I would play this game

When this Duke Nukem Forever trailer premiered at E3, I remember thinking "Hey, this might be worth the wait after all."

That was in 2001.

Edit: Holy shit, I hadn't even seen this new 2007 trailer. Surprisingly enough, it looks like they haven't wasted ten years of development time.

Great Odin's beard!

Odin Sphere is a pretty interesting action-RPG hybrid for the PS2. It's actually getting less fun the more I play it, but even so it's a unique title that may be worth checking out if you're into weird Japanese stuff.

Does whatever a spider can

I wouldn't tell you to go out and buy it or anything, but Spider-Man 3 really isn't as bad as you may have been led to believe. The editors did change the review to make it seem as though I liked it a little more than I did, though (not hugely, but I said it was "pretty fun" and they changed that to "a lot of fun." There's a big difference).

Gotta catch 'em all?

No. No, you do not.

What's this? A Guitar Hero post?

I'm not sure which is weirder: That I'm in the top 20% on the Guitar Hero II leaderboards, or that the points differential between me and the first place person is 1.4 billion. Yep, my total score is pushing 7,000,000, and the top person is currently at over 2,100,000,000. How is that even possible? That's not a rhetorical question. I want someone to explain to me how it's possible to score that many points. If you play Free Bird on expert mode and score 100% with diligent use of star power, is it worth 50 million?

Shreddin' heaven

Is there really any reason to read another review of Guitar Hero 2?

Well, no, probably not.

Super Paper Mario

At long last, another Wii game came out. It's the first one I'd say was genuinely good, too, although it's still lacking something. Anyway, check out Super Paper Mario if you feel like it.

Probably worth mentioning

I no longer have any problem with the X-Plorer. It's not surprising that I got used to it. Pretty much every complaint I had about Guitar Hero II has faded away at this point, and all that remains is serious hard rocking.

Puzzle Quest

Puzzle Quest is puzzling indeed.

It's probably a lot more fun two-player.

Guitar Hero downloadable content

No review this week, so I'm still high on the Guitar Hero horse. Major Nelson reports that downloadable content is available now. At first glance, it seems like a rip. There are three separate packs of three songs, which cost 500 MS points each. That's 1500 points for nine songs, or nearly $20. No thanks. I'd really like "Ace of Spades," "Bark at the Moon," and "Frankenstein," but their selections also include some of my least favorite tracks from the original. This is disappointing. Fortunately, I've got plenty of enjoyment ahead as I attempt to complete the game on hard mode. Current status: failure.

Update: I've been thinking about this for a bit, and I think there were two other things they could have done to justify the price. One would be to release brand-new songs. That would be worth a premium. The other would be to let you choose any three songs from the first Guitar Hero, sort of a custom "best of" pack. Still might be a bit pricy, but that would sting less.

Guitar Hero II (360) quick impressions

I put off getting Guitar Hero II for the PS2 because my controller had broken (it turns out that spilling beer on it is bad). Didn't make sense to pay for an all-new guitar and game when I could wait a few extra months to get it on the 360 instead. I think it was the right call, but it's not all wine and roses for the next-gen version. A few quick impressions follow.

The Good:

Achievements -- Well, duh. It's not as though achievements are even optional. But they add something to most games, especially when the developer has a sense of humor as Harmonix does. One of the achievements: decline to play an encore.

Hardware -- Less time saving and loading games means more time rocking. The performance boost is noticeable. So too are the HD graphics, but as I've always felt about this series, the graphics only matter when you're not the one playing.

The Motherfucking Trooper -- The song selection really does seem weaker in the sequel, but the addition of Iron Maiden's "The Trooper" to the 360 version is practically worth the purchase all by itself. This has been one of my top-five most wanted songs for Guitar Hero, and now I've got it.

The Future -- There's no downloadable content yet, but there will be plenty of new songs -- not to mention the entire tracklist from the original Guitar Hero. Score!

The Bad:

The Gibson Explorer -- The new guitar is a big problem, and it's probably going to assuage much of the dismay that PS2 owners might feel about the game's port to the 360. First of all, it plugs into the USB port on the back of the console. I can get to mine more easily than a lot of people probably can (I've got the system lying flat on my desk), but even so it's a pain to have to run a cable around my desk like this. This has got to be much more annoying to people with full-blown home entertainment setups. Why isn't it wireless?

Even worse, the asymmetrical contours of the Explorer are much less comfortable than those of the SG. There's a sharp protrusion right where my forearm naturally rests when I put my hand on the strum bar, so I can't lay my arm flat to play. So far I'm using a combination of three less than ideal solutions: 1) I can tilt the guitar upward and come at it from a different angle, but this causes the star power meter to go off when I don't want it to; 2) I can loop my arm around the protrusion at a right angle, which basically works but puts more stress on the arm than the more natural position; 3) I can angle it so that the top of the guitar faces a little bit upward rather than straight ahead. The third option is the one that seems to work best.

No doubt I'll be getting used to this, but what a horrible sensation the first time I strapped on the Explorer. Furthermore, didn't anybody else have this problem when they were designing the peripheral? Am I an exception? Or were they just married to the idea of using the Explorer? I think almost any other design would have been more comfortable. It's a huge, huge drawback.

Online Multiplayer -- Doesn't exist. Lame. On the other hand, I'm not even sure how you get offline multiplayer to work. It doesn't say anything about it in the instruction manual, and I only saw one USB port on the back of the console. It is a puzzlement.

GRAW 2

Hey, check out this review of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2. I'm finding myself lately a little distressed by how blithely games can deal with controversial subject matter. Here, and in Crackdown, that doesn't really detract from the quality of the gameplay, but there are big questions raised and then dodged. If the industry is really to grow up, they're going to have to stop turning a blind eye to what they're creating.

In which I tout my powers of perception

Apropros of the official announcement for Rock Band (more info at Kotaku), I wanted to look back at a post I made in June of last year, in which I said this:

...it seems reasonable to assume that within a few years it will be possible to assemble an entire GH-style band, with a couple of guitarists, a bassist, and a drummer.

Well, that's not so impressive in itself. Why? Because this is the most freakin' obvious thing they could have done. Really, was there any other direction to go? Instead, I want to talk about what came next.

I'll up the ante even further: once that's done, I bet we'll see clubs hosting competitions in which groups of gamers get in front of a crowd and rock virtually. At the very least, people would participate just for the chance to get onstage under the auspices of some truly bitchin' band names.

This is an opportunity I hope nobody blows. Can you imagine hordes of Rock Band players descending on legendary clubs like the Middle East, which have hosted some of the greatest actual bands in history? We're reaching the next level here, which is why I want to throw out yet another prediction:

Harmonix will create a song editor that will allow Rock Band players to write and share their own songs.

I think that's the next step. We're going to have people writing and releasing songs made entirely on virtual instruments. And I'll bet you that some of the songs will be good.

Brutal!

Here it is: the lowest score I've ever given.

(N.B. Online they only grade it from .5 to 4 stars, but in the paper it'll be a 1.0/10.)

You don't say

I was looking for a specific bit of information for my Def Jam: Icon review, and came across this tidbit from the press release announcing the game's shipment:

Written by renowned Hollywood writers Virgil Williams and Cle "Bone" Sloan, DEF JAM: ICON delivers an intense storyline unrivaled in any other hip hop lifestyle/fighting game.

I could not agree more. This has the best storyline of any hip hop lifestyle/fighting game I've ever played.

God of War II

God of War II isn't exactly perfect -- occasionally it could use fewer enemies and a little bit less neck-snapping -- but you'd be hard-pressed to find a better platformer released within the past couple of years. It's a genuine must-play. And if it turns out to be the last great game for the PlayStation 2, then it's hard to imagine a more impressive way to go out.

Controversy!

The incendiary blog post that's been getting all the play this week comes courtesy of Destructoid. Written by someone called Reverend Anthony, it's called "Why Video Game Reviews Suck." (The article is split into two parts; feel free to read part one and part two.) This is pretty well-worn terrain at this point, but it's still a subject worth exploring because video game reviews do, in fact, suck. Unfortunately, the author never actually gets around to discussing the problems with video game reviews. The entirety of his screed is dedicated to tearing down game review scores, which are a totally different beast.

Let's start with where the author and I are in agreement. Game scores are essentially useless. That's about where our agreement ends. I'll explain my take on this a little further down, but first let's look at what Reverend Anthony is actually saying.

He thinks scores are useless because they are overwhelmingly positive. The data don't actually back that up. Blogger Bill Harris ran the numbers, and found that less than 2% of the games released in 2006 had a Metacritic score of 90 or above. We can take this even further. Overall, Metacritic lists the aggregate scores of 1,417 PlayStation 2 games. Of these, 62 have a score of 90 or higher. That's about 4.3%. (I'll be sticking to the list of PS2 games for this post, but the GameCube and Xbox are about the same, each coming in around 5%). If you assume that scores should be evenly distributed along the 1-100 range, then you'd expect 10% of the games to be ranked in the top 10% of scores. That doesn't happen. Clearly, reviewers are more reluctant to hand out such accolades than the good Reverend gives them credit for.

But what about the other end of the scale? Why are crappy games given anything but the lowest possible score? Here he has a point. Of those 1,417 PS2 games, only 6 have a score in the 20s. The lowest score is 24, given to Gravity Games Bike: Street. Vert. Dirt. In fact, only 112 PS2 games, or about 8%, have a Metacritic score below 50. If you consider the mid-point of this scale to be the pinnacle of mediocrity, than something seems off. The majority of scores are clumped between 5 and 9. In other words, 40% of the possible scores are assigned to 88% of the games. That actually doesn't bother me. It makes sense to me that you'd see some kind of a bell curve if you were to graph game scores. I think it would make sense to the Reverend Anthony, as well. The difference is that he really wants that peak to come in at 5. I'd expect it to be around 7.

Partly, that's because of the analog between game scores and other types of scoring systems. If you compare it to the four-star rating system favored by most movie critics, you'd get a comparison like this:

**** = 10
*** = 7.5
** = 5.0
* = 2.5

Most critics don't give zero stars, or only do in special circumstances. That's why on Metacritic, which has ranked "virtually every film since the beginning of 1999, and selected films from prior years," only 105 movies have a score below 20. That's 105 more movies than games with that score, but the point stands: it's pretty rare. The two are not so far apart in this way.

The other argument for a clumping of scores above 5.0 is the academic argument, which the author addresses. It goes something like this:

A = 95 (9.5)
B = 85 (8.5)
C = 75 (7.5)
D = 65 (6.5)
F = 64 (6.4) and lower

The logic here is that there's not much difference between giving a game a 6, a 4, or a 2, because they're all an F. I agree with the Reverend Anthony that this doesn't work for video games, and I think he nails why:

But video games do not simply "pass" or "fail." With video games, you most definitely CAN enjoy a sub-average game for some of its aspects. ... Just because a game is sub-average doesn't mean certain people won't enjoy it, and therefore it matters that sub-average games are differentiated from other sub-average games through use of the 1-5 section of the scale.

I'm not sure if anybody would seriously argue that there's little difference between a game with a Metacritic score of 60 and one with a score of 20. Which would you rather play? But I disagree with the implication that there should be an even distribution of scores, instead of the grouping around the C range, or the 70s. Here's Reverend Anthony's take:

If someone was to walk into an EB Games, close their eyes, and randomly choose a game from the shelf, they would most likely not get something good. You might think there’s a 50-50 chance you’d come up with God of War or at least something kind of cool like Red Dead Revolver, but all the more likely is that you’d end up holding a crappy bowling sim or a licensed platformer starring The Olsen Twins.

He's probably right about that. But there's one aspect that he's not mentioning: Nobody reviews those games. I'm exaggerating slightly; Mary-Kate and Ashley Sweet 16: Licensed to Drive was reviewed by four outlets, for a Metacritic score of 49. I agree that that does seem high, but to be fair I have not played the game. The point I'm making, however, is that even publishers whose job it is to review games do not touch this crap. Gamespot didn't review it. EGM didn't review it. Nintendo Power did review it, but they have about as much journalistic integrity as Pravda. On the flipside, why would a publication that is not focused exclusively on games ever even consider reviewing a game like this? You'll occasionally see a Metacritic entry from the New York Times for blockbuster titles. Of course that will raise the aggregate. Those of us who get to pick and choose what we cover will tend to focus on giving exposure to quality games. That's not a bad thing.

I've already gone on a bit longer than I intended to about the game scores themselves, so let's move on. The biggest problem I have with the Reverend Anthony's piece is that he never acknowledges that these scores are usually accompanied by text. In focusing solely on the problems with review scores, he inadvertently proves why I think they should be eliminated. They keep people from actually reading reviews. When readers are more concerned with the score than with the review, there's less incentive for critics to say anything interesting. That, frankly, is what I thought "Why Video Game Reviews Suck" was going to be about.

Why do video game reviews really suck? Because they're attempting to justify an arbitrary score! As soon as you quantify the experience of playing a game, you have to start running down the checklist: graphics, sound, control, "fun factor," and so on. Suddenly you're not applying a critical eye to what the game is about, putting it into a context the reader can understand. You're judging a show dog. You can't simply isolate each part of a game in order to render judgment on the whole. I mean, you can, but it results in the same formulaic, workmanlike reviews we've reading for decades. It's like the difference between listing the ingredients and actually tasting the soup. What does a 7.5 game have that a 7.0 game doesn't? How, pray tell, do you know when a game deserves a 9.7 and not a 9.6?

Video games are pretty amazing these days. Just within the past month, I've played games with some really interesting things to say about subjects like free will (God of War II) and freedom versus security (Crackdown). Would you ever know that from reading reviews of these games? Of course not. What you're likely finding out about them is that they have great graphics and many hilarious ways to kill people (I'll be totally honest here and admit to being guilty of this myself). But there's more to say about games, if someone would just say it. Scores be damned. As the medium grows up, it's going to be necessary for the critics to grow along with it -- and the readers, too. Until they do, game reviews will keep right on sucking.

Retrospecticus

To coincide with the release of God of War II, I put together a list of essential PS2 games for the Phoenix. It's not a ranking of the "best" games or anything like that, just a bunch of games that I think a lot of people have good memories of. I await the inevitable "list fails" comments.

Also on the comments tip, it's been brought to my attention that someone calling himself "Elebit" just recently commented on my Elebits review, employing the phrase "graphic noob" several times. Onward and upward!

MotorStorm

The MotorStorm review is up now. All in all, it's a good game with some problems that are representative of the first wave of software for a new system. I am encouraged about the PS3's future prospects.

I also thought it was charitable not to mention the many people in the MotorStorm online community who tend to quit races whenever they're not winning. More than once, I've had every other racer drop out when I've had the lead. I don't get it. Even when I'm putting along in last place, which is usually the case, I take my medicine like a man.

Free online play is great and all

I've been going online with MotorStorm, and I have to say it's pretty fun (review coming next week). But in the vein of my last post on the subject, I just don't know what the architects were thinking in some cases. For instance, you have to accept the online agreement every single time you sign in. Not just the first time you go online with your PS3, or the first time you play MotorStorm, but literally every time you sign in. That's retarded.

The stupid thing about it is that you can't just pick an option to get into a game as quickly as possible. You have to pick a server at random, and then pick a game at random, and then sit in the lobby until the current race finishes. You can't watch the race in progress or pass the time except by looking at the list of players. Or by writing a blog post.

The last thing that's irritating me is that, despite my five-day headstart on most of these people, many of them are already much, much better than I am. At least I won my first race.