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.

Finally, a Mostly Okay Bailout Game

Since I've been talking so much about how absurdly awful the online bailout-themed webgame scene has been, I guess I'll provide a slightly less rant-y post here for Budget Hero's updated, sort of bailout-themed game.

Budget Hero's update includes one new "badge" to the game, allowing you to set one of your three requisite goals to be "economic stimulus". In the game, you are allowed to add to and cut from any part of the budget that the game provides for, a fairly sizable choice range. On just dealing with the Bush tax cuts alone, you have about ten different choices, ranging from keeping them to reversing them to reversing them and taxing the rich a little extra. Your goal is to achieve the best possible combination of a balanced budget (one that will collapse later than 2030 or so) and your three chosen goals (like "green", "social safety net", and "national security"). Every budget change you make that helps one of your goals contributes a sizeable amount to coloring in the badge, a fully colored one indicating that you were successful.

This is at least a thoughtful game. You are given many, many choices on what to do with the budget, and you can read a lengthy piece of text for each choice, indicating the situation, pros, and cons to implementing that change. There's a lot of information here, and you really feel the pressure dynamic between cutting your spending to keep the debt manageable and implementing the programs we need, especially with the stimulus.

I have a few problems, though. Your three chosen goals allow you to basically ignore everything else. I chose "economic stimulus", "green revolution", and "energy independence". That means that the game doesn't really penalize me at all if I, say, cut defense spending by 10% (which the majority of players have done, likely out of necessity to come near a balanced budget) or even something uncharacteristic for a liberal like eliminating Medicare, Foreign Aid, etc. Your three goals should matter the most, but the others should still matter. The party wouldn't support a move to privatize defense or something radical like that, even if it's not part of your specific platform to keep national security a priority. But, changing the game so that every possible goal matters would make things even more tense and realistic, and it is just a game.

The game also allows us to assume that we stay in absolute power for about twenty years to actually see all of our economic programs take effect. It takes a while, sometimes. Well, I've written enough already. Play it, it's somewhat educational and at least partially successful at representing the tension inherent in the job.

5 Ways The Bailout Game Sucks

The Bailout Game is, to put it briefly, weak. It's a serious flash game about the current bank bailout process, and it tries to give you the reins on how to save and who not to. Gameplay consists of slowly (so slowly) advancing space by space, either saving or rejecting each bank in turn, followed by a humorous video or picture or something else that may or may not make any sense. Even as far as serious flash games go, this game fails on at least five levels:

1. Any rhetoric they may have attempted to splice in to the game is lost on me (and Ian Bogost, and others). Going through and simply bailing every bank out will leave you with about 500 billion in bailout money left and a place in the leaderboard. Mechanically bailing out every bank makes the economy actually grow. It would appear that the only way to get a better score is to skip spaces by double clicking the "Go!" button, apparently a glitch.

2. The game is very opaque in a way. If you actually try to reject certain banks, then random other banks will fail, and you're left none the wiser. Why should you even reject them anyway? On second thought, maybe the game just wants you to bail everyone out, even though its videos tend to ridicule you for it (old film reels telling you about "state capitalism").

3. The actual "game" part of the equation is shoddily designed. It's boring. Press a button to advance one space, wait for it to crank over to it, say bail or don't, see a gag/pull a lever like you're on a slot machine/play an easy timing game, wait for the camera to slowly pan over to the "recession" car then back to you, repeat. It's not efficient or interestingly designed. This would be fine if the above issues with the decision-making were interesting.

4. The comedy varies in quality. Some of the news scroll jokes on the bottom are okay, some of the old film reels are funny at first, but... If any of it had a point it would probably be better, rather than just "So Fred Thompson and John Edwards walk into a bar".

5. Otherwise, the game initially looks like a well-funded endeavor. Unfortunately, all the money was put into technical details rather than, I don't know, actual game design.

So go on! Play it, Woo!

Code of Honor 2 One of the 10 Worst Games of 2008, Thanks to Me

I reviewed the God-Awful game Code of Honor 2: Conspiracy Island for AceGamez a while back, and MTV Multiplayer posted Metacritic's top ten worst games of 2008 today. I am proud to say that my review was partially responsible for keeping Code of Honor 2 #8 on that top ten list! Here's my blurb on its Metacritic page:

"Code of Honor 2: Conspiracy Island is a game that simply won't appeal to anyone who knows what a real first person shooter experience is like. It isn't over the top or realistic, it isn't exciting or interesting, the story is awful and none of the technical details are even close to being up to scratch either. All it really has going for it is that it installs, you can play it, and, as far as I know, it won't plant a virus on your computer."

I think it's also the funniest review out of that list, which is a real marker of how good a review of a bad game is. You can read the full review here.

World of Goo Review

I recently wrote a review of World of Goo, Experimental Gameplay's maiden voyage into the world of retail games, for BlogCritics. Read it there, but here's the opening paragraph:

According to Metacritic, World of Goo is the greatest game of all time. It would be hard to argue that it truly comes close, but it's just extremely difficult to fault such a gem of a game for anything. The game came from Tower of Goo from the Experimental Gameplay Project, which cranked out game prototypes in just a week. In its fully realized form for the PC, Mac and Wii, the game is a wonderfully fun and slick puzzler that serves as a great example of an independent game.

YetAnotherReviewSite.co.uk

I've started writing all my reviews for www.yetanotherreviewsite.co.uk, so anyone interested in reading my reviews should head straight over there right now. So far, you can find my Puzzle Quest, Political Machine 2008, and Metal Gear Solid 4 reviews on there. Check it out.

Review: Puzzle Quest

I've been stuck at the beach for a week, leaving me unable to play Metal Gear Solid 4, so I decided to play an old game for my PSP while I was here. The game I picked up was Puzzle Quest, which gained a lot of popularity from Penny Arcade's Tycho's recommendation of the PC demo when it came out. Otherwise, the game is so awfully marketed that it's incredible anyone ever played it. Even the title immediately makes it sound just awful, guaranteeing that no one would ever enter a game store and buy it unless they already knew about it. Even inside the game, it just looks like you'd be embarassed playing it. Despite all that, it somehow manages to be just fun enough as a game.

Puzzle Quest (for the DS, PSP, and also at some point it came out for the XBLA, PC, Wii, and PS2) casts you as a fairly generic hero (you pick your picture, name, and class) in a fantasy world that is facing an odd resurgence of evil. The story is advanced through text bubble conversations between your character and others, with no voice acting, and a single expression that tends to look comically inappropriate the majority of the time. Your character must quest against lots of orcs, undead, rats, and whatever else. However, you don't fight through an RPG engine or with real combat, but instead with special Bejewled-style puzzles. Matching sets of three or more skulls cause direct damage, while other objects give you gold, experience, or mana for spells. These spells allow you to actually take advantage of your enemy beyond the mostly luck-based regular puzzle, which means you can actually come up with some fairly interesting strategies for taking it to those ogres. Like the rest of the game, this may all sound like a really bad idea, but it magically just works.

The interesting combination of spell strategies with Bejewled gameplay actually makes for an interesting take on combat that will stay intersting, at least for several hours. I tended to get sick of it after about five separate combats, which is pretty much exactly the amount of time I want to play the PSP anyway. I would still be interested and ready to play again after a few hours, making for a good general gameplay experience. Though enemies have different abilities that will make combats somewhat unique, you still will tend to repeat the same offensive strategies against them, meaning you'll want to turn to the mini-games for some variety. After earning a bit of gold from combat and quests, you can unlock the ability to play mini-games (all still based on the tile-switching puzzle system) to get new spells and mounts. These are fairly welcome, but the fact that you're still only playing a slightly modified form of the same puzzle system means they aren't totally refreshing. Gold from combats also allows you to get new equipment, giving you new abilities in combat, which is also an interesting option to keep you playing.

It wasn't too long before I actually all the mini-games bought and what I thought was the perfect set of equipment for my character, meaning that the gold I earned from then on didn't interest me very much even though I wasn't even halfway through the story. This was somewhat disappointing, but goes to show that the hours of gameplay to actually beat the story are very satisfying if not too much.

In conclusion, Puzzle Quest is a seemingly horrible idea with an awful marketing campaign that is fun to play. It's right for everyone (well, not FPS enthusiasts) on some level, be it the RPG elements, Bejewled casual gameplay, or strategy. I've decided that my reviews shouldn't have scores or even letter grades given the recent controversy over them, so I'll stick with an Ebert & Roeper style recommendation. Thumbs up, I suppose.

Echochrome Review Diamante

There has been a lot of talk about corruption in video game reviews recently with Konami's reviewer contract for Metal Gear Solid 4. Let me just quickly say that this story falls into exaggeration too easily. Konami basically asked reviewers not to reveal story details, then slightly more controversially asked that they not talk about the mandatory install or cutscene lengths. That doesn't mean they sad no bad reviews at all, and reviewers didn't have to agree or anything, either. I'm not defending what they did, I'm just basically asking everyone to calm down. Anyway, I want in on this reviewing world, so here's a diamond poem review of Echochrome from last week when I was obsessed with it:

Echochrome

Creative Puzzler

Perception Is Reality

Calm Experience, Frustrating Hell

How Much Time?

Haunting Violins

8.5

Pros: Great idea for a puzzler, level-sharing and world leaderboards good use of network. Some will love the music.

Cons: No idea how much time is left, only one look to the game, some will hate the music.

Two thumbs up, because I have two thumbs all to myself.