TornadoCreator

I definately agree different sensibilities require different critics, in fact I think that's a good solution to my issue to an extent. Jim Sterling and Noah Antwiler are two critics I like, in fact Jim Sterling and I have scarily similar tastes in most cases. My position is that someone who reviews RPGs needs completely different skills than someone who reviews FPSs, and I think that because people spread themselves too thin reviewing all kinds of games no-one takes the extra step to become an aficionado of the media. For example, a J-RPG critic with knowledge of animé, Japanese mythology, tokusatsu, and tabletop pen and paper gaming (like Noah Antwiler) so their cultural references aren't lost on them. Roger Ebert was a great film critic because he was well read and understood the common themes and practices in western film. This is what let him become such a great pusher of film-as-art; as of yet video games don't have that. PS: I'm aware that CoD has a campaign, and like the audience that buys CoD, I'm completely ignoring it. No-one buys CoD for it's laughably trite 4 hour long teen boy power fantasy non-stories and we all know this. Sure they may play the campaign as well, but it's the multiplayer they buy the game for.

Isn't that the point In all seriousness, it's nice to have a community to post in. I hope I don't come across too brash. I have a lot of pent up frustration with my issues, but chatting helps. I hope I can add as much to the community as I hope to get out of it.

I can't really do complex quotes using the Wii U so I hope you can follow this well... You claim the difference between Call Of Duty and narrative games are more genre differences, I disagree. The fundamental differences in mechanics are far more telling than simple genre. A good example of this is as follows. I like both Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Fallout 3. These are great games and if asked for a genre, most would say they're RPGs, maybe they'd specify Western RPGs; which is fine but wrong. The genres are Cyberpunk and Post-Apocolyptic respectively, the game... mechanics style?... that would be Western RPG. It's genuinely hard to discuss these things because the industry has built haphazardly without direction or structure. Think about how stupid the "genre" name First Person Shooter is. Extra Credits did a great episode discussing this. My point is I know someone who likes Fallout 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution but doesn't like Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim because he doesn't like the Fantasy genre. He liked Mass Effect, but didn't enjoy Dragon Age: Origins. This is what genre means, it's a description of the setting. The genre for Call Of Duty is Military, the mechanics style, (for lack of a better term as one currently doesn't exist), is First Person Shooter. Calling both of these things "genre" makes academic discussion on gaming very difficult. PS: For future reference, I'm never trolling. I like to question conventional wisdom and think critically about my hobbies. I'm an intelligent guy trapped at home and unable to work due to disability. This is how I keep my mind active, debate and analysis. If I ever say somthing that offends I apologise but the most interesting topics are emotionally charged. If you disagree with me about something, great, let's debate; but I promise you my opinions are genuine and my posts serious. I do not troll, it would be a sad and pathetic use of the limited time I have left.

I can draw lines like that, they're anything but arbitrary, and they make perfect sense. Why are you so offended that I consider narrative driven Video Games and competitive multiplayer Video Games to be so different that they're no longer the same medium... I'm clearly right. In this young and very badly organised industry there's no allowence for different media. In televised entertainment you wouldn't judge a football match, hollywood blockbuster, serial soap opera, stand up comedy show, documentary, horror film, or children's cartoon short by the same criteria would you? Hell a film critic wouldn't even pay attention to most of what I just said, but it's all still televised entertainment. What I'm suggesting is that interactive media is much like televised entertainment; it's actually many forms of entertainment all under an umbrella term. Tetris, Call Of Duty, and Shadow Of The Colossus are all very different games as different as sports, stand up comedy, and film I'd say. There's nothing stopping a film fan enjoying a football match or a stand up show, but that doesn't make them films. Likewise there's nothing stopping a gamer from playing all types of games but they're clearly different media, that's my point... Now I personally grew up playing video games, they had storylines, where largely single player and had an ending. My hobby is an insular, solitary, and introspective hobby. I don't care about multiplayer deathmatch in the slightest. Handing me a Call Of Duty game is like handing a film buff a DVD with a football game on it and saying, "I know you like video entertainment so I got you some". It's a gross and even somewhat offensive oversimplification of the medium. That's what I mean when I say I don't consider Call Of Duty to be a video game in the same way as I would the games I play. It's not a statement of it's quality, hell, I CAN'T judge it's quality; it's a statement on the inherent disconnect between such disperate genres.

Oh no, you misunderstand... I consider product stability to be bare minimum. As far as I'm concerned Battlefield 4 at launch is a 1/10 because it doesn't work, to get anything above a 2/10 from me it needs to have artistic merit, that said I don't rate multiplayer FPS games at all because I don't consider them games. I'll explain. The likes of Call Of Duty etc. don't need story, character, art design etc. they're about muliplayer competitive play and have little to no appeal to me and other gamers who want narrative driven interactive media. They're not 'video games' in the same way that The Last Of Us or Final Fantasy VII is. I actually feel completely unqualified to discuss Call Of Duty and don't feel it belongs. In effect I consider a game critic discussing CoD to be as ludicrous as a film critic discussing the FIFA World Cup Final, sure it's televised entertainment but it's completely different from a feature film and cannot be judged in the same way. I no more consider Call Of Duty players to be gamers than I would consider a football fan to be a film buff... even if they watch every match in the season. The only reason I buy games is for artistic expression and like with film critique, I expect game critics to touch on the artistic merits; to fail to do so is to miss the point. No-one writes a film review in which they discuss the framerate it was filmed in, the contrast in the shots, or the clarity of the audio (unless they're egregiously bad). It's assumed all films can at least attend competency here and they instead talk about storylines, theming, character depth, pacing, and cinematography... this is what makes film art and not just a waste of time, and it's precisely this that gaming should aspire to.

I would disagree that these concepts are separate at all. What good is a video game review as product? As product all that tells me is whether the game works... that doesn't interest me. If a game doesn't work, I'll take it back and demand a full refund as I would with any product. Sonic Free Riders or Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing for example are broken. I feel reviews need to judge the games artistic merits just as a film review does for film. I'm buying art after all, not a toaster or a set of socket spanners. What I'm getting at is that the reason I'm buying a game is for artistic expression. I don't want average to mean "functional", I want it to mean "of average artist value". I'm not after all buying a media disc, I'm buying the art on that disc. Really it comes down to how you see games. Are they art or product, expression in media or simply a toy to pass the time. I think you can see which side I'm on here.

I consider Alice: Madness Returns to be one of my all time favourite games. 10/10 I say. The mainstream critics aren't fit to critique it quite frankly. Not one of them spoke about the theming, character growth, storyline, art direction, or atmosphere; they didn't even make reference to the original source material. It was just sad inane bullshit as they discussed textures, graphics, mechanics and combat; reviewing the game not as art but as a product and that made me angry...

Only in USA. 70% as an average grade is stupid, it reduces the important part of the scale while highlighting the irrelevant. In UK a passing grade is 40%, but the exam is harder. This makes the difference between a 90% and a 93% for example far more nuanced, and makes high scores rare and valuable. Far too many Americans ace their exams, getting perfect SAT scores... if there are people regularly getting perfect scores the exams are too easy... the same is true in video games. If a critic is giving out more than a sparse few 10/10s, they need harsher judging criteria.

I'll have to disagree there FLD, as I feel your view of a rating system is fundamentally flawed. I don't rate a game 10/10 then knock points off for flaws. A 5/10 didn't lose half the points, it simply didn't excel in anything. I would consider the first InFamous a 6/10 game at best because it felt average and unexceptional, but I didn't dock it points for doing anything explicitly wrong. If anything 5/10 should be average by definition. This isn't a school exam, they don't "fail", for getting less than a 7/10. This is an artistic critique metric and we get more nuance from it by using the whole scale.

How do people feel about game review scores now. A year or two ago, 8/10 was a "bad" review. It was just ridiculous. People expect 10/10 reviews for games they've not even played... it's sad. Here's a good video on the topic. Now, what I wonder is if people feel this is changing yet. PS4/Xbox One games have been getting 6's and 7's far more than the standard 8's and 9's but we're still not using the lower half of the spectrum, and a 5/10 would still be thought of as terrible by most gamers rather than average as it should be. What do you guys think?

The way I see it, people getting upset because of critique are simply too delicate. Sure as kids OoT may have been fun for people, but objective judging criteria are worth discussing especially if we want the media to be taken seriously.

If there's one game you simply cannot criticise on the internet for fear of fanboy retribution it's Ocarina Of Time. I've said for years that this game is an overated overhyped game that gets by on fanboy nostalgia. Thankfully someone has finally made a video on the subject so I though I'd share Egoraptors video here. http://m.youtube.com/?#/watch?v=XOC3vixnj_0 Edit: Can't embed the video from a phone.

Thanks for all the welcomes guys, I miss the old small community forums; the likes of Reddit or even sites like The Escapist are just nit the same.

This song is always stuck in my head, not sure why as I don't really like most of what this band produce.

I've heard many people talk about medicinal use of marijuana. Never tried it myself, but I know people who do. I can't see it being any better than the many prescription meds I'm on though. I'm actually tee-total, no recreational drugs, no smoking, no alcohol... with my drug intake, my liver and kidneys don't need the extra work I say. I'm hoping to cut caffeine eventually. Why would I be banned? I'm confused how that would get me banned?

It's on my shelf, on my backlog list. I'm just playing a few others first. I try not to play games from the same franchise one after another as I don't want anything to get old and samey. I hope to get to Uncharted 2 before the end of the summer though.

Sure, a good example is Dark Souls. A game designed around difficult action-RPG gameplay it had an understandably small niche audience, therefore its budget was appropriately sized too. While the remake of Tomb Raider was causing panic for Square Enix because it needed to sell 6 million units to just break even, From Software celebrated massive profits when Dark Souls broke 1 million sales... naturally they've now decided to ruin it all by giving the franchise a AAA budget, and there's no way it'll get 6-10 million sales and actually make money. Shame really. Some of the struggling AAA franchises of today started as Specialist Games. The Hitman series and the Max Payne series for example, both started with specialist game budgets and small dev teams of less than a dozen people. Now they've got a massive budget, 100+ development staff, and unrealistic sales targets. Some specialist games still exist. The J-RPG series 'Tales Of...' and the Dynasty Warriors series are both good examples. They're still clearly current-gen, but by using slightly cheaper development methods they only need to sell on average around 600,000 copies to make a profit. This is more realistic for most games, but developer/publisher pride takes over and they delude themselves into thinking they can sell niche appeal games to Call Of Duty players if they could just get enough marketing... ...and these companies wonder why the industry is in colapse. THQ, Atari, Capcom... how many more have to go bankrupt or into liquidation I wonder?

Watched 'Non-Stop' yesterday. It's a pretty good thriller that plays on American terrorist sensibilities. Good pacing and the perfect role and range needed for Liam Neeson. Just released this month on DVD/BluRay.

I'd never really considered that the term AAA could be subject to interpretation. I've always seen it as this... AAA Game - Heavily marketed big budget titles intended to sell millions at the standardized price point of $60/£45. It has no bearing on quality but development method. Film analogy would be the Hollywood action blockbuster. Specialist Game - Niche title designed to compete with the AAA titles but with a lesser budget, smaller scope, and an understanding that this game will be unlikely to be overly innovative. Intended to sell to a niche audience so usually designed with the understanding that it probably won't break 1 million sales. Film analogy would be horror films like the Saw films, niche audience, lower budget, but still shown in cinemas. Budget Game - Cheap to make games, usually using either last gen hardware or using assets from an existing AAA games owned by the same developer (eg. Captain Toad on Wii U). Usually sold at a reduced price or as a spin off for an existing franchise, sometimes done as DLC nowadays (eg. Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare). Film analogy would be direct-to-DVD films. Indie Game - Cheap, often retro-themed or highly stylised game with a low budget, lower price point, and intended to be judged outside of the mainstream AAA scene. Film analogy would be indie films shown at Sundance that rarely make it to cinema. A strong game industry needs all these models of games because it's simply too expensive to make all games AAA. Unfortunately no-one told Square Enix, Activision, EA, or Ubisoft... which is why all these games come out nowadays needing 5+ million sales to break even. Not content to make a good game that gets decent sales in a niche audience, todays devs want ALL THE MONEY! That's why previously niche titles like Resident Evil, Dark Souls, and Dead Space are butchered and forced to become AAA. So envious of the likes of Call Of Duty or GTA selling 25+ million copies, devs pump money into every franchise in the hope they'll do the same and panic when they realise that the CoD fans don't care because they already have CoD, and the old fans consider the game watered-down. There's no market for AAA survival horror, stealth games, or super-hard hybrid RPGs... but as niche titles they'd be fine which is why games like Amnesia and Slender did fine. If I can see this why can't so called "industry experts"?

Ok then WaS, give me your test. I shall surely ace it.

Games I've beat this year so far include; Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D - 3DS Dynasty Warriors 8: Xtreme Legends Complete - PSVita Uncharted: Drake's Fortune - PS3 Donald Duck: Goin' Quackers - Dreamcast Super Mario 3D Land - 3DS Alice: Madness Returns - PS3 DmC: Devil May Cry - PS3 So far I've really enjoyed the games I've played this year with Alice and Dynasty Warriors being so good they've made it into my top 10 games of all time. Currently I'm playing though a few Wii U and PS3 games that I'm really into too that may well make it into my top 10 also... it's been a good year for games for me.

Hello there new forum. I'm TC... So, I was looking for a new forum and stumbled upon this place, good size small forum community; just like the good ol' days of the internet. Well, Hi. I'm a 28 year old gamer, started out as a SEGA kid but I've since moved to almost every platform going. I currently own a PS3, PSVita, Wii U, 3DS, Xbox 360, Dreamcast, and an original Xbox; all of which are set up and used at least semi-regularly. I used to have a gaming PC, but it died. I'm using my Wii U to access this website, (by far the best console for using the internet, perfect tablet-like browser). My favourite genres include 3D Platformers, Beat-em-up/3D Brawlers, J-RPGs, Arcade Racing, and Turn Based or World Builder Strategy games. Outside of video games I like pen and paper roleplaying, sci-fi tv and serial drama, horror films, synthpop and metal music, and swimming. A little extra about me; I'm an out-of-work Forensic Analyst. Studied Chemistry, Computer Science and Forensics at three different universities; guess I just like the student lifestyle. I'm now on disability as I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, Fibromyalgia and various other issues that cause muscle and bone degradation. My condition is now terminal as my heart is expected to give out within 10 years. I have limited use of my left arm, can't walk, and suffer chronic pain, chronic fatigue, and seizures. Obviously gaming is a massive help for me as escapism and the internet is a good way for me to casually socialise. With that I hope to get to know the regulars in this forum in time and I look forward to discussing games and more with you all. Thank you for you time, I hope to be here a while.