Do Reviews Still Serve a Purpose?

Via Voodoo Extreme, a post on the Sony-sponsored ThreeSpeech blog asking if game reviews are a thing of the past. Post author 'Azz Hassan' opines that the proliferation of blogs and easy access to game trailers has made the 'biased views' of reviewers a thing of the past. Responding via the Ars Technica Opposable Thumbs blog, Frank Caron offers a rebuttal to the piece. 'The argument presented in the article seems to come with the very slant that it so viciously protests: one of a negative view towards a medium that the writer feels is inadequate. Yes, there is a ton of available media on the net that can help you get a look at a game as it develops, but the problem with videos and pictures is that often the intangible elements are impossible to understand simply from seeing the game in motion--only the written or verbal communication of a person can adequately capture these details.'

Depends

[El_Muerte_TDS]

On who (the actual person) wrote it, and how well you know the reviewer. Personal preference is always a big factor in game/movie/music reviews. It could very well be that I like a game what a reviewer gave a bad review, but I would only know that if I knew the reviewer's preference.
Ofcourse demo'ing the game is always better than reading a review.
The most useless part of a review is the grade, it says absolutely nothing, except what number the reviewer assigned. They might as well use colors for grading instead of numbers or stars. So... I rate the linked article: purple.

They definitely matter to me

[Don_dumb]

These days I buy only a few games and to try and spend my money on something I will enjoy, what choice do I have? I can either look at all the pictures or I can read what someone says when they have actually played through the game. It isn't just the final score that I look for, there are certain things I dont want in a game (such as loads and loads of unforgiving stealth in an FPS) and I use reviews to try and see if those elements are present, if they are I wont bother wasting my money. Most reviews I have seen will also talk about the hardware requirements. A game that requires massive power (while the official claims are for a mediocre system) is also out.
Yes, just like movie reviews they are someone elses subjective view, but to get your own view you would have to watch every movie made or judge them by the trailer. Both of which are far worse (in my eyes) than seeing the opinion of a reviewer that generally agrees with you and has themselves seen almost every movie ever made.

Having said that, reviews are less useful than demonstration versions, which I wish game makers would use more.

Reviews serve to limit need to gather info

[Protonk]

Reviewers are just like political parties, insofar as they help distill a vast amount of information in order to allow us to actually make some decisions. The point of political parties isn't to provide perfect information to the voter, the point is to allow the voter to reduce the complexities of the ballot when necessary.

Before you guys get out of hand in the comments, by that I mean that it is functionally impossible for us as voters (in any country) to vet EVERYONE, from the county clerk to the State Senator (Okay, sorry, I don't have a region agnostic example, deal). We may decide on the president based on our input from non-party sources, but the other 18 names on the ballot don't rise to the same threshold. Parties allow us to make an assumption that a representative will align to the basic ideas that we are interested in.

Reviewers serve the same function. I may decide that I 'trust' a particular game or movie reviewer. As a result, I can presume that his/her views on a game are a good proxy for my own. This allows me to narrow the field of games I might be interested in without covering every demo, every press release, and every industry whisper--not to mention playing the game. In this sense, reviewers are even more necessary, because in order for me to make an adequate decision about a game in the absence of press, I would have to play it (or a demo, but even that isn't perfectly enlightening, see Lost Planet). That, of course, would obviate the need for the review.

In this case, just like political parties, we learn to accept bias in our reviewers. In most cases, the biases are benign--we share them. We like that Rogert Ebert doesn't like M. Night Shyamalan, because we don't (obviously only speaking for some of us). We like that the Onion (and pretty much everyone else) hates Uwe Boll, because we hate him. The same thing with the Democratic and Republican (insert Labour/conservative, etc) parties. We accept their biases (when we do) because we share them to some extent.

The case of bias in favor of a game publisher is a little more insidious, and is something that the game press will have to work out, and I suspect that it won't work itself out by eliminating the review. I suspect that certain reviewers (Ars, to name one) will gain greater acceptance as the rest of them keep shilling for bullshit. The same thing happened to the Democrats in the South. The south changed (beyond racism/segreation, which really only explain the first 10-15 years of that seismic shift), becoming more religious, individualistic and pro-business and the Democrats didn't adapt, so the south moved on to the republicans.

Reviews are good...

[Anonymous Coward]

Previews are not. They are almost universally useless, because usually they offer a lot more praise than the game deserves, so the review site can stay on the developer's or publisher's good side. Honestly, when I read reviews, I don't care too much about the good parts, I pay attention and seek out the things that make the game something I should avoid. If a demo is available, I will ignore all previews and reviews and play it myself. Its what I did with Indigo Prophecy (and I bought it too!) and the King Kong game(didn't buy it). It's what I did with Supreme Commander, Command & Conquer 3, and so on and so forth. Then again, in the absence of demos and presence of a high speed connection, I might actually download the game (yarr) to see if I should bother buying it when a demo is unavailable. If the game is terrible, uninstall and delete, if it's good, buy. Reviews are a great source of information for those who can't or choose not to see how a game is on their own (piracy or demos). They have a lot of life left in them.

Re:Depends

[grumbel]

### The most useless part of a review is the grade, it says absolutely nothing,

I disagree, ratings give you a simple value to compare different games of similar genres. Sure, it doesn't make sense to compare a The Sims rating with a GTA one, since the games are just vastly different, but comparing GTA vs Crackdown is perfectly doable. Ratings also give you a very direct way to see what the reviewer thought of a game, when the review text just mentioned that the graphics are "good", how good is that "good", is that a RE4 "good" or just an average "good"? A 10/10 in graphics on the other side easily tells me that its among the best to expect on a console.

Beside pages from this, ratings are important for sites like Metacritic which would be rather hard to use without a final rating. When I want to get an impression from a game I search for the reviews that gave it the highest score and those reviews that gave it the lowest, thus I get a good overview of how somebody who likes the game views it vs somebody who doesn't like it. If there would just be text things would get rather hard to find the right reviews.

All that said, rating numbers are of course heavily flawed, many reviewers rate almost every game in a 70-90/100 area and don't make much use of the rest of the scale, another issues is that ratings are often tinted by non-game related issues, like price, if it is a port of an old game and such, which however might not matter at all for having fun with the game, especially since price can lower over time and as long as I don't already know the game it is still 'new' for me. Ratings are also a one dimensional scale, while you really might one a multidimensional, i.e. there are many games out there that are great by concept, but also heavily flawed in implementation, those however just end up in the 70-80% region, which tells little about there flaws or great concept, but just tosses them together with all those games that have an uninteresting concept but flawlessly implemented.

With all the flaws I however still consider ratings far more useful then harmful.

Review == Opinion.

[ThePhilips]

I use review quite simply: I'm looking for reviews of games I know and like - and choose people/sites who have rated games I like highly. And then check what else they have rated highly. That way I have found PC's "Rise of Nation", "Heroes of Annihilated Empires" and "City Life World Edition" - IMHO great games I enjoy and play, but most of high profile review sites have given them crappy/misplaced ratings.

E.g. http://wii.ign.com/ [ign.com] fits me perfectly. But on other side http://ds.ign.com/ [ign.com] - is U-turn in the respect: they gave lots of near-perferct marks to IMHO shit games (e.g. Mario, Partners in time) and underrated lots of games I have liked (e.g. Lost Magic). Reviews on ds.ign.com marked as "UK" are pretty O.K. and mostly fit me.

Re:um

[Hoi Polloi]

One thing I have noticed is the very nature of reviewing vs daily use. Reviewers are in and out. They won't go indepth into a game or hardware and won't cover long term playing or use of an item. Very few revisit, say, hardware like tomshardware will do sometimes. I've seen hardware with good reviews come back with user reviews a few months later saying "such and such died after a few weeks" or something similar. Games also usually get a review based on graphics but not on deeper gameplay since they don't put the time into it (gotta get the review out fast!).

I'll use the mainstream reviews for screenshots, basic info, specs, etc. If something is horribly bad about it they'll usually admit it. I can wait a month or so for the users to come out with their reviews which are usually closer to the truth. You'll still have the whiners ("It won't run on my ancient box!!") and impatient to sift through though.

There is so much user content for NWN-1 and the reviews for NWN-2 are so lukewarm that I'm passing on NWN-2. What pushed you to buy it against your judgement?

Re:They do

[heinousjay]

When's the last time a game got a 0, 1, or 2? I've played games that might have gotten a 6 or 7 that I think deserved a 2 or 3. ...I check some game review sites, like IGN...

I think we've found your problem.