Random Gaming Thoughts II ~News Items Beware~

That's what I always wanted Gintendo to be.

After the above discussion, I feel that this is a nice little thing from Nintendo Life. Nowhere near as funny as NGamer in their heyday, I'd still like to doff my hat to NL for doing an entirely humorous feature.

Had this thought earlier: given that Nintendo home consoles tend to have a shelf life of 5 years, and the Wii lasted 6 years, Nintendo had an extra year to get the Wii U right.

Or an extra 5 to get NX right.

More NL stuff! Alex is good, he really is. Also, confirmation that my pronunciation of Yoshi is right!

No, since it's clearly taken from the Japanese name it is said this way:

Quote :

PRONOUNCED: yo-shee [key] From Japanese 吉 (yoshi) meaning "good luck", 義 (yoshi) meaning "righteous", or 良 (yoshi) meaning "good, virtuous, respectable", as well as other kanji with the same reading.

The Japanese sound is halfway between a long o and a short o, and Yoshi says it with a short o. So I'm still right!

Considering it's pronounced in both ways officially (I'm pretty sure) I'm not sure there is a correct and incorrect way - just two different ways.

More importantly, is it Mah-rio or Mar-rio?

The latter. (Peach is wrong.)

Drunkalilly wrote:

More importantly, is it Mah-rio or Mar-rio?

It's Maw-rio.

Why would anyone want to spoil that Brazilian city?

Drunkalilly wrote:

More importantly, is it Mah-rio or Mar-rio?

It's Mary-O.

Alex from Nintendo Life talks about reviews and objectivity and subjectivity and yadda yadda. Don't necessarily agree with him; however I felt the need to post this video because (a) he slags off Kotaku under a cough, which is neither big or clever but which is funny, and (b) because he uses the word "chuffing".

I like this chap. He's the closest I've experienced to the NGamer style save TRP since the website died, and he does something new much more frequently than Greener et al.

The score at the end of a review is always the first thing I look for. There's too many arseholes out there who type two billion words, say a lot without saying anything and don't plonk a score on the end of it. Bollocks to that. Really, stick that right up your arse. I'm not reading your two billions words, I just want an idea if a game is good or not. Give me a decent last paragraph and a score, that's all I ask. Anything over a seven out of ten is probably worth my £30, between five and seven can wait for a price drop, five or less means I'll probably not bother. Easy, doddle, piece of piss.

Come to think of it, C&VG Magazine was really good at reviewing games in the way I like.They had the reviewer's opinion in about two hundred words, a quick second opinion from another staffer, a score out of five ("HIGH-FIVE!!!!!") and a couple of sentences summing all of that up. That suited me.

I like Alex Olney too. Good sense of humour, doesn't take his work too seriously, sometimes wears the same jumpers that I wear, an all-round good guy.

Brilliant timing from you and Jimbob there.

Jimbob wrote:

Sorry to interrupt but

METROID FUSION SUPER-REVIEW

It's like a mini Super Metroid. Good. [8].

Seems me and Drunka might be arseholes then as neither of us put scores on our reviews, as I and I gather Drunka feels the same want you to read what we've put not just scroll down to the bottom and go Severed is a 9/10.

I have brought up scores in my reviews like Until Dawn and I know Drunka has jokingly put one on Pokken but you may have juts looked at that and gone this must be a crap game though if you hadn't read the rest of the review.

If you're not there for my 2 billion words, you're not the person I'm writing for.

I can see both sides. None of us are professional journalists, we're writing for the pleasure of it. As a professional reviewer, I'd want to attract all sorts, including those who like my writing, and those who just want a summary to give them an idea as to whether they'd like it (and there are many, including myself, who want both - I'd skim the mag, see the scores, then come back later and read the rest).

That said, it must be pretty galling for a journalist, who writes for a living, to put in all that effort into an article, trying to make the writing entertaining, and have people just glance at the score and push off. But then again, if the writing's toss (and let's face it, some games journalists out there aren't the best at making their words entertaining), you might just want a general idea from the journo about the game's goodness and nothing more. Arguably a journalist who's good at writing will earn the reader's attention anyway.

The (well, a) real problem comes when there is a score, and you finish the review thinking that the text doesn't match up to the numbers. If you spend half the review slagging off the game and then end on a 7/10 or 8/10, you haven't done your job right.

That's just it. What 8/10 means to me is completely different to what it means to the next guy. Unless we share exact tastes, and I've reviewed every other game ever made, my score alone shouldn't be enough to go on. Hopefully, my words will articulate what I mean, however.

When you get stuff like this, where Burns praises the hell out of Uncharted 4 so much he actually talked some people into buying it but some commenters are out for his blood because he "only" gave it an 8.

Hey EA has me down as Editor-in-chief

That I'm not sure what you even call professional press as some of the well known ones aren't reviewing for the likes of IGN but Pateron with us paying there wages.

Yeah we are writing for the pleasure of it and if we get any codes or get to go any events, that's a bonus.

I also saw Lucy O'Brian get some stick about her 8.8 for Uncharted 4.

Hang on though. While people's 8/10s will mean slightly different things, if you've followed the author for long enough to know their tastes, then there's no reason why an 8/10 shouldn't give you a significant amount of information. It can also be used as a marker of comparison for that same author: "I enjoyed SMG which you gave 9/10, how much will I enjoy SM3DW etc." I don't think it's fair to say that a 8/10 is completely useless.

It's also interesting that you choose 8/10. I think that actually, reviewers' 8/10s are generally a lot closer in message across the boards compare to, say, their 6/10s, which can range from "aggressively mediocre" to "genuinely slightly above average, give it a punt if you like this style of game".

mas wrote:

Hey EA has me down as Editor-in-chief.....

...of the Rad mobile division.

I think that it's a good idea to have some kind of scale you can fall back on. As Mr. Olney says, it doesn't have to be an out of 10 thing, but I think you need some way of comparing a game with (a) other games of that style or genre, and (b) other games in general. However, I don't know what that is - and I'm sad enough to have spent time thinking about it.
However:
1) If you read that a game scores an "8" and you don't bother reading the review properly, to discover why it got an 8, and not a 5 or a 10, then you don't get to complain
2) If a game gets 89% and you complain because you think it should be a 92%,implying somehow that a 3% difference in a score will revolutionise the game's recollection in the archives of eternity, I reserve the right to hold you down and kick you in the privates

NoA just memed, and the Internet is very unhappy about it.