Re: Game Reviews: Spoiled By The Internet

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 18:04:32 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
<dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:

On 9/20/2024 11:34 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

 
But, man, those early reviews were _shoddy_. It didn't seem to matter
what magazine either; they were all universally shallow. Two-thirds of
each review just unquestioningly rehashed the game's box-copy, and
then the reviewers gave their opinions. There was almost no analysis
or deep-dive into what was actually good or bad about the games; at
most we got stuff like, "It was fun" or "it seemed a bit hard to
play".
 

Weren't most reviews at that time written before the game was finished,
let alone released for a reviewer to actually try to play it?

Yes. In fact, there were a number of incidents where reviews were
published and then the game got _cancelled_ ("Renegade: Return to
Jacob's Star" being one such example). Just the fact that the reviews
usually came out _before_ the game released was proof of the fact that
the magazines were getting pre-release copies, and often these weren't
'gold' versions but late betas. The excuse was that this was
acceptable because it took so much time to play through a game, the
reviewers needed to get the game a month or two early... but that
never held water for me. It only advantaged the publisher, not the
reader, to review beta versions.

Worse, it was sometimes quite obvious that the reviewers hadn't played
much of the game anyway. Now, I'm generally more forgiving of that;
you can often make a fair judgement on a game long before you reach
its end. But if the whole excuse for reviewing pre-release versions
was to give the time for the magazines to get through the game in the
first place... well, it all starts to fall apart at that point.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, this all started to come to a head,
and the magazines _finally_ started to get called out on this
nonsense, and while it never fully went away, they at least made more
of an attempt. They hired better writers, were less obvious about
reviewing pre-release code, worked to achieve more journalistic
independence from the games publishers, and generally there was
improvement all around.

But those early years? I've read better user-reviews on Steam (or here
on Usenet!) than some of the comments made by those "professional"
reviewers.