This is the last podcast of 2018, and the next episode will be our Games of the Year announcement. Until then, we snark at Pewdiepie, and check some of the news ending the year.
This week’s news includes:
Let us know what your Game of the Year is.
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.
Yoichi Wada of Square Enix has let the cat out of the bag. The cat is Final Fantasy XIII for the Xbox 360 and it will be simultaneously released with the PlayStation 3 version. This may be an end to an exclusive era for Sony as all their big brands jump to non-exclusion.
This is probably a result of gamers slow adoption of the PlayStation 3 hardware for various issues, one being cost. Personally I think Sony’s move to say “no price cut” in our near future is a grand mistake. It is well understood that they want profitability over quantity but you’re losing your exclusives to a broader audience.
Each generation of consoles brings new industry trends and, for now, exclusive games from third party developers is too risky when you look at overall cost to produce a block buster title like Final Fantasy XIII. Consider the sales of GTA IV, although they were in the millions, imagine how low it would have been if they only released on the PS3. They’d might have actually lost money on the game.
Square Enix can see the writing on the wall, that writing says “ship on as many mediums as possible.” Gamers are split between consoles with a huge segment on Wii and Xbox 360, if you can at least ship on one of those consoles along with the PS3 you’ll do better financially.
(Thanks, Kotaku)
Once again, there’s no set list of topics; the guys just discuss the news of the week off the cuff and what they’ve been playing.
Let us know what you think.
The post Episode 721: More Random Chatter first appeared on Gaming Podcast.
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Hi guys.
Thanks again for this nice episode. Sorry that I was a little bit lazy writing comments under the last episodes, but I had to much thing going on :/
Regarding the topic of this thousand crappy small games on steam: I totally agree. There is so many useless shit there, it’s hard to find the good ones (and I bet there are many we will never find). On the other side, I don’t like that every company tries to run their own shop, because so you have to search / look through so many platforms that it feels like work :/
Best games of the year: i did not really played many actual games, because most of the time I played Magic The Gathering Arena and Hearthstone. Some Overwatch and Battlefield 5 the last weeks. BF makes fun because I play it with my friends, I would not have bought it to play it on my own 🙂
I bought some games, but did not find the way play it. These were Mega Man 11, Detroit become Human, Toki (the new Switch Version) and some shmups for the PS4. I think the only actual title I played so far is Life is Strange 2 (episode 1). Hollow Knight was released 2017, but I bought it some months ago. I love those metroidvania games and I am playing hollow knight a lot during the last weeks 🙂 I Stimm want to play God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2, but there are so many games I wanna play, I will wait with these two until they get a little bit cheaper 🙂
I hope all of you had a great New Year’s Eve and celebrated it with your friends and family. I am looking forward to a good 2019 with a lot of good games and many episodes of your podcast. Stay healthy and the way you are.
Greetings from your loyal listener,
Ralf