As promised, the second half of the two hour long podcast, in which there’s a long, long ramble about pop culture and potential future specials with Paul and company.
The other news items included in the podcast are:
The next podcast will be recorded live at E3’s show floor in two weeks – stay tuned!
Although we’ve found Metacritic a userful resource for game reviews, many folks have gone on a user submission rampage to discredit games that haven’t even launched yet. Their first attack was on LittleBigPlanet followed by Resistance 2, now their hitting Gears of War 2.
While Gears of War 2 has a Metacritic score of 94/100 the user’s have reviewed it to be a 3.5 out of 10, with a bright red box around the user review due to its low nature we’re sure. Although users are free to give their own honest representation of the game from their perspective, Gears of War 2, as of the review dates, hasn’t been released yet – these reviews are bogus.
This style of attack was popularized in Spore, when Amazon got nailed with poor reviews of the game because Spore’s “Draconic” DRM made people angry. However, it’s more reasonable for people to voice their opinion on a known issue with a game; Gears of War 2 review spamming is just mean.
We use Metacritic as guidance when we do our gaming podcast to understand what games are rated in the industry, but we don’t use user reviews as our main guide. There are plenty of folks out there that may utilize these reviews in more seriousness because they may feel journalists reviews are tainted by advertisers or “the man” and want the common gamers opinion.
The common gamer cannot possibility be reviewing Gears of War 2 before the title has arrived. This is bogus. Metacritic has this to say:
“My advice for our faithful users is to focus your attention on the Metascore for this game and not the thousands of user votes, most of which have been submitted before said users have played the game. This is a gaming community, and if people want to stuff the ballot box, there’s not much I can do at this point. When we upgrade the registration requirements for participation on the site in the near future, this type of thing won’t happen. We’ll post the full legitimate user reviews upon the game’s release. As always, thanks for using the site.” (1up)
So, to those looking for holiday gaming gifts, keep this in mind while you start hunting down games you’ll want to buy.
As Jonah and T.J. chide Scott for going into an F-bomb rage over the iPhone’s price, the holiday season looms, and T.J. talks about his renewed relationship with League of Legends.
This week’s news items include:
All this and one Listener Feedbnack we didn’t get around to listening to, so wait til next week.
This week, Paul is not around, as Jonah Falcon and Jordan Lund discuss the latest news, which includes pandas. Lots and lots of pandas. That, and a Gaming History profile on David Crane.
The news this week includes:
With that is Reader Mail and the Queston of the Week: What was your favorite Atari 2600 game?
Thank you for mentioning me!
I referenced the part from episode 423 regarding Jesse Eisenberg in American Ultra where he’s paranoid/anxious until he gets his weed and how stoners can get paranoid after they’re high and think cops are coming.
My user name was supposed to have a cool “A” as 4, so it would read as “Lad”; I was using this user name before Left 4 Dead was publicly announced, and my Steam account is ]_4]), but I don’t like to tell people this for fear of hacking…
Regrading politics, I’ve seen your support for Hillary, so I do not want to discuss politics, but my main issue against Hillary is that she might be part of the New World Order; I hope she is not a member, since she will most likely be the next president…
I neglected to state my Steam account creation date, which is 4/14/2004. I have a similarly named Gmail account with L4d in it, which was created around that time, too.
Is there a way to edit these comments?