Maybe theres such thing as "Rigged Reviews"? Just like in sports? Would be very easy to pay off a group of popular reviewers to bash one thing and not another.

Maybe theres such thing as "Rigged Reviews"? Just like in sports? Would be very easy to pay off a group of popular reviewers to bash one thing and not another.

Well, there's always been the case (on-going) of review scores etc being 'bought', after all, your talking a magazine or website surviving long term on advertising revenues, publishers been known to want something in return for that exclusive review, or cover art, or indeed supplying compo.prizes etc.

Rockstar been linked to EDGE, as often review text has suggested a lower score than 1 given, ex-EDGE staff writter went public with his claims.

Plus OCEAN (as well as the paid for adverts, used to do the Nu-media section of EDGE, talking the early days here, PS1 review of Tunnel B1, suggested a 7 at best, as reviewer made it clear game was flawed and frustrating, yet score, if i recal, was an 8/10, there'd been double-page ads for the game...)

Media made a big thing about battery life of PSP when it launched, yet little said of the 3DS battery life, which despite coming out years later, has around the same life per charge as the PSP and nowhere near that of the DS.

(NOt a PSP fanboy, i've bought a DS+Games before, own GB, GBA, GB Micro, Neo Geo Colour Pocket etc).

Game gear took flak for the poor screen (blur, ghosting etc), yet try as i might, i've yet to get a workable picture from my GB, if anyone other than Nintendo had released something like the orig GBA, where you needed to be in direct sunlight to see screen, sure they'd have taken far more flak.

3DO+Jaguar were initally THE next big thing, then cruely cast aside in favour of the PS1+Saturn and then the fickle media turned on the Saturn.

The Dreamcast? shot down based on Sony's on-paper tech claims, 75 Million Polys, even when developers like Free Radical were saying, IF it does 1/10th of that, we'll be amazed, the hype machine continued and Dreamcast seen as 'dead in the water'.

Gamecube had things like Eternal Darkness, MGS:Twin Snakes (which i found so much better than MGS 2), Res.Evil 0+Remake, Rogue Squadron etc, but seen as a toy compared to the uber cool PS2, just because it did'nt have (average) DVD playback, should'nt have made it any less serious a machine, visually it delivered the sort of games i was expecting my PS2 to deliver at the time (Rogue Squadron's rich textures, gorgeous detail etc, a far cry from the drab, poorly textured PS2 games i was seeing so often).

Think lot of reviewers have ideas what they consider 'cool and if your game or product does't fit within that concept of thiers, it's knee-jerk, mock it time.

Plus, web sites love a good negative story, gets people talking, word of mouth spreads, more hits to the site, flame war erupts on comments box, they bloody love it.

Maybe theres such thing as "Rigged Reviews"? Just like in sports? Would be very easy to pay off a group of popular reviewers to bash one thing and not another.

Well, there's always been the case (on-going) of review scores etc being 'bought', after all, your talking a magazine or website surviving long term on advertising revenues, publishers been known to want something in return for that exclusive review, or cover art, or indeed supplying compo.prizes etc.

Rockstar been linked to EDGE, as often review text has suggested a lower score than 1 given, ex-EDGE staff writter went public with his claims.

Plus OCEAN (as well as the paid for adverts, used to do the Nu-media section of EDGE, talking the early days here, PS1 review of Tunnel B1, suggested a 7 at best, as reviewer made it clear game was flawed and frustrating, yet score, if i recal, was an 8/10, there'd been double-page ads for the game...)

Media made a big thing about battery life of PSP when it launched, yet little said of the 3DS battery life, which despite coming out years later, has around the same life per charge as the PSP and nowhere near that of the DS.

(NOt a PSP fanboy, i've bought a DS+Games before, own GB, GBA, GB Micro, Neo Geo Colour Pocket etc).

Game gear took flak for the poor screen (blur, ghosting etc), yet try as i might, i've yet to get a workable picture from my GB, if anyone other than Nintendo had released something like the orig GBA, where you needed to be in direct sunlight to see screen, sure they'd have taken far more flak.

3DO+Jaguar were initally THE next big thing, then cruely cast aside in favour of the PS1+Saturn and then the fickle media turned on the Saturn.

The Dreamcast? shot down based on Sony's on-paper tech claims, 75 Million Polys, even when developers like Free Radical were saying, IF it does 1/10th of that, we'll be amazed, the hype machine continued and Dreamcast seen as 'dead in the water'.

Gamecube had things like Eternal Darkness, MGS:Twin Snakes (which i found so much better than MGS 2), Res.Evil 0+Remake, Rogue Squadron etc, but seen as a toy compared to the uber cool PS2, just because it did'nt have (average) DVD playback, should'nt have made it any less serious a machine, visually it delivered the sort of games i was expecting my PS2 to deliver at the time (Rogue Squadron's rich textures, gorgeous detail etc, a far cry from the drab, poorly textured PS2 games i was seeing so often).

Think lot of reviewers have ideas what they consider 'cool and if your game or product does't fit within that concept of thiers, it's knee-jerk, mock it time.

Plus, web sites love a good negative story, gets people talking, word of mouth spreads, more hits to the site, flame war erupts on comments box, they bloody love it.

Wheres the "Like" button for this post!? You have nailed it. This is actually what I have witnessed in my 30 years as a gamer. You cant get any better than this summarization.

That's very kind of you to say.

I just rant away 🙂

I was also thinking of when Doom came out and was (rightly) regarded as being like THE best thing ever, but then reviewers starting approaching everything that used a FPS perspective as being, well, it's a FPS, it'll be Doom, won't it?.

Well NO, because by then, PC's coming into their own as decent gaming platforms and consoles were having things like DSP chips put in carts or having 32 BIT RISC chips in them as standard and were capable of handling the sort of early 3D the SNES/MD in their 'pure' (ie non-enhanced) form, just could'nt handle, so developers were no longer restricted to setting a game in a 2D side scrolling enviroment, as they had in the home or arcade, so they had more scope than ever before.

So, Rebellion decide to do an Aliens game and want to do it on a new piece of kit, The Atari Jaguar and they want to take full advantage of the hardware, so use the FPS viewpoint, scan in wall textures from actual film props etc, for that extra degree of recreating the setting, sample audio from the films etc etc, all using the Jaguars ability to do images in 24 Bit colour, thus technically doing more than Doom was doing in that area, which worked as they were taking a totally different approach to a game than Doom with it's mix of guts, gore, shooting and puzzles.

AVP was going to be a slower paced, more atmospheric game, giving players a 3D viewpoint for the 1st time on an Aliens game.

Now a good few reviewers totally understood what Rebellion had done and praised them for the approach and NOT just copying Doom and chucking Aliens in.Instead, choice of all 3 key characters, mission objectives etc etc.

But sadly, a lot went WTF is this? it's slower than Doom, plays nothing like Doom, it's awful, buy Doom, Jaguar=shit etc etc.

Then come Alien Trilogy on PSone, with it's motion capture, CGI etc, media went OMG this islike sooo next gen (even though project had started out on Mega CD and they'd had same reaction to Loaded, which started out on SNES) and no reviewer suddenly went:

'Hang on, underneath all this, it's just Doom, but with Aliens, Aliens which don't even act like they do in the films, here they are just milling about, they look like lost children, where's the A.I?, why's it so dark? atmospheric, yes, but hampers gameplay, it's hard to spot foes.Plus, might be loads of Aliens, but i've so little ammo, i'd best avoid them, thus kinda defeating point of having them in a Doom clone'.

OR:

The Saturn/PSone scenario:

I was a day 1 PSone owner, loved it, essential purchase, but, media was nothing but gushing with praise for it's Polygon pushing power, lighting effects, texture mapping and the like, which were indeed ahead of it's time and suddenly, polys per second was where it was at!.

Nothing seemed to concern them that said polygons on PS1 warped at the edges and this WAS the reason Sega had the Saturn using Quads instead of polygons, ohh no, silly Sega, everyones using polys, look how stupid they are, quads, pff!, nor was the fact that if you wanted to save your game, you had to buy an extra (a memory card) something Saturn avoided by using battery back up.

Since 3D was everything and 2D was 'dead', Playstation 1's 2D abilities (not too hot, Ram limits etc) were glossed over and no-one in the media cared that actually you know what? the Jaguar and Saturn are actually bloody powerful 2D machines, (designed as all round work horses, rather than polygon pushing monsters) and just think of the arcade conversions alone that could finally be done justice on a home system!

Just think of all the CPS 1+2 games Capcom could do or Sega's Scaler coin-op's,or Data-East or...etc( plus with CD storage, no cart limits), great times ahead.But no, media had decided 3D was THe thing and anything that dared ventured outside that? was crap/under powered/bloody awful/who'd want 2D on a 32 Bit CD machine, that was for those (now) kids toys, the MD+SNES.

And since 3D was the bench mark, that's where Sega looked to for it's next gen console, the Dreamcast and likes of Capcom said, yep the 3D ability is fantastic on this new platform, but the 2D side, again whilst fantastic, IS'NT as great as we hoped or advised you on and Sony took one look and said:

Bwahhh Ha Ha, you call that a polygon count? our Next Gen Playstation will render 75 Million polygon's a second, compared to your punny 3 Million and not 1 magazine or website seemed to say ..hold on jut a cotton picking minute, you saying PS2 will be SO powerful, it'll make Sega's Model 3 arcade board look like something out of the ark and it'll retail at under $500, pull the other one, it's got (66 Million) polygons on!.

No, that was what Sony said and so what they had no actual, honest to god GAMES footage to back the claims up, look heres a ducky in a bath, OMG a pre-rendered sequence etc etc, Dreamcast has been killed off over night.How could Sega combat the supposed power of something no-one had seen games running on, with actual here and now, running on the system games?.

Like fighting a Giant with a pea-shooter, but point here is, media were either to afraid or too caught up in the HYPE to apply common sense and say, something sounds so far removed from reality here, 75 million polys, emotions in games? the top range Silicon Graphics workstations, yes, but look at the price they go for, you just cannot deliver that in a sub $500 console, has the N64 claims taught us NOTHING?.

The hilarious and usually brilliant Ashens has reviews the Neo Geo X now, he didn't like it very much . . . . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iHoOK5HCHA