logo
spacer
The Forums are currently disabled.
Comic for: May 25th, 2010
first comic previous comic archives next comic last comic random comic

Alan Wake: "Opinions Are Free"
Posted: Tuesday May 25th, 2010 by

For today's offering I present to you Alan Wake a psycological action-adventure title from Remedy, the folks that made Max Payne. Reviews have, for the most part, been very positive lauding the game for its graphics and combat system. But sour reviews are most often more fun to read. Eurogamer, though agreeing that Alan Wake is a weekend worth of fun, smack the game around for being tired, derivative, and dated. That being said, they do still give it a 7 out of 10.[more info]

Now before the nerd rage sets in and someone starts saying mean things about my mom, I should admit that I don't have a dog in this race. I haven't played the game. And it's not on my "want to buy" list. My entire goal was to shine a light on the idea of game reviews as little more than opinion. If you loved Mario Kart and your best friend said it sucked worse than ET for the Atari 2600, would you really care? No. You'd probably give them the universal "talk to the hand" sign and explain how their mother probably ingested too much alcohol while they were still in the womb and move on to another fiercely debated topic.

So why is a game review any different? Because game companies put so much emphasis on them and believe they somehow reflect a game's potential for success? Pshh. That's just silly marketing and PR folks taking their jobs too seriously. I don't care about game reviews. Why should I? For the most part I don't even KNOW the people doing the review. Their opinion isn't any more valid than say... the standard hype presented in a KitKat commercial.

As I've said before, this is why I like Metacritic. It takes all of those meaningless review scores and smooshes them together into one big meaningless aggregate score. The beauty here is that it also takes a quick snapshot of the reviewer opinions and tosses them onto one page for my easy-reading pleasure. Read scroll read scroll read BAM general picture of the game. You get the idea.

So, I'll leave you now to express your own opinions on my opinion of other people expressing their opinions. And when we're all done sorting that textual mess out, we'll sit down by a warm fire on my patio, eating smores, and singing kumbaya.

[ discuss ]
[ top ]
spacer
GU Commissions
- advertise on gu -