David Jaffe says he no longer cares about specialist review scores

“somewhere between God of War and Calling All Cars”
In terms of budget…

got my attention the word “specialist”. When did he say such word? Where are these specialist? The reviews today are just part of the marketing from “X” or “Y” video game. That’s why he doesn’t care any more.

And thats why i fuckin LUV this dude. Its clear that most reviewers follow what everyone else says without spending much time with a game nowadays due to deadlines and so forth.
Great example: GamesRadars review of Heavy Rain. WoW. dreadful, completely slated this game simply for tying something different.

Second Example: God Of War 3 review, with saying “the gameplay are too similar to the last two games” miss the point completely yet Call Of Duty and Halo get away with all series set in a slighty diff setting. AMAZINGLY HYPOCRITICAL.

love it that the pic above makes him look like the retard that he is …

1@ Not in terms of budget, it is in term of design.

Sony funds for development so expect a good money for it.

I guess he now prefers reviews by magazines/papers like FHM and The Daily Mirror who most likely get sent their reviews by the publishers – rather than reviewers who love good games and will actually play his work.

Totally, totally agree KAP. Case in point was Eurogamer’s tragic review of Ratchet & Clank: A Crack In Time. Ellie spent much of the review talking about the games new features and events, and then slammed the review score down to a seven because surprise surprise, it was still a Ratchet & Clank game. I mean WTF, Insomniac threw a truck load of new and interesting features into the game, polished the core mechanics and kept the slick presentation, but because it still followed the core design which makes a Ratchet & Clank game a Ratchet & Clank game, it was deemed less than stellar.

As you say, nobody is going to deduct points from Halo for being another FPS, or Command and Conquer for being another RTS, so why slam other genre games? It’s something that has really gotten under my skin recently, and I’m certainly a lot more careful of which reviews I give time of day to because of it.

But yeah, I can already see the GoW3 reviews coming in, praising it for it’s technical prowess but OMG, it’s still a God Of War game, and shock of shocks, Kratos still hits demons with massive swinging blades.

I’m just thankful that most game studios seem more interested in delivering what the fans want and expect from a franchise game, rather than breaking what works just to placate the critics, and just to be clear, this isn’t about promoting stagnation either.
If a sequel to a game is nothing more than a re-skinned version of the original that brings nothing fresh to the table then fine, that game should rightly be pilloried as a thoughtless cash in.
It’s when critics object to a game remaining true to itself that bothers me.

I can’t berate the guy for having an opinion… I only wish it wasn’t so jaded.

‘out of their way to praise the artistic’

No, that’s far from true.
Trine for example… beautiful game, unique, interesting mechanics… mostly 7s across the board.

Reviews rate games based on their enjoyment with said game, if that enjoyment is derived from artistic merit then so be it!

I think i read Jaffe hates that photo your using

I love the fact that Jaffe said on his blog that sites should stop using that horrible pic of him and yet all the gaming sites still use it.

Reviews Are Just For Suckers, They Tell People What’s Good & What’s Bad, Then They Just Buy What Their Told Like The Rest Of The Sheep.

@7. really? must have missed that r+c eurogamer review. that really is a shame. the game is awesome. i can understand when you name in a review that you as a reviewer think a game has become a little old because it´s the third+whatever output of a game. but i don´t think this should make an impact on the rating, because there will be gamers that still havent played any of those games. i can accept if a reviewer decides to lower the score a little because of it. but more like in a 0,5 range and then name his reasons. in case of r+c this really is a shame, because insomniac really knows how to make a fun game, with fun weapons. the gameplay of r+c is one of the best in videogaming imo. and it´s a genre which is dying. what makes it even worse, because i crave more games like these.

KAP: Funny examples. Let’s focus on Heavy Rain.

You attack reviewers for “following what everyone else says without spending much time with a game”. Yet the GamesRadar-review of Heavy Rain was published the moment the NDA lifted, together with most other early reviews of the game. So obviously they didn’t know what everyone else said about the game when they wrote and published it.

Also, their score and review certainly didn’t reflect what “everyone else said” anyway. Opinions on Heavy Rain were split, but most were more positive than the GamesRadar-review.

So while I’m not defending that particular review (though I don’t see any reason to attack it either), your critisism misses the mark completely.

A far larger problem is people not actually reading reviews and thinking that scoring a 7 is bad for a game.

There’s lots of review sites and magazines out there, all with thier own opinions and writing styles.
The trick is to find those few that share your tastes and outlooks on gaming. Then it becomes a verry handy source of information.

And stop focussing so much on merely the score alone, take it within the context of what was written and the source.
Becuase there isn’t one review scale that the entire industrie operates on.
For example, a 7 from Eurogamer means something entirely different then a 7 from IGN.
But botrh a perfectly valid if you are familiar with thier review policies.

Unfortunatly, that makes a site like MetaCritic almost totally pointless.

This has pretty much nothing to do with the scores at the end of actual reviews. Its all about the metacritic baby.