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[gregor]

Well i've been asking the same thing about Gimnastics and other graded performance sports. how come all their points are above between 8,5 and 9.9 or sometimes 10. how come no one scores 2 when they fall for example. cause they sometimes suck and yet they get high points.

same is with games. it really seems that every game is awesome these days. Oblivion well i would be afraid to look at other games if this one was GOTY.

i had to do the same. the game is easy but so repetitive. so many enemies and late rin game you are mostly having a click fest with your mouse. nto that you can't beat them, it's just boring if you need to strike each enemy 15 times before you kill them (and that with porpper leveling and powers). Also everythign levels with you and since you can level up quite fast it could happen that oyu never get to wear certain armour or items. but you will get bandits and other enemies wearing the best armour you can buy. and you kind of wander why they have to be all the way out in the wilderness if they can afford such weapons and armour. Not to mention the fact that the army seems crapier later on that everyone else in the country. inflation of armour and weapons is obvious. and you can finish a questline if an afternoon with stupid quests which mostly involve you going somewhere, killing someone, going back, only to be told that you have to go all the way back there again to kill someone else. at first i didnt' saw this because of fast travel, but then i started to observe this more and more. they might send you to the other side of the map and request that you return only to send you out there in the same part again. well gee couldn't you tell me that before? or a mission where they say don't kill the guy just steal something from him or you will be punished. and then your next mission is to kill they guy.

the game does have it's plus as it can be fun mostly because of the AI. but the AI wasn't as they first wanted it to be. in fact it was all too human.
Now about these new games - some facts:

most of them have a huge problem that needs a fix in the form of patch (lame and makes you wonder how they don't find this problem before release)

game developers seem incompetent to a degree or just very lazy. Oblivion would be one example where community managed to patch a lot of things with unnoficial patches. makes you wonder how come the developer couldn't find these bugs and fix them.

Nice and shinny graphics are often a cover for crapy story.

Reviews will often reduce or ignore the value of huge game errors and bugs. Like for Oblivion - feel free to explore and delay the main quest indefinitelly (sure feel free just don't stem in miscarcand or you're main quest is doomed, and feel free to explore just don't enter the temple of ancestor moths or you will never finish the thieves guild quest etc.) Not to mention the bugs you find in stalker - like repeating "i said come in" or "how did i manage that" sound loops.

AI is usually much better than in old games although far from perfect (as it can often still be fooled ro it get's stuck somewhere). remember doom? you shot you pistol, then switched to chainsaw and waited behind a corner. the monsters would always go next to the wall to go arround the corner and be slaughtered on your chainsaw.
There are more interestic physics that offer some additional fun although i wouldn't call them realistic. as you can clearly see on Mythbusters show the body doesn't get thrown back when you shoot someone. while in games you can make them fly. realistic graphics and/or effects are also a lie.

[Tervez]

I have seen the same problem, and I've learned one thing:

Don't trust reviews that come a day or too after the release of the game.

Really, I don't think that any modern game can be reviewed accurately by just a few hours of gameplay. There are just too many things in games, (not to say that's a bad thing) some of which might be good and some downright horrible. For example, I did like Oblivion's casting of magic system in favor of Morrowind's, you didn't have to put down your weapon to cast a spell, but the fact that they took out so many things that were good in Morrowind just made it bad. No levitate, what the heck? The fighting might have been dull in Morrowind, but atleast you met a challenge every now and then, unlike in Oblivion where every single enemy is exactly at your level, meaning you just have to hack it with your sword for 20 times, without even being in risk of dying unless there's many of them.

And the paid reviews thing is real, albeit I think there's still magazines and websites out there you can still trust.

So, when buying a game, I consider these factors important: How much does it cost? Is it still regularly talked about, even after years have passed after it's release? Has it received positive reviews even from "independent" reviewers, such as non-profit websites? If so, it's probably worth the buy.

[Bobbin Threadbare]

I don't read reviews so I am not prone to any hype. I only bother with a game if the concept interests me or someone recommends me the game.

[ianfreddie07]

After my mod experience with Oblivion, I would have rated the "vanilla" version 7.25/10.

But I'd only give a 9 for modded Oblivion due to it getting unstable and CTDing every now and then.

[Panthro]

Glad to see I'm not going crazy, and other people see this too!

Just had a look at the games I bought over the past three years on gamespot, and all got above 8.5, despite some having minor or major flaws. On the scale that Oblivion gets 9.3 and Mass Effect gets 9.0, why does NWN2 and NWN2:Mask of the betrayer get 8.6 and 8.0 respectively?

I guess I'll be sticking to older games, those that stand the test of time. There are games out there that I rate, but many games lack certain qualities that were present in older games. The industry doesn't want to stick its neck out for some reason, in the same way that perhaps it did years back. Perhaps its a big business thing, everyone is aiming for huge sales figures with the standard 13-18 male console gaming demographic, and I'm out of that bracket by some way now. With the success of the Wii for the "family" and "casual" demographics, I would have thought someone could gamble for the slightly older audience.

Ah well, here's hoping for something decent from Iron Tower Studio's Age of Decadence.

[Spoonman]

Originally Posted by Tervez

Don't trust reviews that come a day or too after the release of the game.

This, for example makes me go *narf*. Not that I don't believe FO3 is a great game, but 7 websites giving it a rating of 100 is absurd. It's just not credible at all.

[Panthro]

Agreed - I think this sums it up...

"Faults be damned, though; this is the kind of hugely ambitious game that doesn't come around very often" - 1up (gives it an "A" which metacritic takes as 100%)

Faults be damned? How can you call yourself a reviewer with stuff like this? I applaud the ambition, but you have to rate these things as they are, based on what they claim to be.

I love Fallout 2, but it has many flaws, and metacritic gives it a 86 and the original 89, which in part show respect for what it achieved based on what it set out to do, and I would say these scores are fair.

[Blood-Pigggy]

You can't trust these reviews, for the most part the people online gaming journalism sites hire have no knowledge of the hobby's history or the development process, thus they are not fit for examination on a technical level. Because of that, they cannot easily extrapolate the good from the bad and usually tend to ignore problems because they simply can't put a name to it.
In other words, if something feels "wrong" but they cannot figure out exactly what it is (because they know nothing of the hobby's history and its regular problems) then they will assume nothing is wrong.

That's the gist of what reviewers on GameStop and most publications do. You're either stuck with paper publications that are tainted by advertisement money that essentially forces them to give good scores to high profile titles just so that publishers will provide them with more advertising in order to compete with the online gaming journalism spectrum or online publications run by idiots.

I can already tell you some things about Fallout 3 that most reviews will not, the game crashes, it has frequent lockups, there are security problems with the PC version, there is too much copy and paste in Metro areas, leveling is far too fast and you hit level 20 before the half-way point, the writing is terrible with your character stating the obvious for Intelligence checks and NPCs responding in kind, the game is severely inaccurate in regards to the previous titles in the series (Jet is on the East Coast with no explanation for one thing, Vault-Tec for whatever reason has an FEV testing center - and we all know what "game" had that, Brotherhood of Steel, the shitty console game) and at worst anachronistic, AI pathfinding is atrocious, NPCs will get themselves killed by falling off ledges, disappearing or simply dying from mysterious causes, you will find the most powerful guns within the first ten hours of gameplay (out of around fifty), you can max most skills out (around six out of thirteen if you barely plan), there are several useless perks (Strong Back, Little Leaguer) and almost all of these perks are boring skill bonuses.

There is graphical pop up, the party member NPC trading is broken, the hacking and lock picking minigames make no sense and the only reason to improve the related skills is because it allows you to actually attempt infiltration at higher levels (or else they are locked), the game is far too easy with Very Hard being equivalent to Easy on the original Fallouts, the ending vignettes have been removed and the ending is simply atrocious, VATS aiming calculations are broken with pistols outclassing rifles in distance and accuracy.

The list goes on and on. You're only going to be seeing the positives if you read any of those reviews.

[Eagle of Fire]

God BP, if you are right this ought to be one of the worse game ever created and should never get more than around 60%...

[Blood-Pigggy]

I wrote a pretty in depth review that you can find on my site (in my signature). You're pretty accurate, I gave it a 5.8.