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?
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.
