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12
Jul
2011
Out of Ten
Out of ten scales have gone terribly wrong. This isn’t particularly geared towards out of ten, it works equally well with out of one hundred as well but out of ten is used rather frequently.
The idea of an out of ten scale is that 5 is the middle, which should represent average. Or at least it used to. When a book is rated 6/10 that is an above average book. But when a movie is given 6/10 that is an average or below average movie. And these days a video games has to be an 8/10 or it is not even worth playing by the general consensus. More recently I’ve been looking at guitar reviews where almost every reviewer seems to give 9/10 or more to every guitar I see reviewed.
Now these average numbers don’t matter in and of themselves, as long as you know what the average score is you can judge based on that. But as a reviewer it allows no freedom in scoring. A book that is a 7/10 is certainly worse than one that is 9/10 and there are specific reasons to point out why. But both are good books. A 9/10 video game and a 9.5/10 video game have about the same difference in score as the those two books compared to the average. The same 2 point difference has to be squished into a .5 difference now. There are no in-between points. But you can still say that the 9.5 game is better.
The problem actually comes in low scoring games. Since everything below 8/10 is seen as a failure in video games, how can you accurately score things? 6/10 and 7/10 might seem natural. These scores are just below a good game. But what exactly is the difference between 3/10, 4/10 and 5/10? These seem like they are arbitrarily given out. Any score within this 3-5/10 range can effectively be given the same score.
The other problem lies with how something is reviewed. As price is highly variable in many of today’s products, in order to compare the high end and low end products on the same spectrum you have justify the higher scores on low end products as “for the price”. This is a good camera “for the price.” The downside to this is that you cannot compare things that are not “for the price.” My newest guitar receives mostly 9/10 and 10/10 on review sites yet it is also apparently “significantly worse” to the $2000+ guitars. None of these reviews can accurately score that.
So we should stay with a very easy to use four point system. Or maybe even less than 4 points. Bad, Satisfactory, Good, Great. Just as arbitrary as what we are using now, but with less of the fluff. There are still awards given out at the end of the year anyway, and rankings could be done entirely separately to distinguish the greatest games.
4
Jun
2011
Rift – One Step Closer to Guild Wars 2
So there Trion finally came out with a 7 day trial of Rift last month. I gave that whirl and ended up buying it after 3 days. It is one step farther from the old MMO and one step closer to Guild Wars 2′s questless system. I still employs a full range of quests, but many of them are outleveled because of the rift system.
The invasion system is almost like the GW2 system but without much of the longer term effects. A zone is invaded with many rifts and invasion forces at once and you have to group up to complete a goal and then defeat a boss. Which is basically one of two major factors that differentiate Rift from other contemporary MMOs.
I love these invasions. The problem is that it still seems like the side part of the game. During most of the game I’m still doing lame “kill 15 squirrel quests” which is exactly the part of WoW that drives me to rush through it all and try to hit the end game.
What Guild Wars 1 did best was having a series of chained plot quests that got you through the game. There was a little gear progression after that in certain dungeons and some higher level dungeons but in general you level did not determine your progression, the plot did. It was not a matter of being a certain level to progress, it was a matter of doing certain plot missions to progress, like you do in most single player RPGs. Of course you could still run ahead and skip bits, but the natural progression was that you completed missions and did plot quests to ‘beat the game’.
Guild Wars is the still the only MMO I’ve played where I’m not looking at an experience bar but just playing the game.
29
Nov
2010
Little Review of Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light
As a little background I’ve played Tomb Raider games from Angel of Darkness to Underworld. I missed anything earlier than that as part of my gap of having a shitty computer. In general I liked them. Good puzzles, sometimes a little unpolished or confusing in general but still fun games nonetheless.
So the move to a top-down action game caught me off guard to say the least. I never really thought it was going to be bad, but it was a strong move away from the previous incarnations. It was also another developer so I wasn’t sure how much of a Lara Croft-y feel it would still have to it.
However, to my delight this is probably the best Lara Croft game I’ve ever played. Only ran into a couple bugs throughout the whole game (door wouldn’t open at one point, replaying the level fixed it) and the co-op aspect really added a lot to the game. I played through my first time on local co-op with a friend in two sessions, once last month and once last Friday. The puzzles were generally pretty easy but still rewarding. Then on the weekend I played online (after it was finally released) with a friend. From what he told me by the end he was missing some particles and stuff (caused a few deaths) and he couldn’t switch guns anymore. As the host I was fine all the way through.
I did find in order to get the point rewards I had to basically take all the points I could. My second time through I ended up with the railgun this way. The final boss only took 3 hits (although he had about 6 phases to go through as well, so 18 hits) with this gun which was rather disappointing. My first time doing the boss fight was much more rewarding having to basically use everything I had to beat him.
I plan to play through the SP sometime. I think most of the puzzles will be different; everything in co-op seemed to rely on having two people. For a game released at $15 this a great deal. I wouldn’t say it’s worth more than $30, definitely not a $50 release game, but for about 6 hours for a playthrough (that’s six GOOD hours) I think I’d be interested in some DLC as well. $5 for a new mini-campaign would be great.
Note: I played on PC with the mouse and keyboard and my local friend played with a PS3 controller. Didn’t really feel like there was a disadvantage to either so pick what you’re comfortable with. There’s some assist with WASD for those not-so-8-way jumps that make it all work out.
6
Nov
2010
Little Review of Global Agenda
So I started playing Global Agenda about 10 days ago, starting with the trial (most of the game, up to level 12). It was originally released 9 months ago at $50 + some subscription fee for playing. That fee used to provide the MMO side of the MMOTPS game, stuff like the auction house, mail, agencies (guilds). It has since been removed, the game dropped to $21 ($15 with a friend discount) although you can still pay $12/mo to advance at about twice the speed.
I just hit level 30 with my first character after those 10 days. Level 30 is basically access to all content and all skills, but there are a few items with level requirements that are higher. It also allows you to play with all the other big boys in the 10v10 mercenary arena that is most of the day-to-day PvP in the game. Read the rest of this entry »