It’s hard sometimes as a gamer when you see a game that you
love or are very interested getting sunk by a shoddy or lazy review. It
happens, reviews are for the most part subjective, ‘one man’s treasure is
another man’s trash’ so to speak. Reviews have the power to make or break a
company in the case of Obsidian and Fallout New Vegas. Obsidian missed out on
profit sharing by a few points in its aggregate review score. It happens;
sometimes reviewers let personal issues cloud their professional judgment, as
we like to say ‘they’re only human’. You never like to see a shoddy review even
when it bumps the metacritic score up. It always feels so un-American; you know
the whole equality for all.
Reviews are necessary, they put things in perspective, and
they give a measuring stick on the quality of the game. A good review and a bad
review can oftentimes have the same language but vastly different scores. On
the other hand gamer reaction to a popular game being reviewed harshly or vice
versa is often vitriolic; not that writers are not without fault. I cannot
count the number of times when a review has been positive or negative and yet
the score in no way shape reflects it, combine that with the various times I’ve
read a review where the author clearly did not finish or understand the game
and you have problems.
