This week’s episode has no Gaming Flashback, but there is a lot of talk about how awesome the Good Old Games digital store is.
The week’s news items include:
Let us know what you think.
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.
This week’s Gaming Podcast is exciting as we’re giving away a copy of the Xbox 360 version of Borderlands 2, which Jordan Lund drools over, while Jonah Falcon urges players to check out Kerbal Space Program. The Gaming Flashback is none other than the classic The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.
As far as game news:
Finally, the Question of the Week is, “What is your favorite game from the decade of the 2000’s”. For some help, check out this article.
The sound problems continue, while Jonah complains about not being able to live stream Dragon Quest XI; this issue is something that’s frustrated PlayStation, PC and Switch gamers for the past few years, and there doesn’t seem to be a reason why the restrictions are there.
Otherwise, the news of the week includes:
Let us know what you think.
