The Game Review Timesink

I read about this little news story recently about Gamespot publishing then taking down a review of Global Agenda, an MMO. The game got a low score, and some readers apparently complained that the reviewer had not played the game for long enough to get any real sense of it. The reviewer had said he'd put in 15 hours of gameplay, but his data was online, and it turns out the real number was closer to six hours of evaluation.

In any video game without a natural story arc, it is very interesting to decide how long is long enough to have evaluated the game fully. I've reviewed the Baseball Mogul series before, in which case there are any number of variables to consider when making this decision:

• The game lets you go through it at any speed, from watching every pitch of a major league season to simply setting general lineups and simming the whole season in ten minutes. This choice is left completely up to regular consumers, and everyone has their own style. The game is naturally very different depending on which way to play it I choose, so do I have to try them all out, even though I know which way I enjoy the best?
• Playing through an entire season at my usual pace would take months. And a lot of the satisfaction of the game comes after playing through two or three seasons, as you start to see your draft picks develop and odd players set records.
• You can play any team from somewhere around 1900 on, or create your own fictional teams. Baseball has not been at all the same game over those periods, and in fact, the increased realism of older periods is a selling point to the game. How much of that do I need to evaluate?

The list goes on and on and on. Realistically, I won't be able to answer every question, well, ever. I am never going to play through an entire season, calling every pitch. I am never going to play a deadball era season.

So what did I do, in the end, writing without pay, mind, for a rather small reviews site? I played through six months of a Seattle Pilots '69 expansion team and played through six months of the 2009 Atlanta Braves' season. So I did not in fact complete a season until after the review was published. But I spent more than twenty hours just doing that much, and it wasn't really enough.

I've also reviewed movies, it turns out, and doing that feels like a breeze compared to reviewing a video game. You know exactly how much time you're putting in, probably between 90 and 180 minutes. Compare that to the timesink for reviewing a video game, which could easily be anywhere between 180 and 1200. For games without a storyline, 1200 minutes may not even be enough, but you have to stop somewhere. There are plenty of story-driven RPGs that will set you back more than 1200 minutes as well, especially if you have to be thorough like a reviewer, but 1200 is plenty enough to be shocking.

If the movie is bad, don't worry, you'll be out of there and ready to have fun ripping it apart in less than three hours. If a game is bad, and especially if a game is ridiculously freaking hard, then you don't know how long you've got left. A walkthrough may not even exist, because you're playing this before or at release time.

Sonic & the Black Knight was my least favorite game to review ever, and unfortunately, my review was for Kidzworld.com, so I couldn't really say whatever I wanted about it or use nasty humor or something. I just had to plod right through that crap, which was at first easy to the point that I thought I was missing something, then eventually became difficult in a really idiotic way. I just felt like I was wading through shit, playing levels that had zero fun content for the "reward" of cutscenes that made my childhood want to puke. Why, Sonic? Why? Then on the second or third-to-last level, I just couldn't move on. There was a point with insta-kill drops that I just couldn't move past, especially because I was already so infuriated with playing that piece of garbage. So, I threw the Wiimote down, and just wrote the review right then and there.

Thankfully, I didn't send it in immediately, because upon waking up and reading it the next day, I realized the review wasn't really appropriate for Kidzworld.

What's the answer, then? How can we reform video game reviews to make this process either more complete or more tolerable?

We can't.

Civilization V Announced: Is Canada in the Game?

"Civilization V," a new entry in perhaps my favorite video game series, was announced today. It will be released this fall. The details announced so far provide essentially no idea of what is new in this game, besides three pretty screenshots, and the announcement that this game will use a hex grid rather than a square one (which I am for). So, as you can imagine, the speculation on the 2K Games forums is crazy. My favorite thread is the one wondering who the 18 civilizations in the game are going to be. Why? Because of the arguments about Hitler and Canada.

In Hitler's case, some forum users want Hitler to be a playable leader of the German civilization in the next game. He hasn't been a leader in previous titles, even though other horrible leaders like Stalin have been. I can say pretty safely right now, though: Hitler will not be in "Civilization V." If he were, the game would be banned in Germany. German laws are very strict on the matter of keeping Nazis out of even historical titles, unless the game beats you over the head with the belief that Nazism was a bad idea. That's why there are no swastikas in the "Hearts of Iron" series.

More hilarious to me: There are tons of forumites who want Canada to be a newly added civilization. The first to make this comment knew it was an impossible suggestion, saying things like "Being a Canadian I also would love for this to happen. Poor Canada " and so on. But then, as people pointed out that Canada is probably not one of the eighteen most important civilizations in history, it got militant.

Someone said that Canada was unimportant, and really just a mixture of English and French civilizations, and the reply was: "Well it just so happens that Canada is very important to MY history. By the same Token the USA was just a British colony that gained independence, why should they get their own civ?" Others chimed in on the exact same note, saying that America was only a former British colony.

Another supportive opinion: "Canada has contributed as much to the world as America has and has been instrumental in some of the largest areas of modern life, from involvement in overseas military action, to political and economic stabilization in second and third world countries."

...and another one: "Canada should for sure be included.
It should have a high diplomacy factor, diplomatic unque building, and an idea for a unique unit is the pioneer!! Have the pioneer the same as any other settler but with an extra movement and defense point!
Canada and America were both colonies that gained independence..... THe only reason America is "stronger" is because of their greater population.....
PS: another idea for a unique building... ODR.. the outdoor rink "

It got more tangled from there. Someone recommended that we all see "Strange Brew" to find out why Canada isn't a civilization. My favorite anti-Canada post:

"Also, for those mentioning the great nation of Canada, be serious.

Russia- Great Revolution, Socialism/Communism, First in Space
America- Nuclear Bomb, Landing on the Moon, Hollywood
Britain- British Empire, Magna Carta
Canada- Bacon ?"

Great stuff.

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Pushing the Medium Forward

Has any medium's idea of what is acceptable for display moved as quickly as that of video games? Just two years ago, Mass Effect was universally hated (by people who had never played it) for including a "sex scene" which was actually just mild nudity. Now, Bioware's latest titles include the same level of mostly clothed "sex scenes," with virtually no public outrcry, despite these titles' huge mainstream attention. And despite not coming anywhere close to actually portraying sex, they're probably closer than the Hot Coffee mini-game was so long ago. Jack Thompson has disappeared, games are getting reviewed in the New York Times every week, and their perception as a children's medium is dying.

Video games can now have nudity and yet still be sold in Wal-Marts. That's a huge and recent development. Grand Theft Auto IV's DLC expansion The Lost and Damned was a strategically important place to get this done, and I think developer Rockstar North knew that. The Lost and Damned included a cutscene with a visible digital penis (belonging to a congressman), making it the first mainstream North American release to include male nudity. First of all, the game would not be released in stores to begin with, because it was download-only. The only people who could stop it from being sold were inside Microsoft. Second, as merely an expansion, the mainstream media attention wouldn't be overwhelming, so you get less people talking about a scene that they've never actually seen, which is important. Third, the DLC would eventually be sold in a disc format, after the attention had died away. Now we have stores selling a video game with frontal male nudity without controversy. It has now set precedent for all game releases in the future, and the medium has moved forward in the public consciousness.

Heavy Rain is now widely known as a game that's meant to move the medium forward, in many more ways than simply nudity. But, the fact that their nude scene is interactive makes an important distinction in the ongoing argument. One of the major reasons people will argue that video games should not have nudity while movies can is that video games are interactive. Nude scenes in games past have almost all been simple, non-interactive cutscenes, but in Heavy Rain, you can be seen as controlling the scene. The game hasn't yet been released, so I haven't played it, but it will be interesting to see exactly how it's handled. Regardless, the scene just isn't attracting the Fox News-class outrage we've seen in years past.

Maybe certain Japanese games like Rapelay put things in perspective.