So there’s a petition on Change.org demanding that Metacritic stop including scores from gaming megasite IGN.com in its meta-scores. Why?
Because IGN gave the new Doom reboot a score that was … lower than the scores other critics gave it! Thus proving that IGN.com is irredeemably corrupt!
As petition creator Ivan Kovalev explains this logic.
Doom recently got a 7.1 in IGN, severely altering the score that it deserves, All other reviewers give it sterling reviews and has 90% and above score on steam.
Translation: It’s about ethics in you not liking a game as much as I like it!
Advanced warfare received a 9.1 yet being a mediocre game, IGN is paid off by large devs and shouldn’t be use as a legit source of review.
Translation: Any time anyone disagrees with a consensus I also happen to agree with, someone must be paying them off!
How far does your head have to be up your own posterior that you’re unwilling to accept the possibility that someone has a different opinion on a game than you do?
I’m not sure, but given that there are more than 1200 signatures on the petition so far, we can conclude that there are at least that many gamers whose head-up-their-own-posterior score exceeds this threshold.
The comments from petition signers are of course also quite lovely.
The top comment, from a fellow calling himself “Mike Hunt” — get it, get it? — somehow manages to work Anita Sarkeesian into the mix.
IGN is an uninformed, idiotic source paid off by big companies. I rank them at the same level as Feminist Frequency, the aneurysm causing garbage that kills the braincells of any logical being unfortunate enough to stumble upon it’s lie-speckled articles.
Uh, that should be “its lie-speckled articles.”
“IGN is like marrying crackwhore,” explains commenter Lale Gator from Belgrade, Serbia.
You know she isnt the best but still doesnt matter cause she perform everytime you want it from her,but on the downside she always gives you new STD.
Er, that doesn’t even remotely make sense as an opinion about a game site. It doesn’t even make sense as an opinion about a crack addict.
“Ign in cancer to gaming,”declares memes mcghee from Berlin, Israel.
“The don’t rate games probably,” adds Dexter Dorks of Dohah, Qatar.
At this point you may have noticed that I have given up on correcting the grammar and everything else.
“IGNorance should be punished for consecutively selling out,” Paulo Santos of Hollywood, Florida demands.
“People should not be misleaded!” cries Portugal’s Francisco Novais.
“IGN is polluting the gaming community and should be stoped,” Oscar Gerkman of Vingåker, Sweden angrily mutters between bites of lutefisk.
I guess the people have speakened, huh?
@Eyes on the Right
The fuck??
I’ve actually been playing the new Doom game lately, and I’m enjoying it a lot. But like…I didn’t come for the complex story or anything. I came for the over the top violence and blasting demon faces off. On that, it delivers. That’s not going to be for everyone, though, which is more than fair, and anyway, 7.1 isn’t bad. These dudes are so fragile, man.
And yeah, Borderlands 2 was my gateway drug into FPS games, and I’d still probably give it only like an 8. I love it, but it’s got its issues. That’s okay. That I enjoy it doesn’t make it perfect. How is this so hard for these supercool, logical dudes to understand that?*
*You don’t actually need to answer that.
mmm, lutefisk. I miss food from Svenska.
@Hesster
Star Fox Adventures was a total letdown for me. For months (or maybe over a year?) we were getting these teaser shots for a beautiful new game from Rare that looked amazing with a unique and interesting art style. That game was being called Dinosaur Planet. Then one day they decide it needs to be a part of a recognizable franchise and they tie it to Star Fox because the original game had fox characters. It wasn’t the same game we were looking forward to anymore. It turned into crappy cartoon characters with bad jokes. It wasn’t bad and I enjoyed it, but I felt like it could have been so much more.
Re: Notch:
Angry, misogynistic, insufferable douche of fading relevance with a history of siccing his followers on the innocent and harassing people out of the industry joins forces with other angry, misogynistic, insufferable douches of fading relevance with a history of siccing their followers on the innocent and harassing people out of the industry. News at 11.
But seriously, dude’s always been an utter toolbag and there’ve been rumours of him being sympathetic towards #GG for months, so I’m breaking new records in not-surprise here.
@Handsome “These Pretzels Suck” Jack (formerly Pandapool)
That was my reaction. Is everyone I like a tremendous douchebag? I’ve lost Billy Corgan and Jesse Hughes of EODM and Richard Dawkins to total ignorance, and now this?
Okay the whole Gerstmann incident was bad ethics in games journalism 101, but Gerstmann was fired by the owner, not the website staff, and multiple other editors there quit in solidarity. And Gamespot has since changed owners. They also never altered the score given to Kane and Lynch; the written review was never removed and the video review is back up.
Basically focusing on games journalism as the unethical parties in the games industry ignores the reality that most of the abuses come from major games publishers.
(Of course you can’t tell a GamerGater that, obviously real ethics means worshiping at the AAA industry’s feet.)
Hey this reminds me of the GTA V / Gamespot “scandal” a few years back. I was over in the US at my then-girlfriend’s when it happened, and we had a good laugh. Then we went out to grab our copies of the game.
Gamespot gave GTA V a 9/10. And the female (and also trans, if I remember well) reviewer stated that the only thing she had a problem with was the sexism in the game. Now that’s been debated a lot and there’s definitely a lot to say about it, but anyways the True Gamers had a field day on that one. The avalanche of transphobic and sexist rants was overwhelming… until Gamespot released a video response that was simply brilliant. And alienated a part of their audience that they made clear they didn’t want in the first place. Oh and someone pointed out that if they’d given it a 10/10, then the backlash would have been worse, because GTA V doesn’t have jetpacks like San Andreas did and thus doesn’t deserve a perfect score.
Only way to win this game is to not play.
So yeah, definitely nothing new here.
The best reviews are the ones that aren’t just a number. Old Man Murray used to do some of the best, and so did whatever newspaper writer did this piece: http://1.media.dorkly.cvcdn.com/69/52/08545dfb01dd6cab2ac97c3942f97f31.jpg
re: Notch; The original ideas for Minecraft were from a game called Infiniminer, by the excellent Zachtronics, another one-man game development show programming in Java. Notch lifted Infiniminer’s concepts pretty much whole cloth, and he was lucky enough to catch a viral wind and sail it to the Minecraft we know now. There was a huge fight about the fact that Minecraft was a ripoff of Infiniminer, though, and Notch was a bit of a jerk about the whole thing.
So, yeah, surprised that he’s unable to accept that “mansplaining” is an actual thing? Not me.
To end on a positive note: Major, major props to Zach in how he handled things. He didn’t get upset at the slightest and kept on doing his thing. Try his games! If you like puzzle games, they are gems. Spacechem is magnificent, brilliant and a great educational tool; it’s his first to make it big.
There is this mindset among some guys that any criticism of games is a criticism of them. What they don’t get is criticism and divergent understanding is how the industry grows.
On a separate issue I really don’t get Gamergate, on one hand they started over the accusation of sex for favorable write up of a game (which never actually happened) and somehow this is more of an egregious violation than what happens between the established game publishers and reviewers who we know give advertising and early access in return for favorable treatment.
Now it seems that Gators are going to get upset when journalists are ‘insufficiently positive’ about games. Hey guys, you have really dealt with that problem of ethics in games journalism: mandatory positivity. For the record Doom as good but not earthshaking I’d say anything in the vicinity of 7 or 8 is understandable. Such is their insecurity only complete groupthink is permitted, lest their assumptions about everything be questioned.
There’s only one man I will trust.
You know, to screw everything up. Trust no man. If you’re a man, don’t even trust yourself. Don’t trust the people closest to you, either, not even your own daughter or the dude that you’re inside the head of. You’ll just screw yourself over in the end, thinking you’re doing the right thing, but you should have just keep your nose out of ancient alien vaults or thrown stock options at people or something. Learn from Handsome Jack and trust no one. Except hot chicks with cowboy hats and mommy issues. Weirdly, 100% trustful.
Ha, nah. Anyway, I figured he’d be a douche when he bought that billion dollar mansion, I just didn’t think he’d be a complete fucking ass about it. I guess Europeans aren’t better than the rest of us, shocking.
It’s a remake with simple, unevolved mechanics and repetitive gameplay. What is there to ‘get’?
7/10 seems about right and I’m honestly surprised by the high scores other reviews have given.
We try though. Sometimes. Maybe.
Yeah, that was sort of the main thing going on with this post but I guess I was making fun a bit too.
On the its/it’s thing, that was partly so I could quote the “lie-speckled articles” bit. It’s funny to me when someone screws up the grammar in the midst of saying something so over-the-top.
On actual corruption in games “journalism” it’s telling that these guys almost never seem to go after the popular youtubers who literally do get paid off by game companies (w/ junkets, w/ goodies, w/ “sponsored” videos). Granted, these folks often disclose this stuff, which is good, but basically this makes them unofficial PR people, not reviewers.
And here I was thinking the “conspiracy” of Disney paying people to give Batman v Superman bad reviews yes, this was actually a thing was stupid. GamerGaters are like everyone else in the manosphere they act like 5 year olds over petty crap.
I didn’t get into Minecraft until a few months after MS bought it, so at least Notch didn’t get any of my money. I didn’t really know anything about the man until now, but still it always surprised me to see Let’s Plays where people build temples to the man. It’s strange how people equate the creation with the creator. It doesn’t help that so often this allows one to take credit for the work of the many – Gary Gygax and Stan Lee being two people from my childhood that gave good example of what ‘feet of clay’ means.
@pitshade, I understand a bit of the Notch worship. Notch, and Minecraft, represent a very odd trend in gaming that is a very big thing for a lot of hopeful-game-developers these days.
Minecraft’s success is weird. When it was starting to explode, and up to when Microsoft bought it, Minecraft almost actively discouraged people from buying and playing it. You needed to install Java, you needed to run jars, no tutorials, no installation guide, piles of weird mods that took ages to get working properly. Optifine and Tekkit and FTB and all sorts of stuff. And despite this big hurdle to entry, it was a monstrous success, all made by one guy who barely spoke up or interacted with his fan base.
It was a game that seemed to grow out of nowhere, with no one in charge, no company pulling the strings; just a big community of creative people who like legos-with-zombies-in. Notch was a symbol for that community and the playful, positive, creative world it represented. So, I get that. He’s still awful, but I get the people who idolize him.
@ Scildfreja
All of that is pretty much news to me. Despite spending most of my free time gaming, I don’t keep up with anything much beyond reading theorycrafting on whatever my current game is. Never even heard of Minecraft until I got to the top of High Hrothgar in Skyrim and found the Easter Egg.
But still, it’s just something I’ve never been able to comprehend, that greatness makes one moral? or beyond reproach?
Remember when internet petitions weren’t a joke? Neither do I.
I mean Jesus Christ, they’re not even angry at a bad review, they’re angry at an insufficiently good one. It’s a better score than they gave The Division. Besides which, scores are for people too lazy to pay attention to the rest of the review. And Metacritic is for people too lazy to look for individual review scores.
I am a major minecraft player who actually enjoys the mods but I am not willing to excuse notches behavior.
Steam ratings are the worst, and it seems to be very rare for a game to get below like 70% and even more so the 50% threshold they use for thumbs up/thumbs down.
I didn’t meant o suggest his behaviour was at all acceptable. I just understand why people might idolize him. He’s a fitting figure for hero-worship in that community.
@Scildfreja
I didn’t read anything you wrote as being supportive of his behavior. I’m sorry if I gave that impression.
No probs!