“In the case of video games, if you really enjoy a particular genre of game, only a drastically bad review will convince you not to buy it. Many times, I find myself reading a game’s review, even after buying the game, to pat myself on the back for finding something that gave me a good time.”
I’ve done this on numerous occasions. But there are times when, caught up in the hype, I buy a crappy game (a-la Fable) and then go back and read the review to see what they got wrong. How could they miss such glaring problems. How they gloss over things like how the game was basically on rails with no exploration to talk of? This was supposed to be an open-ended game where you could do anything you wanted to. They alluded to this with statements along the lines of “it is not nearly as wide-open” but don’t really get into any details. Sometimes, they do mention something that could have swayed my decision, like how easy the game was when your pockets were full of potions. Things like that make a difference and sometimes they get it and sometimes they don’t. This is a piece on RAB about some of the pitfalls of the 10-point rating system. He’s got six questions a review should answer and a way to score them to give a final score. I think it works, for the most part. I want the reviewers experience and some of the questions effectively capture those feelings. I’ll have to check out some of RAB’s future reviews to see how this works.
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