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Category Archives: video games

Canada takes Metacritic game reviews by storm

14 Mar
Canada didn't just whip U.S. butt in 1812; we've also done it in mainstream games coverage.

Canada didn’t just whip U.S. butt in 1812; we’ve also done it in mainstream games coverage.

It’s been a good week for Canada and video games, with both the Toronto Sun and the National Post finally getting included in Metacritic‘s video game listings. The two newspapers join The Globe and Mail  (and your’s truly) to form a trio of mainstream media representation on the important aggregation site, a claim only one other country can make. It’s a significant development for several reasons.

For the uninitiated, Metacritic is a hugely important entertainment review aggregator. The site’s editors curate a list of critics in four categories – movies, games, television and music – and present their respective findings as an averaged score. The usefulness of this is obvious: one or two critics can be wrong about a particular piece of entertainment, but the average of dozens – the wisdom of the masses – is a pretty good overall indicator of its quality. So, while Time magazine tells us that Argo was only a so-so movie deserving of a 5 out of 10, yet the critical consensus is 86 out of 100, we can generally judge that it’s actually pretty good (even if it is horribly inaccurate).

As a user, I don’t find the site to be too useful for TV shows or music; reviews of the first are generally based only on pilots or the first few episodes, while I’m not interested in reviews of the second much anymore. With movies, though, I live and die by Metacritic scores. I generally go see highly rated movies, whatever they’re about, and skip the low ones (sorry, Adam Sandler). Game scores, meanwhile, are also hugely important for many potential buyers, not to mention the makers themselves. Some publishers award bonuses to developers based on the Metacritic score of their game. Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted by on March 14, 2013 in journalism, video games

 

Game reviews need to be as fluid as games

11 Mar

SimCityThe past week has seen a lot of rage directed at Electronic Arts for SimCitygate, or the ongoing server issues tied to the new metropolis-building game. Many would-be players have been unable to log in to the game, which requires an internet-connection, because the company simply wasn’t prepared for the launch.

EA and developer Maxis have been trying to make things right by boosting server capacity and offering affected players a free back-catalog game, and even went so far as to admit that the launch was “dumb.” In all likelihood, the problems will eventually be solved and players will soon be able to get on with dumping countless hours into building their virtual worlds.

But the imbroglio does highlight a unique problem with the way that video games are reviewed. Over on aggregation site Metacritic, SimCity scored an incredibly high 95 (out of 100) average with reviewers. Not only is that universal acclaim, the rating would also cement it as one of the best games of the year. Yet, given the connection problems that followed, reviewers also took a considerable amount of collateral damage from complaining gamers as a result. After all, how can anyone give such a high score to a game that simply doesn’t work? Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted by on March 11, 2013 in video games

 

Is mainstream media treating games any better?

04 Mar
History shows most Native assassins were actually left handed.

History shows most Native assassins were actually left handed, which means AC is horribly inaccurate.

The Globe and Mail ran a sizable feature over the weekend on Assassin’s Creed III, the latest in Ubisoft’s historical action-adventure series. The timing of the story was a little odd given that the game was released back in October, although it does coincide (most likely coincidentally) with the announcement of the upcoming next game in the franchise, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. The article, which asks whether AC3 is rewriting history, seems to be a follow-up to the Globe’s ill-conceived editorial back in November, which asserted that yes indeed, the game does distort what really happened.

It’s always something of a curiosity when the mainstream media takes an interest in video games. Usually, the focus is on violence and whether games are brainwashing kids into shooting up their schools. Fortunately, that’s not the case here, although the medium’s potential negative effects are still at the core of the story.

Assassin’s Creed is proving to be a particularly poignant topic for the Globe, Canada’s national newspaper, for several reasons. The franchise is Paris-based Ubisoft’s flagship, yet it is been born and bred in Montreal, at the company’s biggest and most important studio. Assassin’s Creed III, meanwhile, is set during the American revolution with a half-British, half-Mohawk protagonist. As such, it’s a Canadian-made product with some Canadian-relevant history in it.

The article makes a better-than-average effort at balance, with writer Ian Brown talking not just to developers at Ubisoft, but also to history professors who have actually played the game. Still, there are things about it that are off. As someone who writes for a living – and who writes a lot about games – I’m fairly cognizant of how language can be used to convey a particular slant, or at least how it can betray such a position. And boy, is this story ever full of the sorts of anti-gaming hallmarks that the mainstream media has been perpetuating for years. Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted by on March 4, 2013 in ubisoft, video games

 

Sony’s PS4 might make 3D design really easy

21 Feb

It’s late and I haven’t fully digested the PlayStation 4 launch yet, but one of the things that did tickle my interest was a demo by LittleBigPlanet maker Media Molecule. The developers reached deep into their bag of tricks and dug out the PlayStation Move – come on, you remember it: it’s that wand-shaped motion controller thingy that Sony whipped up a while back to compete with the Nintendo Wii.

Anyhow, they brought out the Move to show off the PS4′s advanced rendering capabilities. With more horsepower under the hood, the new console – which will hit stores in time for holiday 2013 – will be able to do things with the motion controller that the existing PS3 can’t. Here’s a video of the demo; pay particular attention starting about halfway through:

The ability to create three-dimensional sculptures with the Move struck me as particularly amazing, given that it could theoretically be combined with 3D printing. In other words, it looks like it would be remarkably easy to create objects – say toys, simple items or even works of art – in thin air with the motion controller, then beam it over to a printer to be whipped up. No need to learn a complicated computer-assisted design program, and indeed, no design skills necessary whatsoever.

How cool would that be?

 
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Posted by on February 21, 2013 in 3D printers, sony, video games

 

Used e-books and games: worlds apart in thinking

08 Feb
Microsoft won't sell nearly as many Halo games if it kills the used market.

Microsoft won’t sell nearly as many Halo games if it kills the used market.

It’s been an ironic – and potentially revolutionary – week for digital goods. It started out with the revival of rumours that Microsoft may be looking to crush the used video game market with the release of its next Xbox console and it ended with the revelation that Amazon has acquired a patent to sell used e-books. These two bits of news couldn’t be further apart, even though they’re essentially dealing with the same thing.

In the case of video games, rumours have been circulating for a while now about both Sony and Microsoft implementing technology into their next-generation consoles – expected this year – that would make it impossible to play used products. It’s no secret that game publishers hate the used market, estimated at about $2 billion in the U.S. alone, because they don’t get a penny of it. Moreover, there’s bitterness over retailers like GameStop, the biggest player in used games, because they devote so much floor space to used games in spite of the huge marketing dollars spent by publishers on new products.

And so the latest rumours peg Microsoft’s next console as requiring an internet connection and a one-time activation code to play games, which would effectively kill off buyers’ ability to resell their games. Read the rest of this entry »

 
10 Comments

Posted by on February 8, 2013 in amazon, ebooks, microsoft, sony, video games

 
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