GameSetChat: How Do Wii Judge Fun For Mainstream Gamers?
January 2, 2008 8:00 AM | Simon Carless
It's [EDIT: the day after!] New Year's Day, so why not try something new, eh? Sometimes we chat with friends of GameSetWatch on various IM services, and get ideas for columns or opinion articles. And when this latest one came up, we realized - why not just clean up and rebroadcast the conversation as a GameSetChat, if it's cogent enough?
In this case, it was Joel Reed Parker of Game Of The Blog we were talking to, and the particular subject was the Nintendo Wii and how game reviewers are treating the casual-focused games on the system. Some of this chat is well-trodden, but I think it does make some relevant points on how game reviews work - or don't - in the new Wii order:
Joel Reed Parker: Man, Wii third-party software really is bad... a friend got a Wii and was asking me for advice about party games and good games and such. According to the aggregate scores sites, not much.
Simon Carless: But I will say that conventional reviewers do a poor job of differentiating fun casual games from bad casual games - or just bad games, in my opinion.
JRP: I agree wholeheartedly. Same goes for kids' games also.
SC: Like Mario Party 8 has a 62 average on Metacritic's Wii chart, and so does... Heatseeker? Blimey. OK, we definitely need write something about this.
JRP: I didn't even seen the Rayman Raving Rabbids games as high as I thought they would be. It's all the predictable stuff - Mario, Metroid, Zelda.
SC: There's definitely a problem here - Elebits, Korinrinpa, and Dewy's Adventure are all worth checking out, and are lost in terms of scoring with markedly inferior games - even/especially from a 'mainstream' gamer perspective.
JRP: I literally have to tell my friend to be careful what she bought, as the Wii game quality control is almost non existent. I felt really bad for her. Another friend bought a Wii bundle (on Christmas Eve) just to be able to get a Wii, but actually took it back unopened because the games were so terrible.
SC: So there are two problems here - there's the fact that some Wii games that are casually aimed and look a bit like they might be good are actually completely terrible.
And there's the problem that if you go look at reviews/average reviews, anywhere past the Top 15 games on Metacritic seems to do a bad job of differentiating what the average Wii player would like. Looking at it some more, probably the best example is Wii Play, with an average score of 58. That's worse than Fishing Master or Spider-Man: Friend or Foe.
JRP:: I really thought that GameRankings would help the first friend decide what games were good - but I also know that she wanted light and fluffy gameplay, not 30 hour action adventure quests. I was baffled to see that the games i had heard good personal reviews of weren't even in the Top 20.
SC: Ah, here's another great example - my mother just got a Wii for Xmas back in England, because she liked playing Wii Sports when she visited his summer, and she loves the Bust A Move/Puzzle Bobble series. But here we have Bust-A-Move Bash! down with an average score of 53. That's ridiculous, given how fun the game is on a basic level.
Are jaded reviewers reacting to the pricing, or just having played about 15 versions of it before? This may be the moment in the history of games where the reviewers start diverging from the mainstream in a major fashion. It happened in movies a good few decades ago, so I guess we can't be too surprised.
JRP: The 'multiple versions' issue is probably the exact reason Mario Party 8 scored so low with the hardcore reviewers - yet another Mario party game they have to play though.
Talking of the casual element, I have a disturbing love for simple 3D platformers, and usually can't trust major review sites for a decent score/review. It would seem that only Dave Halverson and I can truly appreciate the artistry that went into Stuart Little 3 or Brave: Search for the Spirit Dancer.
SC: Well that, my friend, is something you and your priest will have to explore in more detail. But nonetheless, a good point has been made - who can I trust to tell me whether my mother would like specific Wii games, other than me? And what if I don't know anything about Wii games? This is a major problem.
Perhaps What They Play is along the right lines, but it doesn't actually differentiate along quality grounds. So what's the solution here? Let the Average Joe make his own mistakes after judging by the box covers? What a palava!
JRP: Yeah, there needs to be a middle ground between GameSpot and GamerDad. Maybe we all need to go back to Epinions or something?
SC: Not a terrible idea! Just like Yelp is handy for hands-on reviews of local businesses from Average Joes.
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8 Comments
I keep thinking back to, I think it was Iwata's cooment, at the GDC where he stated we needed to have review scores based on what a non-gamer thinks of the game.
Not that it is the answer, but some sort of score based on ages and game experience would certainly be helpful.
I rent a new Wii game every week through GameFly and ask my 8.5 year-old daughter her opinion of each and have her rank it against the other games we have played. It always gives me some interesting information. Also, if my wife picks up the controller on her own (which happened in Wii Sports, Brain Academy, Mario Party 8 and Guitar Hero), then I know the game is doing something right. Notably she won't typically even try the game if the nunchuck is attached.
I think the best solution for finding useful reviews is finding someone you tend to agree with and just read their reviews.
Russell Carroll | January 2, 2008 9:35 AM
"I think the best solution for finding useful reviews is finding someone you tend to agree with and just read their reviews."
This is one of those things that gets said a lot, and in theory it's good, but the problem is that first of all, it takes some time to actually find someone who you consistently agree with (especially if you're new to the world of gaming websites), and even then there's no guarantee that they will ever review the game you're interested in.
fluffy bunny | January 2, 2008 12:44 PM
I have owned a WII for a year and the thing that I noticed is that the system has even out the playing field for all age groups. I have seen my six year old go up against an exeperienced gamer in WII Sports and bet him at all the games. I have also seen my 70 year old father, who can't stand video games, pick up a controller and play bowling for hours. WII has taken gaming to a level that none of the reviewers understand because they have been programed into the traditional type of video games. Reveiwers need to be of all age groups with all levels of experience. When it comes to WII games I have given up on the reviews and I just go out and play the games.
Ben | January 2, 2008 1:23 PM
The other thing to think about is where a gamer is relative to the games they've played. I've watched people go from Bioshock to Mario Party 8 and not give it a second thought. After playing Bioshock, I ask them how great it was and they answer, "what was SUPPOSED to be great about it?". Likewise, I tell them that Mario Party 8 is getting average to poor reviews and they wonder "whats so bad about it?". Most "great" games are literally lost on the average gamer, just like they don't recognize flaws in all but the most broken games. What a hardcore reviewer may consider a flaw will go completely unnoticed to the average consumer.
used cisco | January 2, 2008 1:53 PM
think one thing that often gets ignored is that the reviewers tend to hew fairly closely to the target audience of the publication. this is not atypical nor do i think it's wrong-headed. it means you can't use EGM as a guide for buying games for your kids, but i know for the fact the EGM guys would say as much.
i definitely agree with fluffy bunny in the second half; i don't think you should say it's "too hard" to find someone you agree with, though, because that's just something that happens naturally as you read a publication. and there are mitigating factors, like editorial direction of a site/magazine helping to bring writers in line with a common vision of what's good and what's bad in games.
but the major issue is that, yes, your reviewers are not going to review the games you are interested, particularly if you have relatively diverse tastes.
i also think that there is something very much to be said for people being critical. now, i am not defending even perhaps the majority of reviews around, but ultimately, film critics hold film to a higher standard than the public and so should game critics. just because average gamers will enjoy things that critics think are mediocre doesn't mean that nobody should be saying these games are mediocre, and why.
ferricide | January 2, 2008 5:26 PM
You would have to be a moron to think that taking the average of every reviewers game score is a smart thing.
Seriously.
Why do you even wonder that this doesn't work?
Please replace the word game with music or book or anything. Now turn on your brain. Do you perchance see what the problem might be?
Rating every experience in your life, then getting everyone else to do the same, then averaging the number and guess what. The really good stuff is likely to end up somewhere in the middle, as the good stuff tends to be loved by some, hated by others.
The stuff at the top tends towards the bland and inoffensive, or bad but well marketed.
So yes, I would expect most good games to sit amongst the middle ground, just like most good music or films or books...
Kriss Daniels | January 2, 2008 9:40 PM
Kriss, I don't know about you but I'd agree with a lot of what's on the list I link to as my username's URL. It's a list of Metacritic's all-time highest scores for film. Interestingly, the literature equivalent means nothing to me.
Not attempting to make a point, instead I'm trying to further discussion.
Merus | January 3, 2008 5:52 AM
"But here we have Bust-A-Move Bash! down with an average score of 53. That's ridiculous, given how fun the game is on a basic level."
This is not ridiculous. The Wii controller is ideal for the Puzzle Bobble series, but they screwed it up regardless. The controls are dumbed down (your aiming device shoots a laser that makes aiming trivial) and there are so many powerful power-ups that playing a versus game just becomes a meaningless cascade of bubbles.
Jonathan Harford | January 3, 2008 6:34 PM