Split-Screen :: The Game-Geek’s Daily Read

By Ravi Sinha

Penny Arcade humourously highlighted the parallels between Cole McGrath and Superman, especially in terms of their weakness. However, as much as they enjoyed the more twisted hooks of Sucker Punch’s Playstation 3 exclusive inFamous, once again the gulf that occupies the professional reviewer’s opinion of an exclusive and the actual experience has been analyzed. More accurately, as Tycho put it, “my inability to perceive the game I have read about in reviews.”

“Infamous is a decent game, and that’s the whole of it. Ironically enough, it lacks spark: it lacks impetus. Whatever power it does exert grounds out after a few hours, so that by the tenth hour I was twiddling my charged thumbs wondering if there was some other mutant that could torment this grey town. It’s cool to shock dudes, true. That’s a good Goddamned thing, because you’re going to be shocking a lot of fucking dudes.

“There’s a lot about the game that is incoherent. A game based on truly beautiful, fully realized art that (unlike their previous efforts) never seems to inform the gameworld. Some water kills you outright, some water doesn’t. It’s a game about urban traversal where the platforming has been trivialized by a kind of capricious magnetism, which sometimes negates or just disregards your input. As a result, Cole can climb virtually anything, almost automatically – marquees, exposed girders, modern art – everything except chain link fences, something any normal person could climb.

“Something strange happens with platform exclusive titles when they come into contact with the journalistic edifice, and I don’t know what it is. I would make sure you download the demo.”

Much like Grand Theft Auto IV, gamers and reviewers have had a hard time meeting eye-to-eye. When Killzone 2 was readying for release, many reviewers were nudged between a rock, a hard-place and the rabid PS3 fanbase. If any one so much as whispered something against Guerrilla Games’ PS3-exclusive, they were met with stern reprimand (read: vulgar flaming). Just recently, EDGE-Online faced more heat when they scored inFamous a 7/10. Even non-Sony fans are considering EDGE’s objectivity in relation to PS3 products (which is still hard to decide: if Resistance 2 saw a 6/10, then LittleBigPlanet was awarded a 9/10). At least other publications shared EDGE’s enthusiasm in regards to inFamous.

We could just say it’s a problem of numbers and go home. How could one possibly quantify a game using a score? We do the same for movies and books. Dividing a game review into parts of analysis regarding graphics, sound, replay factor, etc. has been called a narrow reviewing approach but a movie is reviewed on the basis of it’s direction, acting, scripting and art direction. It’s been commonly observed that people skip the reviews and go straight to the numbers to decide whether a game is good or not. Forget if the game is actually for them – higher numbers equal better games.

In terms of reviewing styles, I’ve observed that most reviewers when faced with the prospect of writing a glowing review often regress into waxing eloquent on it. Straight forward objectivity suffers a lot when it can’t be distinguished from prejudiced liking (or even hating) of a product. Some reviewers find one aspect of a game to be so great as to completely conceal any shortcomings it may have. Others may not find the initial game compelling enough and seek to mask their lack of enthusiasm (or showcase their immense dislike) by pinpointing flaws. This may sound like gibberish but it becomes an important issue when faced with questions like why Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare wasn’t criticized for it’s lack of co-op play while Killzone 2 was.

There’s no denying the need for professional reviews. We need people who have been around long enough to elaborate on the genuine merits of a game, while identifying the flaws the interfere in gameplay. It may seem “cold” or “heartless” to degenerate game reviewing into a completely objective art of analysis. But when going the other way has produced such controversial results (Gerstmann’s firing, the Killzone 2 controversies), it’s definitely worth a shot.