people won't read/watch critics and just look at the score in the end, without listening the actual review.
That Myst DS port was truly awful. It had multiple game-crashing bugs. It also included an in-game notepad, which had only one page, no word wrap, and no ability to insert characters (if you want to add something on top, you have to "backspace" the whole thing). In fact, I think it might not have been possible to complete it without using a strategy guide to skip Selenetic because of the crashing. And, yes, all the surreal visuals and audio got crunched to fit on the DS. If that IGN author had actually played it he would have been able to say "it crashes" and give it a deserved 1 out of 10. It's a moot point now since Myst is easy to buy in like three different versions on Steam, but back then it compelled me to install the original disc on PC and mess with installing an ancient version of Quicktime to make it run. Just sharing this because I don't think I've ever seen another person talk about it.
Really excellent video. I'm reminded of my frustration during the PS2 era. I was (and am) a big fan of Dynasty Warriors and its ilk, and I found myself profoundly disconnected with the perception of them at the time. Review outlets, even as they still might call them "good," also routinely panned them as repetitious button mashers that recycled too many assets, ideas, and saturated the market with too many releases. And while there was (and is) some truth to those thoughts, they routinely ignored the fact these games were immensely popular with the base that played them. If they acknowledged them at all, it was usually with at least a bit of scorn, casting them usually as mindless knuckle-draggers. The fact was they generally performed quite consistently and smoothly. They were satisfying and cathartic to play for people looking for a sort of spiritual successor to classic brawlers and beat em ups. They were also mechanically iterative in ways that anyone other than a seasoned player might not ever notice: Character movesets were tweaked, AI improved, that sort of thing. The changes brought with each new release were generally worth the time and money to take a look at. All that's to say, they didn't Get It™. All the more galling that today reviewers like Musou now since they paint Zelda on top of it while ignoring (or blithely downplaying) the game running like absolute garbage. But I digress.
Being fair, older games got a lot more of a pass than modern ones. Back then you added a button to stick to the wall and bam, instant best seller. Included dynamic lighting and everything was forgiven. Added some ragdolls and you already had the whole game. Slapped a popular IP and people would buy it. Like, Simpson's road rage is a crazy taxi clone, yet it's regarded as such a great game. Same with the other mess of a game, Hit & Run (which yes, i played a lot as a kid, but i still recognize it sucked). All because of the IP. Abe's World Oddysey is still considered a great PSX game, somehow. Just because of the setting i imagine (because that game has nothing else going for it) Final Fantasy 7, one of the FF games with the worst gameplay possible, is often considered one of the best games of all times just because it had a plot? Which had a couple of impactful moments and that was all people needed to say it was good. (And for every good moment there where plenty of bad comedic anime ones) FF Tactics is also considered the best of the series just because of the plot, while the gameplay is an intentional mess. Deus Ex came out in the 2000, and it is absolutely awful despite being an FPS that came AFTER something like Half Life. Even if you get one of those modernizing mods the game is barely playable. But it is still a cult classic. Roblox is one of the most played games nowadays, and i invite you to find a single game that doesn't feel like a troll Unity asset flip. GTA Online, which used P2P while MTA San Andreas was hosting over 100 players per server with proper multiplayer FOR FREE. Added pay to win micro transactions where with money, you could get vehicles so busted that they wheren't even available as cheats in any other GTA games. (Even MTA servers didn't allow you to spawn tanks or fighter jets in free roam, where everyone is given a cheat menu) People's opinion do not always reflect the quality of a game.
I'd consider myself a musou semi-fan but I feel this comment so much. I'm not a diehard and I don't really keep up with em but I like them a lot. Even this detached from them I can clearly see the mistreatment musou games got/still get from gaming press, until you slap a zelda on it of course! Then it's "not like the other musou games" and "fresh and innovative" as it chugs to a silky smooth 15 fps and has less content than DW games from years ago.
@@The-S-H3lf-Eater isn't it the same as the first one? I remember it having good gunplay and a great atmosphere. I am kinda numb to open world games after 15 years of GTA games so idk how to rate them anymore
@@rompevuevitos222 I would say the gameplay is same-ish as in the story. Go to marker, shoot bad guys, go to other marker. I haven't played red dead redemption 1 and kinda can't, so i can't really answer your first question.
This is the first video of yours I've watched. About half way through I paused the video because I respected how open you were in giving honest feedback on the subject. Its refreshing to be talked to like a person and not a customer.
Excellent video, really hit the nail on the head with this one, especially the points about review culture, and alienation from the person behind the review. I've thought giving art a numbered score is really dumb for a while now. Different kinds of art serve different purposes, strive to do different things. So when trying to score something, do I score it based on my overall enjoyment, ignoring how well designed the game actually is, or do I score it based on how well the game fulfilled what it set out to do, regardless of my feelings? Or is it both, or something else entirely? Enjoyment can be experienced in many different ways, so do I need to specify if a game was primarily "fun", or "gripping" etc? In the end, what does a score even really do, other than boil down complex pieces of art into a digestible number that leaves zero room for nuance? This is only exacerbated when comparing games of the same score, like you bring up in the video. So as a UA-cam reviewer myself, I can't bring myself to give scores to things, it's ultimately pointless. But I found that I can't even do it in a non serious context, as I stopped scoring everything I watched/read on My Anime List, cuz I just couldn't quantify wtf a 7 meant. It's ridiculous lmao. Excellent video mate, looking forward to the next one!
Great comment, I can definitely relate to this. Journalists often seem like Robots fullfilling a task, without the Soul that's necessary to fully enjoy each video game experience differently, and sometimes, out of the Boxes presented to the player.
I hate 10 points score systems. It's not just IGN, it's working wrong almost everywhere. People usually using only 7-10 and forget about the rest of the score. 5/10 supposed to be middle of the road average, but I believe that people would suppose it as a bad score if they see 5/10. Kudos to Steam for getting people only 3 options: positive, negative or keeping your opinion to yourself c:
Steam not having a meh rating means people kinda have to decide this or that way, which leads to review bombing and games that are just okay but not anything special getting higher marks because you don't find many bad things to say about them... It's the Rotten Tomatoes scale where most people giving it 6/10 will make it 100% fresh.
I do think the steam rating system would be better with a 'meh' option, because a lot of reviews on mixed games say they tentatively support it or don't support it with a caveat; like only bother if it's on sale, it's a good base but wait for it to be updated further, fun but very short, not worth your time unless you like a very specific genre, etc. I think these games deserve to be looked at more than they would be if everyone just chose negative. But I agree that a "yes, maybe, no" scale is LEAGUES better than a number rating system, because it forces reviewers to think and elaborate on their opinions lol
I swear it used to be possible to sort by review scores. Having said that the issue that have with deciphering which platforms the reviews were for…. It used to be A LOT clearer. The old ign ui would have which platform you were viewing. Actually what was really cool is that for platform “portal” the UI would change to reflect how to video game console looked. So it was REALLY clear what platform you were viewing. Also I appreciate they had different people review the games on different platforms. Ign was a really good website that entertained me to no end. I loved looking up old reviews and videos and see all the old games I would see on store shelves as a little boy and what they thought of them. Unfortunately IGN wanted to unify the entire platform, so legacy article ui was updated. It’s a shame because they erased the “score breakdown” that was at the end of every article.
I hate and have always hated superheros. Movies, comics, books, never liked them. And you know what I *don't* do? Tell people who do like superheros what media they should and shouldn't give a chance. I'm not qualified to.
Superb video. The obsession with review scores drives me crazy. Scores remove all the context of a review, and I dread giving games I review a score, even if I love the game. Games and other media have objective qualities for sure, but how much those objective qualities can affect someone's experience with a piece of media can differ greatly. Unless you're strictly talking about a product's functionality and technical aspects as accurately as possible, almost every review will be subjective. Thinking that anyone can mathematically equate a score from an individual's opinion on a game is a ridiculous notion. IGN is one of the worst examples of this, as they give silly scores such as "5.9" to games. How do you calculate an individual's opinion to a decimal point? Steam reviews have their own problems (such as basically encouraging "meme" reviews that contain little substance and rarely actually say anything about the game), but I think the "thumbs up/thumbs down" system is better for aggregating reviews, at least for a marketplace. Rotten Tomatoes sort of does this, but in a significantly worse way, as it relies on review scores that are above or below a 6/10. Steam requires people to own the game, meaning that people have to be interested in the title they're reviewing. This is why a game such as Sonic Frontiers can receive an overwhelmingly positive score on Steam. It may be confusing as to why it's rated that high to some, but if you're interested in Sonic games, you're very likely to enjoy Sonic Frontiers. The 95% score isn't to say that the game is actually a 9.5/10, but to say that 95 percent of users recommend the game. While browsing games on Steam, I've often found myself scrolling down to the review section to find out why a game got the reception it did. It's a "score" system that makes me want to look for more context behind the reviews. That being said, when I do scroll down, there will be a number of reviews that will just be a joke and nothing more, but some of the more informative reviews are actually better "simple" reviews than the ones you see at IGN. I can often discover a lot about the functionality of a game in a short amount of time. If I'm interested in a game, but it has a "mixed" reception on Steam, that actually means something to me. I'll look into the review section and will come out with a list of bullet points of the most common postive/negative aspects of a game. It's not a perfect system by any means, but I find it far more reliable for gauging whether or not I should purcahse a game than something like metacritic. For the analytical reviews you can find on UA-cam (and the type of review I like to write the most), there probably just shouldn't be any kind of scoring system at all. It actually kind of peeves me a bit when UA-camrs like SkillUp put things like "I recommend/I don't recommend" in their title because of the analytical nature of their reviews. It often leads to people taking their word as gospel without even considering how the UA-camr got to that conclusion and how their preferences might differ from others. I'm not entirely innocent when it comes to this, and it isn't completely the reviewers fault. The structure of the internet and making money off this sort of business encourages this kind of behavior. Anyways, the only issue I have with this video is the point that UA-camrs inherently make for better critics. UA-cam game discourse has its own issues (one of which I talked about in the previous paragraph). It really depends on the individual writing, and not all websites are structured like IGN. There are plenty of lackluster game critics on UA-cam. Maybe even more so than a website. The problem with writing for a website is that you have to accept that your work is going to be of a more inconsistent quality because you have to constantly be writing about things you may care less about. I think it's fair to say that UA-camrs are more consistent in their quality thanks to the creative freedom and schedule they get, but it isn't as simple as UA-camrs being better.
Well thought out response, I appreciate it. As I've mentioned in a couple other responses, I don't think my position is being read quite right: It's not that "all" UA-camrs are better, it's that UA-camrs "in general" will provide better content than IGN by their nature.
The score is as easy as the 1-10 female scale. The 5 is avg, the 6 has something special, the 7 stands out from the 6s with something you wouldn't expect, the 8 borders on ideal perfection, the 9 is the best you can actually find and represents the pinnacle of female form and action, and the 10 is 100% subjective based on personal desires. Ergo, MOST games should be 6,7,8 and the 9 is a must buy, and a 10 is a holy grail that has the absolutely rare magic to appeal to all and be undeniable.
Some old gamezines could be super harsh, if you go all the way back to the commodore 64 and other 8 bits systems... boy games could get a 20/100... Hell getting over 70 was HARD in that time! The scale was very different indeed!
I was letting this video play while I was working on a game I am developing. It hurts me on a personal level to see games like "Action Girlz Racing." For one, it hurts because I can see that there is a degree of quality that could be met with just a couple hours worth of development time. But more than that, it hurts to think they shoveled out in six weeks, but yet, they still have a game. No matter how crappy and horrendous that title may be, the developers have that very much over me, having achieved in six weeks what I still haven't after several years. That hurts me on a very personal level. But perhaps even worse than that is to realize that this game just scored more attention, more reviews on UA-cam, and more sales than my game ever will if-and-when it ever gets finished. Also it has a more consistent art style than what I'm making.
I love that you're starting this conversation, although I do think the problems run much deeper than can be solved with revising the scores and content of these reviews. I really think you're a bit too hasty in saying that UA-camrs are essentially a solution to the problem. UA-camrs present what I guess I'd call a cult of personality problem. People are so willing to just go along with any notion that is popular or at least justified in some way in video game discussions. So many people just parrot some other popular opinion, especially if it's one from some UA-camr, even if they don't necessarily agree with it. It's like they're scared of their own opinion being "wrong" or something, and because the UA-camr has some false sense of authority on the subject (despite the fact that you can't be a better "enjoyer" of something), they feel more comfortable just parroting whatever they said. Of course, the experiences of a video game and its value are a personal thing, and really what something means can only be decided by the one who experiences it. The problem then is, within video game discussion, the question is never "what is the value of this video game?" It is "how good is this game?" and within that I think we find part of why video games are considered an immature hobby. I think there's a lot of artistic value in video games, but I would never call myself a "gamer" (there are also other philosophical reasons I wouldn't as well, but I definitely wouldn't call myself a gamer specifically). When discussion and journalism about games is mostly centered around those ideas, which fundamentally are just circlejerks about somebody's opinions, UA-camrs don't help the issue really. The only real reason this all exists is because of how video games are so expensive, at least triple A ones, and how people can get recommendations about what to buy and all. To fix that, and therefore reviews there needs to be an examination of the ethics of video game distribution. The answer there, at least I think, comes from the fact that video games are software, and the solution would have to come from the same place that open-source and fsf stuff are looking into. Cheers.
One thing that I think needs to be said too is that time frame matters. Your thoughts on something will change over time, so ultimately, what you considered a great game right after finishing may eventually seem better or worse later down the road. I have many games that I absolutely loved, that now when I think about going back to them, I don't really have a desire to. Which only goes to show how meaningless that Metacritic rule about not allowing changes in score, since I imagine there are plenty of people who might change their opinion on say, Bioshock Infinite or some other heavily-lauded game now that the dust has cleared and people have had more time to consider their overall feelings on them.
7:51 what platform did they review alien isolation on? Remember that alien isolation released on the original Xbox one with the obligatory kinect camera and the xenomorph will be attracted to sounds through the Kinect camera so playing the game in a noisy environment is terrible. The game is sometimes challenging but it is by no means hard
I got into an argument on a Discord server over why I think review sites aren't very useful compared to UA-cam gameplay overviews. I wish I could have just pointed everyone to this video, you made all my points so much better than I did.
Hey M Really great video! The problems you mention in regards to out of date reviews are certaintly annoying, especially in this age of early access, open betas and constant content rollout and updates. Steam’s “recent reviews” Can certainly help someone, but it’s without scores and the reviews Can be as useless as any IGN review. I’m at the point of watching gameplay first, or singing some seadog tunes before buying any game. Anyway, sorry for the phoneposting. Cheers.
Yeah this is what I do now also. If something looks interesting I'll watch some gameplay for it. I don't bother sailing if it doesn't pull me from the gameplay. I've been happier with my game purchases this way. I end up buying way less games but on the other hand I play more of them.
My personal "WTF IGN" moment that kick-started it all for me was the "7.8, too much water" review for the Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire remakes in 2014. I simply couldn't imagine how you could bother to bring up something that mundane in a Pokémon game with so much else to actually criticize or even mention in the first place. How naive I once was. How disgusting they've always been. Edit: Omg, you actually mention one, lol. Excellent.
@@ohno5559 this feels like a wilfully ignorant complaint to make i actually think 7.8 might even be a bit HIGH for ORAS personally but even i can recognise that that review made some ridiculous points and got blasted for good reason, albeit yes the joke did get a bit old
@@Tundra. Mine is the fact that Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky got a lower score (4.9) than Imagine Party Babyz (7.5), a Wii shovelware game.
This reminds me of the reviewer that couldn’t complete the tutorial of cuphead and then rated it badly. If you don’t have the qualifications or the critical thinking skills to read and then follow text in a video game tutorial, then you don’t have the qualifications to be reviewing video games.
Just for accuracy sake, that was not a review it was a preview, he didn't rate it at all just said it was hard, and he uploaded it himself because he thought it was funny how badly he was doing while interviewing the developer
Dude wth. It's 730am I have had insomnia for 5 hours and I just found my login to leave this comment. Your videos are some of the best production quality and excellently narrated videos out there. I am gobsmacked as to how you're not on 1M+. What the actual he'll.
I think most people consider Vader Immortal a game. That's how I always heard it described. Interactive movies generally have very basic interactivity and this is especially true in VR. Also, if Telltale games count as games then surely so does Vader Immortal. Those games are nothing but cutscenes and quick time events followed by running around for a bit and then repeat.
Tbf initial reactions to Alien Isolation WERE much more mixed; until only horror-game fans (the more appropriate target audience) remained focused on it. It was seen as not very approachable for people not used to stealth horror.
I agree the single universal scoring scheme doesn't cut it. And this isn't how games were originally reviewed back in the 90s so I am curious about your take on categorized scoring scheme. Say: "Music: 0 (no in game music). Plot: 7. Difficulty: 3.". These categories don't need to be fixed, though some should be common. The sad part is that back in the day reviews would "average" scores which produced the result. A game with no music but excellent story could match a game with no story but some music and high difficulty, which was silly, but at least you knew where the average score came from. I miss this old scoring style..
Holy shit Billy the Wizard is a real game, I really thought that had to be a joke. I can't imagine why they decided against the original title, "Barry Hatter: The Sorcerer's Broomstick" (again, not a joke).
The fact that Real Steel got a 3/10 yet I have some of the best memories playing as a kid with friends sums up the worthlessness of review scores. Every piece of art is subjective.
Never seen your videos, idk why this one was shown to me now, but this was a fantastic video. Definitely gonna watch more, nice job and thanks for the content
this is like the biggest issue with ign. People get mad at them for "not giving low scores" all the time, but when they do they get flamed and the writer gets doxxed. Gamers are their own worst enemy
Perhaps the most startling point here is that IGN reviewed Cooking Mama, a game nobody could play because it was pulled from sale, for search volume. The outlet literally last year did the same thing for The Day Before - when other sites were producing other types of content keeping players up to date with the controversy surrounding its launch - and even slapped a 1/10 on it. Of all the points in this vid, that's the one that rings the most true.
@@angeloh58dCooking Mama Cookstar, which was made for switch and then was pulled from release. Eventually it got a re release without the crypto miner
26:12 YES! THIS IS WHAT I ALWAYS SAY! Everyone (online) attacks me saying I rate various forms of media “too low.” Even after I explain my reasoning and give fairly detailed context to the good, the bad, and the mediocre. I even often add in my personal biases to give a clearer picture of the media I am examining as a whole. They just get hung up on the number and the cultural inflation attached to it. To me a 50-60 is average. To most a 75-85 is average. By me going against the inflated norm in my scale I am somehow personally attacking the content they love (or even sometimes content that they admit is just average but simply doesn’t deserve a 61).
I honestly have never felt good about reviewing things on a 10 point scale because I don't feel a connection between arbitrary numbers and my feelings, so I try to avoid numbers when I can. Tier lists I feel similarly about, where letters on a tier list can be rather meaningless when different people view tier scores differently. I usually just rank things on a word scale, say it like it is, on a scale of this sucks to this is fantastic and everything in between. It just feels more comprehensible in this landscape of numbers and letters getting overblown in their meanings, seen differently all over by each different person
Hey man, pretty good video! I do just want to say that, as someone who bought these kinds cereals for a keto diet, the lack-lustre flavour is just a by-product of the dietary nature of these cereals. They’re not really meant to compete with the big names in sugary cereal, because that’s not their angle. Their angle is health, in a not super hardcore way that involves chugging eggs. In that regard, for people who are serious about that kinda stuff, it’s a good buy… if you can afford it. Good video, and I can’t wait to see where this series is headed!
A key example of how things are consistently gotten wrong by a reviewer is the early entries of Monster Hunter on Gamespot. Wow. The reviewer, who may have been on board as the designated reviewer for the franchise all the way to the 2nd or 3rd portable Monster Hunter, really laid into the game and complained about the things we actually look for in MH - the flimsy excuse for boss fights, the game loop of killing then crafting then killing again, and even the part where the monsters have a tell when they're about to attack.
I find that sometimes it's helpful when someone is super biased towards a review. Example: Reviewer reviewed a game console and said it was bad all the way around, and mentioned that the device was a fingerprint magnet (not a dealbreaker to me). They then mentioned very briefly in the video that it drained 4% of the battery life after playing an intense game for 7 hours straight... back up for a second, a system with an average span of 175 hours on high settings isn't considered a tool of the gods? Yep no, the dude was just hating on the system because he didn't like the design. Although it sucks that bad reviews can ruin a good game.
It's perfectly fine for a reviewer to dislike Myst in their reivew. Hell, a lot of my favorite reviews to write and read focus on the writer's distaste for something. The problem is that Myst review is poorly written, edited and phrased. If you disliked Myst, you should be able to articulate why you dislike it in a way that a disinterested party could understand. That review says "game sux don't buy" and leaves all the potential on the table.
You're right! I might not have emphasized this enough in the video, but I've always championed the importance of vocal criticism! It's what lets viewers calibrate their expectations to your tastes. If you're an RTS genre noob and I'm a total RTS purist, knowing that mismatch helps me understand where your "too many things to manage" complaint comes from. It's expected feedback from someone unfamiliar, but not a deal-breaker for veteran. Same goes for you as a reviewer loving every FPS under the sun - when you slam one, it carries serious weight. Something you love nearly uncritically has a flaw you mention openly? Boy it must be a big one. This kind of transparency isn't about "good" or "bad" reviews, it's about alignment. As a viewer, I want to know if your take is gonna vibe with mine, if your joys and gripes mirror my own potential experience. So yeah, let's get negative, but constructively. Saying "I hated it, so I'm not even going to play this port, I'm going to trash it and the original instead" is why I picked on this review so harshly.
Found you via EFAP. 17:39 I really like this being raised. Beyond UA-cam: user review systems from Steam, gog etc are way more helpful these days, despite their own issues (namely, real instances of review bombing)
Yeah definitely, and solid effort with compiling all this information. First of its kind endeavour as far as I’m aware. Hope this information gets some traction.
Still salty about that God Hand review 20 years later, I'm over relationships and shit from that long ago but I still can't believe they gave one of the best games a 3/10.
Ahhh yep, speaking of game journalists hating the game they are reviewing: Pokemon mystery dungeon explorers of the sky has a 4.9 and, as my profile picture might suggest, i refuse to let people forget about it, especially cause the reason the review was so scathing was that they ragequit partway through because it was too hard. They are singlehandedly the reason that game didnt become as popular overseas as it could have, all because they refuse to have journalistic integrity. Honestly seeing that one back in the day was my wakeup call to journalists being trash, even if im aware with it being my current favorite game i am biased, i dont care its just depressing.
That's why user's score is more reliable. Hell, Steam reviews are BETTER than popular "gaming sites". The same can be said with movie reviews. Never trust the critics.
That is true @@thientuongnguyen2564 but the sad state of affairs is that those reviews affect sales only a fraction that popular gaming sites do, its honestly sad...
As someone who just finished Cyberpunk and Phantom Liberty I liked the changes since release it's still got some stupid bugs but it's much more playable now
After finishing the whole video, many thought's have went through my head for each segment, and topic in discussion. But by the end I'm left with few words, you covered this issue tremendously well. From the editing, to the thought out topics/discussion, the fact you don't hold back in exposing how IGN really work & how damaging they actually are to Videogames as a form of Art, not just Soulless consumption. I agree with so many thing's you've said in this video, but unfortunately I don't think the algorithm will ever let it flourish. Nonetheless, you've done the gaming community a solid. I have seen so many great game's the last 4 year's release, only to be hit with such divisive reviews. People blindly following each other without having experienced said game, themselves. Which to be fair, is part of what makes game reviewing, and is what comes of game review's. But the problem to me is, many reviewers just can't seem to have fun & enjoy the game for what it is. Unrealistic expectations and the idea that a game must be built around the specific individuals exact wants and needs from a game, can lead that consumer to be disappointed, instead of finding Joy in the unique aspects and quality's, that the game may offer. To me, I've finally seen a resurgence in some of my favourite IP's, Games that were stagnating or had sup par releases, finally stepped it up with their latest releases, yet to the average consumer, they fell short... Maybe people have been burnt by so many poor releases over the year's, that they're unable to see when something is genuinely fun and worthwhile. From PS2 to PS3 had so many great games (Before than to, but I'm just keeping this timeline for now), but for me the industry started going downhill after The Witcher 3, around 2015-2016. 2007 to 2011 really had some great open world games that experimented with physics etc, then it just started to fade out. The sequels we started getting were falling short, and tiresome (be it a few Gems in-between). But from 2018 to the current year (2023), I have had smash hit after smash hit, this has been some of the best gaming in my life.. yet for many other people, it has been their worst, or at least that's how it seems by the constant whinging in the gaming community. The words definitely started flowing once I started typing, but with such an in-depth video, you left me with a lot to say. Cheers again for putting the effort into addressing such a unique topic that generally goes unnoticed, especially by the average gamer, even though they tend to be influenced by review scores the most.
Hey great video M! I think there is a interesting conversation to be had about number scores in general for movies as well, not just games. Keep up the great work though, I actually made it to one of your video on time instead of watching it a year late.
The fact they gave Alien: Isolation 5.9 will *never* not be hilarious or embarrassing The Myst review is an all time classic, though. A full 3d rebuild of a *fkn slideshow?!* - 4 out of 10 because I'm outside
Could it be that people are using the 5 to 10 scale like the US grading system where it goes from A to F and F is just failed? It seems that 1 through 5 = F while 10 is A, 9 is B, 8 is B-, C and D equal to 6 and 7 respectively, making the users consider anything outside the "positive/passing" side of the scale a negative.
24:20 The Day Before has been released and also shut down at this time. So the clip is very comparable to how ign operates. Despicte knowing the game no longer exists for purchase. They'll still give it their first 1/10 in like decade to get clicks.
I have never in my life bought a game based on reviews. So the whole "LOL IGN" thing is kinda lost on me. For most people, their assessment will be swayed by the reviewer they love/trust, it's always best to go in blind. Says the guy that bought Cyberpunk and Diablo 4 on day 1.... so yeah take that with a grain of salt.
the myst thing is why i tend to avoid jrpg reviewers that don't focus primary on them. as if i do other wise it's clear the reviewer does not like them and has a bias so the review is worthless.
Thanks so much to my Patrons for suggesting this video, and to you for watching it! You can help promote this video by retweeting this tweet twitter.com/MRIXRT/status/1602818671457476613
I know this is a year old but you know what I realized before you finished going over the fives? at this point they write reviews for clicks thats why they review their toilet paper. It's the video game review equivalent of buzzfeed articles
@@WildFungus yes
Wired did the same thing that guy did on Myst for Hogwarts legacy, literally gave it a 1 out of ten because they did not like JK Rowling's opinion on certain issues.
wired is a bad magazine that is constantly referenced because people agree with its politics. @@thedivinityman
All you had to say was "IGN" and I already knew their ratings are akin to scribbles on the wall inside a "treatment facility" where they house the mentally unbalanced.
...And I have to say I kind of feel I'm insulting the mentally unbalanced made scribbles.
I'm literally shocked that Myst has such a low rating. We love Myst in Bulgaria. Back in the days, there was a gaming show on TV called "Mist" which started around 9 pm and went till 4 am. They had everything - video game discussions, consoles, mobile games, anime, movies even a DJ was playing sick house and techno beats in the background. And after midnight, the host started playing adventure puzzle games like Myst 4 or Siberia or Schizm etc, and you get to phone in and tell him what to do in game. It was absolutely legendary. Sadly, the host passed away a few years ago... RIP Roro.
This is so so endearing, I loved hearing this, thanks for sharing. I think there's a certain love / hate relationship for those games, I always felt like it was unfair how badly rated they were. They were truly pieces of art. Eastern europe also made many of them ! I do know that the company that made Schizm and others in the series was Polish.
That sounds like an amazing experience. Sorry to hear about the host, but at least you got to make memories out of it!
its boring and only interesting in the context of you donèt have any fun games to play,.
Omg that sounds like a good show I want to watch
Bulgaria mentioned! ЛЕТС ГОООО
The way he spoke the words "The guy that hates Myst" sounded like a boss introduction that warranted a boss track with a choir speaking latin.
My family loved myst, I didn't lol its unique and but just not for me
I own Myst, Myst 3, Pyst, and have never managed to finish any of them. Great story games, but just not for everyone.
Myst plays like ... putting all the clues to the end of the deep elves (Dwemer) in Morrowwind onto one island and that is the game.
I am still angry about the Alien Isolation review by IGN. Complete tools.
Yup...blew me away that anyone could give that game a low rating...yeah..it was arguably a slow burn towards the mid-point, but WOW the whole setup was chilling af...and the twin brain for the xenomorph?! Pure. Unadulterated. GENIUS 😎
I will never forget that the reviewer for Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky rated the game a 4.9 after getting stuck on arguably one of the easiest dungeons given the point in the game, getting frustrated and dropping the game right there
They didn't even get to the weird existential stuff 😔
I give this video a 11/10, it has the perfect amount of water
Nice it is so important to stay hydrated😊
33:28 the day we learned that IGN editors work for Team Magma
Review objectivity and the nonsensical review score shenanigans is something I've been struggling with since the 90s. I remember Diablo got a 5/10 one time, Xbox Magazine gave Dead Space a 6/10, and the infamous 9.6 Fortnite review inspired a whole Twitter account to document all the games that were lower rated than "Flosscraft". Great video. Kudos to you and your collaborators!
Thank you! You look familiar, I think we've been on the same podcast a few times ;)
Nice to see you here
Dead Space got a 6 out of 10? 💀 Every day we stray further from God.
Fortnite is a good game tho
Honestly though... the fortnite score was only infamous because older millenials and Gen X have a superiority complex.
Fortnite appeals to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, but it does so to MASSIVE success. Anybody looking at that and saying that fortnite is trash... is just showing their own bias.
Daily reminder that God hand got a 3/10 from. Ign
If Shinji Mikami didn't want a 3/10 he wouldn't have made such a boring, annoying and frustrating game. Why should you be forced to try and complete a level with no starting health when you have no hope of survival and will just need to reload a minute later? What's fun in fighting the same annoying demon creatures over and over again when the fight was old the second time you tried it? Why, oh why, did Clover Studio put so much money into such a risky joke, and why did no one see that the joke didn't have a real punch line at any point in the development?
@@reallycool
Uh... what?...
Godhand is considered an underrated cult classic, it has some real flaws but also some great strengths, it's an important landmark of Clover becoming the far more action heavy Platinum, and the game certainly isn't a 3/10.
@@_-Lx-_ I quoted IGN's review
@@reallycool
Oh, OK, NVM, I'm just stupid.
Ignore me.
Christ, why would they rate the literally unplayable cyberpiss on the ps4 higher? This comment alone is all you need to never trust ign scores again.
We need a reviewer matchmaking service, where you input your own ratings for a bunch of things and it matches you with the reviewer whose tastes match yours best. That way, you get the next best thing to trying all the things yourself : the opinion of someone who thinks like you.
As an objective review is imposible, embracing the idea of the opposite: a completely non-objective review but from someone that has the most similar taste posible. Actually sounds good
@@prysma2057 Thanks! I think it would work. And the more reviews you submit, the more relevant the match would be.
Why would you want to only hear from someone who agrees with you all the time lmao
@@lepercolony8214 Well We ARE talking about art here, not politics or science. In art consumption, the most important thing is to find more of what you like and avoid things that you do not. That's the whole reason genres exist, after all.
@@TheComedyGeek idk you can't find new stuff if you keep getting fed the stuff you already like!
I'm telling you all the school grading system messed us all up. A C (70%) was "average" while an F (50%) was "failing" so a 5 out of 10 isn't "average" in our minds it's "failing"
I was always thinking, "Why is 70% average in reviews?" Why did I never think of it this way?
I disagree.
The school grading system isn't judging your work from 0% "bad" to 100% "good", with 50% being "average", it's determining how much of the work you did right. If you only did half your job right at, say, a real job, you'd get fired, because that's a failure, not the average.
@@lamenwatch1877 That's right, but the mentality of grading systems, which score you based on how well you completed an objective, have affected the way we see game reviews
@@awsxedc3 I guess I just disagree that that constitutes "messing us up", but I see your point.
I mean… getting 50% of the material correct is failing at understanding the material. That’s what it’s representative of.
21:40 there are actually three versions of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter that are wildely different games. The PC version is a highly tactical FPS. PS3 & Xbox 360 is a third-person arcade. PS2 & Xbox is a first-person arcade.
OH MY GOD THAT HOCKY GAME SEGMENT HAD MY JAW GLUED TO THE FLOOR. its even funnier when you realize that the first treyarch game is the lowested rated ign game yet for a long time they would give every cod game both good and bad a glowing review.
And they gave it a zero, but gave the Switch Fifa 23 Legacy Edition a 2, despite that being the same game as the game in 2022, and 2021, and 2020, and 2019
So yes, a game that was released a second time is worse than a game that was released annually over 4 years literally without any change at all. And even the reviewer jokes that unlike EA they dislike just copying last year's review.
@@HappyBeezerStudios TBF, IGN can't even give 0/10 scores anymore
As someone who considers Myst one of the games that shaped my childhood and outlook on life, those reviews made me legitimately angry.
Genuinely, and Exile is possibly my favourite in the whole series, it's one of the greatest pieces of art and architecture ever made and it changed my life :) I wince when I think about how that game was maligned, and failed to make the money needed to keep Presto Studios alive, and reviews like the one at 30:29 helped to really ruin its release.
The game is mid at best if you take off the nostalgia googles.
@@xBox360BENUTZER, luckily I don't own "nostalgia googles". ;-)
@@xBox360BENUTZERit all depends on what youre looking for brother.
These reviews basically means I can’t trust any of their reviews. They are not reviews, just rants about their hatred of that genre.
So in summary. Even game review scores are effected by inflation 24:51
That point about games getting better reviews once the franchise is popular is so true. Dark Souls got OK scores from most outlets when it launched, and it got lower scores from reviewers who didn't get it. Overall it landed in the 80s for most outlets and averages (brought up by the likes of Gamespot and Edge giving it glowing reviews because the individual reviewers connected with the game and recognized how special it was), the game was seen as a niche difficult Japanese game that not many outlets gave a ton of attention to, especially with Skyrim just on the horizon.
Then it blew up over the next two years, especially UA-cam reviewers who couldn't stop raving about it as the word of mouth spread. Later, Dark Souls 2 came out amidst the peak of excitement and every single big outlet gave it very high scores, which got it into the 90s and into "universal acclaim", suggesting it's an improvement over the original. Cue DS2 being the most divisive, mixed game in the franchise with those same UA-cam reviewers mostly either tearing it apart or giving it mixed reviews.
Journalists 100% review games based on hype and how high the expectations for a game are, they really can't be trusted.
Great example
Erm...Cyberpunk
@@AG-kb7yb well everyone was shitting on cyberpunk so IGN was just band wagoning on that.
There's a lot to be said as well about reviews used essentialy as advertisement for new games
I don't know if this is still a thing, but back in the day there was the threat of the "blacklist", where certain reviewers or entire websites just wouldn't receive early review codes because they were negative towards some high-profile title (Jeff Gerstmann and Jim Sterling come to mind)
I saw a Kotaku writer today who posted a bunch of 'funny moments' on their Twitter before posting their brand new review of High On Life. It felt like they were nothing more than a part of the hype machine
FWIW: I've been blacklisted by Ubisoft in the past, it happens
It not only is still a thing but also it targets youtubers now.
Always
ALWAYS trust reviews that are made after launch
never early access or Closed Alpha
Honestly that's still a thing. Even "popular you tubers" will get offers to review a new title. But if they give the game a bad review, or even one that isn't glowing, that company will lose interest in that UA-camr. That's something that all these UA-camrs have to contend with; it's part of the review business.
The only reviews I can trust are ones made of older games; games that are not making any sales or money any more.
@@marscaleb just find a critic/creator who you trust!
I'ved landed on IGN a few times looking for walkthroughs for stuff like collectibles, and I honestly would have thought that the atrocious web design would be enough to deter anyone from actually reading the reviews on that site.
Lmao
How I score things;
(10 = Perfection. Even with context impossible to achieve.) Don't bother looking for this score.
9 = This is what AAAA+ games with time and resources invested into it should be.
8 = Fantastic. Very hard to fault, unless I'm nitpicking.
7 = Good. Not great and may have some flaws, but still recommend.
6 = Decent. It is fun but not enough to remember for the right reasons.
5 = Average. Take it or leave it.
4 = Mediocre. It works, but not something I'd go back to.
3 = Bad. It's functional .... just about. At best I'd run with a concept, but incompetent execution.
2 = Poor. Will remember this for the wrong reasons; might even be so bad it's good. Probably an asset flip.
1 = Shit. IT'S. JUST. BAD. Barely playable dumpster fire. So bad it's burned into your memory.
0 = Irredeemable. Game does not work and its existence feels like (or even is) a criminal offense.
Used to just browse ign scores to see all the worst ones, because that's just the sort of thing that stimulated me back in the day. Seeing Explorers of sky get a 4.9 was one of the main reasons it took me so damn long to get around to playing it, and I'm a little sour over that ngl
"stimulated me" wym by that
@@arandomstreetcat Gen Z when they see a form of expression they are unfamiliar with:
@@anguset this comment stimulated my special spot
@@anguset bro, the joke is that "stimulated" usually has sexual undertones, it's like saying "that's what she said" in response to something meant to be innoccuous
Gen Z knows what stimulated means
The Myst reviewer just doesn't get it. Puzzle games, visual novels, slower paced atmospheric games, aren't necessarily "fun". They're enjoyable. It's like a quiet walk in the park or reading a book, where they want something akin to playing a sport. But a lot of people don't like sports.
knowing the person behind the review is definitely extremely important if you're going to take anything valuable away from the review
The fact that the just dance review calls it "not a game" as though dance pad style games hadn't already been around doing the exact same thing for a while-
Nah not really though, just dance really is just dancing, dance pad games aren't really dancing, idk having grown up on both one of them does feel significantly more like a video game with more direct input for your actions and just dance felt more like a workout CD, still it IS a game as it does give you a score on how well you copy the dance so.
In the 1990s in Germany, video game magazines lived from their personalities. Take the magazine GameStar as an example, back then the most sold magazine. You had for example Mick Schnelle, who sadly died in the 2020s. When you saw him testing a simulation, you knew that he was qualified. He lived simulation games. Not a typo. Probably he had more technical expertise about planes than even plane engineers just by how much he knew about those games. And similar examples go for the other genres, although not to that extreme. When someone reviewed a game, the redaction would discuss it afterwards and then come to the conclusion of what score to give, in order to keep it in line with other scores, but the reviewers almost always knew what they played, were experts on the genres. And they didn't shy away from controversy. Once they published a multiple pages article about a developer complaining about their supposedly low score (which was in the 80s, meaning it was a top game for genre fans).
That is how video games journalism was back then in Germany: Independent. Investigative. Fair. With not only reviews, but background stories also (one was on how the id software developer with the nickname "Levelord" designed the Quake III levels so they are fun and balanced, another was on violence in games, then one on legality of circumventing DRM, etc.).
I miss those days. I used to be super loyal to PC ACTION back then, as a teenage edgelord...
5:30 On the topic of games that can no longer be played, it is VERY important that digital copies, documentation, and information about old "lost" videogames are not deleted from the internet. Similar to real life history, there is value in keeping records of things that have passed - even small things.
we shall never forget the Sonic Unleashed and Doom 2016 reviews showing that the ones who reviewed those games have clearly never touched a controller in their lives 😂
Sonic unleashed with the tedious night levels?
@@ikagura Hot take, they weren't bad and the platforming (besides the awful camera in Chun Nan) was alright
@@ikaguraBut that's not what got the brunt of the criticism from IGN. They clearly couldn't handle a game for literal children with the footage used for the day stages
The infamous awful doom 2016 gameplay was from polygon, not IGN
@@ThatGuy-ky2yf I'd say they were bad, but not that bad. Just meh.
I started digging into reviewer's Twitter profiles, seeing that a lot of gaming website game reviewers have credits on news websites that don't have gaming on them. I then realized that game reviews are just another writing gig to them.
That Cuphead review that couldn't make it past the tutorial was from a website on investing, and not a gaming website.
😂
Bro needs to invest in gaming skills
This was super interesting! IGN is a meme level company but it was great to explore why. Maybe I'm misremembering but I believe the whole seven being so low came from the original release of Destiny, since it was the first proper hype delayed game that came from a dev that was too big to fail.
They also gave The Day Before a 1 today lol.
Myst DS guy gave Sonic Free Riders a 7.5 out of 10
A game that is completely unplayable and lacking in every aspect that defined the Riders spin-offs, it's just completely baffling to me
How does IGN select their staff for reviews? It's insane
And because of these reasons you said, the hungarian IGN actually removed the scoring system from both movies and games about 2 years ago. They said that most people won't read/watch critics and just look at the score in the end, without listening the actual review.
That Myst DS port was truly awful. It had multiple game-crashing bugs. It also included an in-game notepad, which had only one page, no word wrap, and no ability to insert characters (if you want to add something on top, you have to "backspace" the whole thing). In fact, I think it might not have been possible to complete it without using a strategy guide to skip Selenetic because of the crashing. And, yes, all the surreal visuals and audio got crunched to fit on the DS. If that IGN author had actually played it he would have been able to say "it crashes" and give it a deserved 1 out of 10. It's a moot point now since Myst is easy to buy in like three different versions on Steam, but back then it compelled me to install the original disc on PC and mess with installing an ancient version of Quicktime to make it run. Just sharing this because I don't think I've ever seen another person talk about it.
Really excellent video. I'm reminded of my frustration during the PS2 era. I was (and am) a big fan of Dynasty Warriors and its ilk, and I found myself profoundly disconnected with the perception of them at the time. Review outlets, even as they still might call them "good," also routinely panned them as repetitious button mashers that recycled too many assets, ideas, and saturated the market with too many releases. And while there was (and is) some truth to those thoughts, they routinely ignored the fact these games were immensely popular with the base that played them. If they acknowledged them at all, it was usually with at least a bit of scorn, casting them usually as mindless knuckle-draggers. The fact was they generally performed quite consistently and smoothly. They were satisfying and cathartic to play for people looking for a sort of spiritual successor to classic brawlers and beat em ups. They were also mechanically iterative in ways that anyone other than a seasoned player might not ever notice: Character movesets were tweaked, AI improved, that sort of thing. The changes brought with each new release were generally worth the time and money to take a look at. All that's to say, they didn't Get It™.
All the more galling that today reviewers like Musou now since they paint Zelda on top of it while ignoring (or blithely downplaying) the game running like absolute garbage. But I digress.
Being fair, older games got a lot more of a pass than modern ones.
Back then you added a button to stick to the wall and bam, instant best seller.
Included dynamic lighting and everything was forgiven.
Added some ragdolls and you already had the whole game.
Slapped a popular IP and people would buy it.
Like, Simpson's road rage is a crazy taxi clone, yet it's regarded as such a great game. Same with the other mess of a game, Hit & Run (which yes, i played a lot as a kid, but i still recognize it sucked). All because of the IP.
Abe's World Oddysey is still considered a great PSX game, somehow. Just because of the setting i imagine (because that game has nothing else going for it)
Final Fantasy 7, one of the FF games with the worst gameplay possible, is often considered one of the best games of all times just because it had a plot? Which had a couple of impactful moments and that was all people needed to say it was good. (And for every good moment there where plenty of bad comedic anime ones)
FF Tactics is also considered the best of the series just because of the plot, while the gameplay is an intentional mess.
Deus Ex came out in the 2000, and it is absolutely awful despite being an FPS that came AFTER something like Half Life. Even if you get one of those modernizing mods the game is barely playable. But it is still a cult classic.
Roblox is one of the most played games nowadays, and i invite you to find a single game that doesn't feel like a troll Unity asset flip.
GTA Online, which used P2P while MTA San Andreas was hosting over 100 players per server with proper multiplayer FOR FREE. Added pay to win micro transactions where with money, you could get vehicles so busted that they wheren't even available as cheats in any other GTA games. (Even MTA servers didn't allow you to spawn tanks or fighter jets in free roam, where everyone is given a cheat menu)
People's opinion do not always reflect the quality of a game.
I'd consider myself a musou semi-fan but I feel this comment so much. I'm not a diehard and I don't really keep up with em but I like them a lot. Even this detached from them I can clearly see the mistreatment musou games got/still get from gaming press, until you slap a zelda on it of course! Then it's "not like the other musou games" and "fresh and innovative" as it chugs to a silky smooth 15 fps and has less content than DW games from years ago.
@@rompevuevitos222 People also praised Red dead redemption 2 despite the gameplay being bad.
@@The-S-H3lf-Eater isn't it the same as the first one?
I remember it having good gunplay and a great atmosphere.
I am kinda numb to open world games after 15 years of GTA games so idk how to rate them anymore
@@rompevuevitos222 I would say the gameplay is same-ish as in the story. Go to marker, shoot bad guys, go to other marker. I haven't played red dead redemption 1 and kinda can't, so i can't really answer your first question.
This is the first video of yours I've watched. About half way through I paused the video because I respected how open you were in giving honest feedback on the subject. Its refreshing to be talked to like a person and not a customer.
Excellent video, really hit the nail on the head with this one, especially the points about review culture, and alienation from the person behind the review. I've thought giving art a numbered score is really dumb for a while now. Different kinds of art serve different purposes, strive to do different things. So when trying to score something, do I score it based on my overall enjoyment, ignoring how well designed the game actually is, or do I score it based on how well the game fulfilled what it set out to do, regardless of my feelings? Or is it both, or something else entirely? Enjoyment can be experienced in many different ways, so do I need to specify if a game was primarily "fun", or "gripping" etc? In the end, what does a score even really do, other than boil down complex pieces of art into a digestible number that leaves zero room for nuance? This is only exacerbated when comparing games of the same score, like you bring up in the video. So as a UA-cam reviewer myself, I can't bring myself to give scores to things, it's ultimately pointless. But I found that I can't even do it in a non serious context, as I stopped scoring everything I watched/read on My Anime List, cuz I just couldn't quantify wtf a 7 meant. It's ridiculous lmao. Excellent video mate, looking forward to the next one!
Thanks so much for your thoughts, they mirror a lot of mine
Great comment, I can definitely relate to this. Journalists often seem like Robots fullfilling a task, without the Soul that's necessary to fully enjoy each video game experience differently, and sometimes, out of the Boxes presented to the player.
I hate 10 points score systems. It's not just IGN, it's working wrong almost everywhere. People usually using only 7-10 and forget about the rest of the score. 5/10 supposed to be middle of the road average, but I believe that people would suppose it as a bad score if they see 5/10. Kudos to Steam for getting people only 3 options: positive, negative or keeping your opinion to yourself c:
Steam not having a meh rating means people kinda have to decide this or that way, which leads to review bombing and games that are just okay but not anything special getting higher marks because you don't find many bad things to say about them... It's the Rotten Tomatoes scale where most people giving it 6/10 will make it 100% fresh.
@KasumiR great points
I do think the steam rating system would be better with a 'meh' option, because a lot of reviews on mixed games say they tentatively support it or don't support it with a caveat; like only bother if it's on sale, it's a good base but wait for it to be updated further, fun but very short, not worth your time unless you like a very specific genre, etc. I think these games deserve to be looked at more than they would be if everyone just chose negative. But I agree that a "yes, maybe, no" scale is LEAGUES better than a number rating system, because it forces reviewers to think and elaborate on their opinions lol
"IGN sucks" - 10/10 IGN
I swear it used to be possible to sort by review scores. Having said that the issue that have with deciphering which platforms the reviews were for…. It used to be A LOT clearer. The old ign ui would have which platform you were viewing. Actually what was really cool is that for platform “portal” the UI would change to reflect how to video game console looked. So it was REALLY clear what platform you were viewing. Also I appreciate they had different people review the games on different platforms. Ign was a really good website that entertained me to no end. I loved looking up old reviews and videos and see all the old games I would see on store shelves as a little boy and what they thought of them.
Unfortunately IGN wanted to unify the entire platform, so legacy article ui was updated. It’s a shame because they erased the “score breakdown” that was at the end of every article.
I hate and have always hated superheros. Movies, comics, books, never liked them. And you know what I *don't* do? Tell people who do like superheros what media they should and shouldn't give a chance. I'm not qualified to.
Superb video. The obsession with review scores drives me crazy. Scores remove all the context of a review, and I dread giving games I review a score, even if I love the game. Games and other media have objective qualities for sure, but how much those objective qualities can affect someone's experience with a piece of media can differ greatly. Unless you're strictly talking about a product's functionality and technical aspects as accurately as possible, almost every review will be subjective. Thinking that anyone can mathematically equate a score from an individual's opinion on a game is a ridiculous notion. IGN is one of the worst examples of this, as they give silly scores such as "5.9" to games. How do you calculate an individual's opinion to a decimal point?
Steam reviews have their own problems (such as basically encouraging "meme" reviews that contain little substance and rarely actually say anything about the game), but I think the "thumbs up/thumbs down" system is better for aggregating reviews, at least for a marketplace. Rotten Tomatoes sort of does this, but in a significantly worse way, as it relies on review scores that are above or below a 6/10. Steam requires people to own the game, meaning that people have to be interested in the title they're reviewing. This is why a game such as Sonic Frontiers can receive an overwhelmingly positive score on Steam. It may be confusing as to why it's rated that high to some, but if you're interested in Sonic games, you're very likely to enjoy Sonic Frontiers. The 95% score isn't to say that the game is actually a 9.5/10, but to say that 95 percent of users recommend the game.
While browsing games on Steam, I've often found myself scrolling down to the review section to find out why a game got the reception it did. It's a "score" system that makes me want to look for more context behind the reviews. That being said, when I do scroll down, there will be a number of reviews that will just be a joke and nothing more, but some of the more informative reviews are actually better "simple" reviews than the ones you see at IGN. I can often discover a lot about the functionality of a game in a short amount of time. If I'm interested in a game, but it has a "mixed" reception on Steam, that actually means something to me. I'll look into the review section and will come out with a list of bullet points of the most common postive/negative aspects of a game.
It's not a perfect system by any means, but I find it far more reliable for gauging whether or not I should purcahse a game than something like metacritic. For the analytical reviews you can find on UA-cam (and the type of review I like to write the most), there probably just shouldn't be any kind of scoring system at all. It actually kind of peeves me a bit when UA-camrs like SkillUp put things like "I recommend/I don't recommend" in their title because of the analytical nature of their reviews. It often leads to people taking their word as gospel without even considering how the UA-camr got to that conclusion and how their preferences might differ from others. I'm not entirely innocent when it comes to this, and it isn't completely the reviewers fault. The structure of the internet and making money off this sort of business encourages this kind of behavior.
Anyways, the only issue I have with this video is the point that UA-camrs inherently make for better critics. UA-cam game discourse has its own issues (one of which I talked about in the previous paragraph). It really depends on the individual writing, and not all websites are structured like IGN. There are plenty of lackluster game critics on UA-cam. Maybe even more so than a website. The problem with writing for a website is that you have to accept that your work is going to be of a more inconsistent quality because you have to constantly be writing about things you may care less about. I think it's fair to say that UA-camrs are more consistent in their quality thanks to the creative freedom and schedule they get, but it isn't as simple as UA-camrs being better.
Well thought out response, I appreciate it. As I've mentioned in a couple other responses, I don't think my position is being read quite right: It's not that "all" UA-camrs are better, it's that UA-camrs "in general" will provide better content than IGN by their nature.
@@reallycool Ok, thanks for the clarification.
The score is as easy as the 1-10 female scale. The 5 is avg, the 6 has something special, the 7 stands out from the 6s with something you wouldn't expect, the 8 borders on ideal perfection, the 9 is the best you can actually find and represents the pinnacle of female form and action, and the 10 is 100% subjective based on personal desires.
Ergo, MOST games should be 6,7,8 and the 9 is a must buy, and a 10 is a holy grail that has the absolutely rare magic to appeal to all and be undeniable.
@@InvestmentBankr you sound like a creep
@@OrgaNik_Music you sound like you don't understand how averages work. Oh, and a simp 😆
Some old gamezines could be super harsh, if you go all the way back to the commodore 64 and other 8 bits systems... boy games could get a 20/100...
Hell getting over 70 was HARD in that time! The scale was very different indeed!
I was letting this video play while I was working on a game I am developing.
It hurts me on a personal level to see games like "Action Girlz Racing." For one, it hurts because I can see that there is a degree of quality that could be met with just a couple hours worth of development time. But more than that, it hurts to think they shoveled out in six weeks, but yet, they still have a game. No matter how crappy and horrendous that title may be, the developers have that very much over me, having achieved in six weeks what I still haven't after several years. That hurts me on a very personal level.
But perhaps even worse than that is to realize that this game just scored more attention, more reviews on UA-cam, and more sales than my game ever will if-and-when it ever gets finished.
Also it has a more consistent art style than what I'm making.
I love that you're starting this conversation, although I do think the problems run much deeper than can be solved with revising the scores and content of these reviews.
I really think you're a bit too hasty in saying that UA-camrs are essentially a solution to the problem. UA-camrs present what I guess I'd call a cult of personality problem. People are so willing to just go along with any notion that is popular or at least justified in some way in video game discussions. So many people just parrot some other popular opinion, especially if it's one from some UA-camr, even if they don't necessarily agree with it. It's like they're scared of their own opinion being "wrong" or something, and because the UA-camr has some false sense of authority on the subject (despite the fact that you can't be a better "enjoyer" of something), they feel more comfortable just parroting whatever they said. Of course, the experiences of a video game and its value are a personal thing, and really what something means can only be decided by the one who experiences it.
The problem then is, within video game discussion, the question is never "what is the value of this video game?" It is "how good is this game?" and within that I think we find part of why video games are considered an immature hobby. I think there's a lot of artistic value in video games, but I would never call myself a "gamer" (there are also other philosophical reasons I wouldn't as well, but I definitely wouldn't call myself a gamer specifically). When discussion and journalism about games is mostly centered around those ideas, which fundamentally are just circlejerks about somebody's opinions, UA-camrs don't help the issue really.
The only real reason this all exists is because of how video games are so expensive, at least triple A ones, and how people can get recommendations about what to buy and all. To fix that, and therefore reviews there needs to be an examination of the ethics of video game distribution. The answer there, at least I think, comes from the fact that video games are software, and the solution would have to come from the same place that open-source and fsf stuff are looking into.
Cheers.
Interesting viewpoint, thanks for taking the time to write it out
One thing that I think needs to be said too is that time frame matters. Your thoughts on something will change over time, so ultimately, what you considered a great game right after finishing may eventually seem better or worse later down the road. I have many games that I absolutely loved, that now when I think about going back to them, I don't really have a desire to. Which only goes to show how meaningless that Metacritic rule about not allowing changes in score, since I imagine there are plenty of people who might change their opinion on say, Bioshock Infinite or some other heavily-lauded game now that the dust has cleared and people have had more time to consider their overall feelings on them.
Can't spell ignorant without IGN.
7:51 what platform did they review alien isolation on?
Remember that alien isolation released on the original Xbox one with the obligatory kinect camera and the xenomorph will be attracted to sounds through the Kinect camera so playing the game in a noisy environment is terrible. The game is sometimes challenging but it is by no means hard
I got into an argument on a Discord server over why I think review sites aren't very useful compared to UA-cam gameplay overviews. I wish I could have just pointed everyone to this video, you made all my points so much better than I did.
Hey M
Really great video!
The problems you mention in regards to out of date reviews are certaintly annoying, especially in this age of early access, open betas and constant content rollout and updates. Steam’s “recent reviews” Can certainly help someone, but it’s without scores and the reviews Can be as useless as any IGN review.
I’m at the point of watching gameplay first, or singing some seadog tunes before buying any game.
Anyway, sorry for the phoneposting.
Cheers.
You really do have to do the work yourself at this point, and having "7/10 -IGN" doesn't do anything to help the discussion
Yeah this is what I do now also. If something looks interesting I'll watch some gameplay for it. I don't bother sailing if it doesn't pull me from the gameplay.
I've been happier with my game purchases this way. I end up buying way less games but on the other hand I play more of them.
never trust IGN for anything, avoid them at all costs.
My personal "WTF IGN" moment that kick-started it all for me was the "7.8, too much water" review for the Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire remakes in 2014. I simply couldn't imagine how you could bother to bring up something that mundane in a Pokémon game with so much else to actually criticize or even mention in the first place. How naive I once was. How disgusting they've always been.
Edit: Omg, you actually mention one, lol. Excellent.
> reviewer gives a game a score that's like half a point too low
time to whine about it for literal years
@@ohno5559 this feels like a wilfully ignorant complaint to make
i actually think 7.8 might even be a bit HIGH for ORAS personally but even i can recognise that that review made some ridiculous points and got blasted for good reason, albeit yes the joke did get a bit old
@@ohno5559 Ahhh the jeff gerstmann review of twilight princess. Good times.
@@SFTMKW actually the review was good. Look up mangakamen’s vid on it.
@@Tundra. Mine is the fact that Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky got a lower score (4.9) than Imagine Party Babyz (7.5), a Wii shovelware game.
This reminds me of the reviewer that couldn’t complete the tutorial of cuphead and then rated it badly. If you don’t have the qualifications or the critical thinking skills to read and then follow text in a video game tutorial, then you don’t have the qualifications to be reviewing video games.
Just for accuracy sake, that was not a review it was a preview, he didn't rate it at all just said it was hard, and he uploaded it himself because he thought it was funny how badly he was doing while interviewing the developer
Dude wth. It's 730am I have had insomnia for 5 hours and I just found my login to leave this comment. Your videos are some of the best production quality and excellently narrated videos out there. I am gobsmacked as to how you're not on 1M+. What the actual he'll.
I think most people consider Vader Immortal a game. That's how I always heard it described. Interactive movies generally have very basic interactivity and this is especially true in VR.
Also, if Telltale games count as games then surely so does Vader Immortal. Those games are nothing but cutscenes and quick time events followed by running around for a bit and then repeat.
TotalBiscuit energy is strong with this one.
Subbed!
Tbf initial reactions to Alien Isolation WERE much more mixed; until only horror-game fans (the more appropriate target audience) remained focused on it. It was seen as not very approachable for people not used to stealth horror.
The guys at my local game store can give much better reviews than "gaming journalists".
I agree the single universal scoring scheme doesn't cut it. And this isn't how games were originally reviewed back in the 90s so I am curious about your take on categorized scoring scheme. Say: "Music: 0 (no in game music). Plot: 7. Difficulty: 3.". These categories don't need to be fixed, though some should be common.
The sad part is that back in the day reviews would "average" scores which produced the result. A game with no music but excellent story could match a game with no story but some music and high difficulty, which was silly, but at least you knew where the average score came from.
I miss this old scoring style..
Too much water? What about the VERY NEXT mainline Pokémon games after ORAS, which took place on LITERAL ISLANDS
Holy shit Billy the Wizard is a real game, I really thought that had to be a joke. I can't imagine why they decided against the original title, "Barry Hatter: The Sorcerer's Broomstick" (again, not a joke).
The fact that Real Steel got a 3/10 yet I have some of the best memories playing as a kid with friends sums up the worthlessness of review scores. Every piece of art is subjective.
Never seen your videos, idk why this one was shown to me now, but this was a fantastic video. Definitely gonna watch more, nice job and thanks for the content
Thank you :)
My personal pet peeve IGN review is the 3/10 they gave God Hand.
this is like the biggest issue with ign. People get mad at them for "not giving low scores" all the time, but when they do they get flamed and the writer gets doxxed. Gamers are their own worst enemy
@@cooltwittertag No-one lost sleep over that MK film getting a 3. They just wrongly gave a good game like God Hand a 3 and that's ridiculous
Perhaps the most startling point here is that IGN reviewed Cooking Mama, a game nobody could play because it was pulled from sale, for search volume. The outlet literally last year did the same thing for The Day Before - when other sites were producing other types of content keeping players up to date with the controversy surrounding its launch - and even slapped a 1/10 on it. Of all the points in this vid, that's the one that rings the most true.
No way that was pulled I had it for ds as a kid
@@angeloh58dCooking Mama Cookstar, which was made for switch and then was pulled from release. Eventually it got a re release without the crypto miner
From the thumbnail I wasn't expecting a video nearly this good.
Thank you
More awesome work. Hope to see you on EFAP again soon.
Can't wait!
26:12 YES! THIS IS WHAT I ALWAYS SAY!
Everyone (online) attacks me saying I rate various forms of media “too low.” Even after I explain my reasoning and give fairly detailed context to the good, the bad, and the mediocre. I even often add in my personal biases to give a clearer picture of the media I am examining as a whole. They just get hung up on the number and the cultural inflation attached to it. To me a 50-60 is average. To most a 75-85 is average. By me going against the inflated norm in my scale I am somehow personally attacking the content they love (or even sometimes content that they admit is just average but simply doesn’t deserve a 61).
At points in this, your voice-over sounds like the guy from LGR lol. Not a bad thing just cool.
First time stumbling across your channel, your videos are fyre keep it up
Glad you like them!
Today I learned that in the midst of it all, the "too much water" guy got shafted by the editor.
Deadly Premonition is a 10. IGN messed that one up.
I honestly have never felt good about reviewing things on a 10 point scale because I don't feel a connection between arbitrary numbers and my feelings, so I try to avoid numbers when I can. Tier lists I feel similarly about, where letters on a tier list can be rather meaningless when different people view tier scores differently. I usually just rank things on a word scale, say it like it is, on a scale of this sucks to this is fantastic and everything in between. It just feels more comprehensible in this landscape of numbers and letters getting overblown in their meanings, seen differently all over by each different person
Hey man, pretty good video!
I do just want to say that, as someone who bought these kinds cereals for a keto diet, the lack-lustre flavour is just a by-product of the dietary nature of these cereals. They’re not really meant to compete with the big names in sugary cereal, because that’s not their angle. Their angle is health, in a not super hardcore way that involves chugging eggs. In that regard, for people who are serious about that kinda stuff, it’s a good buy… if you can afford it.
Good video, and I can’t wait to see where this series is headed!
A key example of how things are consistently gotten wrong by a reviewer is the early entries of Monster Hunter on Gamespot. Wow. The reviewer, who may have been on board as the designated reviewer for the franchise all the way to the 2nd or 3rd portable Monster Hunter, really laid into the game and complained about the things we actually look for in MH - the flimsy excuse for boss fights, the game loop of killing then crafting then killing again, and even the part where the monsters have a tell when they're about to attack.
I find that sometimes it's helpful when someone is super biased towards a review.
Example: Reviewer reviewed a game console and said it was bad all the way around, and mentioned that the device was a fingerprint magnet (not a dealbreaker to me).
They then mentioned very briefly in the video that it drained 4% of the battery life after playing an intense game for 7 hours straight... back up for a second, a system with an average span of 175 hours on high settings isn't considered a tool of the gods? Yep no, the dude was just hating on the system because he didn't like the design.
Although it sucks that bad reviews can ruin a good game.
I much prefer the metric of Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down, or Neutral (neither good nor bad).
It's been a long time since I've seen a UA-cam video that raised some salient and cogent points, well done.
It's perfectly fine for a reviewer to dislike Myst in their reivew. Hell, a lot of my favorite reviews to write and read focus on the writer's distaste for something. The problem is that Myst review is poorly written, edited and phrased. If you disliked Myst, you should be able to articulate why you dislike it in a way that a disinterested party could understand. That review says "game sux don't buy" and leaves all the potential on the table.
You're right! I might not have emphasized this enough in the video, but I've always championed the importance of vocal criticism! It's what lets viewers calibrate their expectations to your tastes. If you're an RTS genre noob and I'm a total RTS purist, knowing that mismatch helps me understand where your "too many things to manage" complaint comes from. It's expected feedback from someone unfamiliar, but not a deal-breaker for veteran. Same goes for you as a reviewer loving every FPS under the sun - when you slam one, it carries serious weight. Something you love nearly uncritically has a flaw you mention openly? Boy it must be a big one. This kind of transparency isn't about "good" or "bad" reviews, it's about alignment. As a viewer, I want to know if your take is gonna vibe with mine, if your joys and gripes mirror my own potential experience. So yeah, let's get negative, but constructively. Saying "I hated it, so I'm not even going to play this port, I'm going to trash it and the original instead" is why I picked on this review so harshly.
I remember even back in the 90's, I'd read reviews in EGM and would hardly ever agree with the reviewers. Been a weird disconnect for decades.
Found you via EFAP.
17:39 I really like this being raised. Beyond UA-cam: user review systems from Steam, gog etc are way more helpful these days, despite their own issues (namely, real instances of review bombing)
I try to raise good points, I'm glad you think I did :D
Yeah definitely, and solid effort with compiling all this information. First of its kind endeavour as far as I’m aware. Hope this information gets some traction.
this video makes me understand why gamergate was so popular
Nope, that was organized bigotry.
@@LiraeNoir sorry, I don't listen to people who take Jim Sterling seriously.
@@gmjammin4367 lmao imagine being gamergate apologist in 2020s, incurable inceldon.
Oh my god finally someone who doesnt just go "too much water lol ign dumb". I have been saying for years its a perfectly valid critism.
Still salty about that God Hand review 20 years later, I'm over relationships and shit from that long ago but I still can't believe they gave one of the best games a 3/10.
Ahhh yep, speaking of game journalists hating the game they are reviewing: Pokemon mystery dungeon explorers of the sky has a 4.9 and, as my profile picture might suggest, i refuse to let people forget about it, especially cause the reason the review was so scathing was that they ragequit partway through because it was too hard. They are singlehandedly the reason that game didnt become as popular overseas as it could have, all because they refuse to have journalistic integrity.
Honestly seeing that one back in the day was my wakeup call to journalists being trash, even if im aware with it being my current favorite game i am biased, i dont care its just depressing.
That's why user's score is more reliable. Hell, Steam reviews are BETTER than popular "gaming sites". The same can be said with movie reviews. Never trust the critics.
That is true @@thientuongnguyen2564 but the sad state of affairs is that those reviews affect sales only a fraction that popular gaming sites do, its honestly sad...
I knew it was Mauler when you said film critic.
As someone who just finished Cyberpunk and Phantom Liberty I liked the changes since release it's still got some stupid bugs but it's much more playable now
I loved them
After finishing the whole video, many thought's have went through my head for each segment, and topic in discussion. But by the end I'm left with few words, you covered this issue tremendously well.
From the editing, to the thought out topics/discussion, the fact you don't hold back in exposing how IGN really work & how damaging they actually are to Videogames as a form of Art, not just Soulless consumption.
I agree with so many thing's you've said in this video, but unfortunately I don't think the algorithm will ever let it flourish. Nonetheless, you've done the gaming community a solid. I have seen so many great game's the last 4 year's release, only to be hit with such divisive reviews. People blindly following each other without having experienced said game, themselves. Which to be fair, is part of what makes game reviewing, and is what comes of game review's. But the problem to me is, many reviewers just can't seem to have fun & enjoy the game for what it is. Unrealistic expectations and the idea that a game must be built around the specific individuals exact wants and needs from a game, can lead that consumer to be disappointed, instead of finding Joy in the unique aspects and quality's, that the game may offer.
To me, I've finally seen a resurgence in some of my favourite IP's, Games that were stagnating or had sup par releases, finally stepped it up with their latest releases, yet to the average consumer, they fell short...
Maybe people have been burnt by so many poor releases over the year's, that they're unable to see when something is genuinely fun and worthwhile.
From PS2 to PS3 had so many great games (Before than to, but I'm just keeping this timeline for now), but for me the industry started going downhill after The Witcher 3, around 2015-2016. 2007 to 2011 really had some great open world games that experimented with physics etc, then it just started to fade out. The sequels we started getting were falling short, and tiresome (be it a few Gems in-between). But from 2018 to the current year (2023), I have had smash hit after smash hit, this has been some of the best gaming in my life.. yet for many other people, it has been their worst, or at least that's how it seems by the constant whinging in the gaming community.
The words definitely started flowing once I started typing, but with such an in-depth video, you left me with a lot to say. Cheers again for putting the effort into addressing such a unique topic that generally goes unnoticed, especially by the average gamer, even though they tend to be influenced by review scores the most.
Thank you for your interesting comment
@@reallycool no worries man
Hey great video M! I think there is a interesting conversation to be had about number scores in general for movies as well, not just games. Keep up the great work though, I actually made it to one of your video on time instead of watching it a year late.
Cyberpunk 2077 is up from 4 to a 9 on IGN now. I wonder if that's the biggest change they've ever made on one of their rolling reviews.
Also seems metacritic updated with their new score, so I guess there's exceptions to that rule
The Alien Isolation review still makes me mad all these years later
Your video's are so high quality man, you and your team (anyone helping you), deserve way more views!
Just me, but thank you ;)
@@reallycool I thought you might have been running the show solo, Nice work man.
@@reallycool what about the person who spent 35 hours data mining these reviews for you?
Yes?
@@reallycool aren't they your team?
Can you post a link for the spreadsheet you used in the video? I think its quite informational
Some of these "reviews" sound like reddit posts 😭😭😭
The fact they gave Alien: Isolation 5.9 will *never* not be hilarious or embarrassing
The Myst review is an all time classic, though. A full 3d rebuild of a *fkn slideshow?!* - 4 out of 10 because I'm outside
I rate this video 7.5/10, too much water
7.8 excuse me
Could it be that people are using the 5 to 10 scale like the US grading system where it goes from A to F and F is just failed?
It seems that 1 through 5 = F while 10 is A, 9 is B, 8 is B-, C and D equal to 6 and 7 respectively, making the users consider anything outside the "positive/passing" side of the scale a negative.
Yes, this is very likely a major factor.
24:20 The Day Before has been released and also shut down at this time. So the clip is very comparable to how ign operates. Despicte knowing the game no longer exists for purchase. They'll still give it their first 1/10 in like decade to get clicks.
I have never in my life bought a game based on reviews. So the whole "LOL IGN" thing is kinda lost on me. For most people, their assessment will be swayed by the reviewer they love/trust, it's always best to go in blind.
Says the guy that bought Cyberpunk and Diablo 4 on day 1.... so yeah take that with a grain of salt.
Honestly wish we could just download a stress test before actually buying a title
That's what demos are for! It would be nice if more games did them though.
16:36 this music played when I was playing a game which seemed to include a horror aspect, I almost had a panic attack
the myst thing is why i tend to avoid jrpg reviewers that don't focus primary on them.
as if i do other wise it's clear the reviewer does not like them and has a bias so the review is worthless.
It's important to find a critic you can tell how you agree or disagree with so you can set expectations well
*Cough*Dunkey*cough*
Kind of sad you only have 23k subs and this video only has 32k views. The work you put in is phenomenal