Edge Online is finally dead - The Bear and Badger

Tempy

Diluted Dante wrote:

I did wonder if he'd played it like Gears of War from your comment, having never read his review. Temps, his criticisms and observations are not moot. Not using him as a buyers guide is a different thing though. That you dismiss reviews as buyers guides in the very same post makes it all the more confusing as to why asking if anyone uses him as a buyers guide is read as dismissal of him.

I don't personally use reviews as a buyer's guide, that doesn't mean I don't appreciate that most others do. I am interested as to why you wouldn't use his material as a buyer's guide, even though I don't like them. Curious that.

dynamiteReady

I'll miss the site. At one time, I appreciated the email updates, and they were doing a good job of keeping some of their more interesting magazine articles up there.

Me? I'll be moving to Eurogamer for the reviews, and Destructoid for the news, I think.
What's the consensus here though? I'll stand to reason...

Tempy

No single place satisfies as they've all got their duff writers.

Petey

Eurogamer and RPS seem to be the best of the bunch; but I admit to rarely actively seeking reviews for a particular game unless it's already piqued my interests (which are specific enough to be fairly self-selecting anyway).

hylian_elf

dynamiteReady wrote:

I'll miss the site. At one time, I appreciated the email updates, and they were doing a good job of keeping some of their more interesting magazine articles up there. Me? I'll be moving to Eurogamer for the reviews, and Destructoid for the news, I think. What's the consensus here though? I'll stand to reason...

Nowhere. Everything was shit compared to old Edge and still is. I'll just get news from you guys.

regmcfly

Brooks wrote:

Polygon suck dicks too. Typing even as someone who really appreciates Riendeau on the Idle Thumbs poddo.

Goddamit pal, I have also struggled to reconcile this.

regmcfly

For my money RPS are the funnest and cover cool pc games I wouldn't know exist otherwise.

Eurogamer are good for a while because Donlan. I generally like their reviews coz they got that ninty boner.

I miss Sterling's writing, he was a prize cunt but a fun and funny one.

Petey

What are people's views on killscreen ?

IanHamlett

Tempy wrote:

IanHamlett wrote:

Tempy wrote:

Bollockoff wrote:

Sterling's Vanquish review is a black mark on his professional career no question. I use Metacritic as an index of review scores. I always ignore the user scores and average score and just click on the full links that look interesting.

Disagree wildly, even though I disagree with his review. I don't care if they're "wrong" or "right" in consensus. If they've consitebtky drawn their conclusions and backed then up, I'm interested, regardless.

What's the fucking use if they're just wrong. I could tear Dark Souls to pieces and back every point up but, if that's the only place you read about it, you'd walk away with a useless opinion.

How on earth can someone be "wrong" in a review unless they've fundamentally failed to play the game beyond the first few minutes? There isn't an objective right/wrong, if someone too a chunk out of DS and backed it up well how is that wrong? The whole point of knowing an established reviewer's critical canon, is that if they utterly tore a game to pieces, you'd know why they did, ergo it isn't a useless opinion. I used to want to know what Ebert thought of a film because I wanted to know what he thought of a film. Even if I saw it and disagreed, that wouldn't make his opinion useful, in fact it's the contrary.

I find a lot of review entertaining in their own right, but as a tool to help me decide what to spend my money and time on, some are useless. Everyone's got an opinion, but if your opinion is based on a misunderstanding of the source material, then it's a fucking useless opinion.

IanHamlett

Tempy wrote:

No single place satisfies as they've all got their duff writers.

So there's you need to use a few places and aggregate?

Brooks

I think RPS is broadly okay.

Kow

RPS is great. They don't do scores and it's always clear their opinions are just opinions, if they could be bothered having opinions at all. I find that I read it because it's entertaining, not because I care about their opinion at all. Which is as it should be really. This idea that some opinions are more important than others veers close to Prankster territory.

Tempy

Yeh RPS are grand, on the whole.

IanHamlett wrote:

No single place satisfies as they've all got their duff writers.

So there's you need to use a few places and aggregate?

Nope, I have a handful of people I like to read and I read them and then go "ok" to their opinions, but there's none of this "well X likes it which means it's a 10 but Y said no, so he's a 5 which makes the whole shabam a 7" because they aren't the same people, they have different reviews and different reasons, so I get different facets out of them, and also most of them I don't bother with the numbers.

IanHamlett wrote:

Everyone's got an opinion, but if your opinion is based on a misunderstanding of the source material, then it's a fucking useless opinion.

If the source material allows that misunderstanding, that's interesting enough, like with the Vanquish thing.

I mean I'm totally ready to just conce at this point that our views are essentially impossible to reconcile, we just feel totally different about this, and going on any further will just be the same cyclical argument. I don't like MC/RT, you do, end of, no danger.

Petey wrote:

What are people's views on killscreen ?

I've never bothered because the P4K taint is real

IanHamlett

Well I'm happy that works for you. I've found MetaCritic very useful on several occasions.

edit - lookingat my history it's been twice this month and then nothing for over a year. But still, there aren't many other places where I can quickly find a bunch of good Wii games from 2010.

Tempy

The conversation has just definitely reached peak

for me.

I will say that falling off the wheel in terms of disposable income has absolutely changed my opinion on stuff like MetaCritic for games, but I've always found it largely pointless for films, so it was only time before both of those personal viewpoints intersected.

optimark_prime

I'll keep buying the mag until it stops. I hardly read any of it anymore, but it's kinda the completist in me will see it through until the end.

GameCentral on Metro have always been pretty good at reviews, certainly closer to old Edge in their evaluation and criticism.

Mr Biffo has started again too, on Digitiser2000.

IanHamlett

Tempy wrote:

Everyone's got an opinion, but if your opinion is based on a misunderstanding of the source material, then it's a fucking useless opinion.

If the source material allows that misunderstanding, that's interesting enough, like with the Vanquish thing.

Are you fucking shitting me? If a piece can be misunderstood then it's useful to have someone misunderstand it, and pass on that misunderstanding, without ever acknowledging that it's a misunderstanding that has been passed on? No. A better approach would be to understand the source material and inform people that it might not be their thing and it's quite dull if you don't play it as intended.

I've only just read the JS Vanquish review and it does fit the bill as a totally fucking useless opinion to have.

Sam's rocket gliding ability is governed by an energy meter. His melee attacks are governed by the same meter. Yes, you read that right, Sam actually needs energy to punch his opponents, and once he's landed a single successful punch, he can't glide away since the energy meter completely drains. Several times, I punched an enemy, failed to kill it thanks to Sam's inability to aim his punches properly, and was killed because I could neither defend myself or swiftly escape.

So you never figured out how to use the larger enemies, the ones that can survive a punch, as cover. Okay.

Vanquish is just another cover shooter with shallow gimmicks that have no applicable use.

Gimmicks that you never figured out how to apply. Okay.

Sam's dodge maneuver is pathetic and won't get him clear of the giant energy beams and explosions that endlessly come his way.

It will though.

Even the final boss is just a repeat of a boss fought at the end of the game's first act.

Easy mistake, the end of act1 is foreshadowing the end boss. Like Zelda OOT.

This total lack of compulsion and variety is made worse when you realize that the game is only five or six hours long.

So it's not repetitive for long enough?

Tempy

I'm not shitting you but I also can't be fucked carrying this on, as previously stated.

IanHamlett

Fine. Run. Run away. I'm gonna stand here on this hill of mud singing "I'm the king of the castle".

My point is that individual reviewers are often wrong, and I can tell a lot about the chances of most people enjoying a game from the first digit of a metascore.

You probably shouldn't stop at a single reviewer or the metascore.

Tempy

I'm not running, I am busy, I do have other stuff to be getting on with or I'd do the whole back and forth even though it is utterly pointless, sadly tonight I've got 2 hours left to do 3 hours work, so I've got to be off.

Brooks

I am the only reviewer anyone should hold in significant esteem.

IanHamlett

I believe you tempy, not sure if some of the others on here will.

I only buy games with the brooks seal of quality.

mistercrayon

Piracy all the way then?

adkm1979

Temps, your attempts to be all hippy about reviews is lovely, but to choke at the notion of a buyers' guide - or the inference or even just the words - because you don't like your heavily commercialised hobby to sound too commercialised is nonsense. You may bathe in the elegantly expressed opinions of some carefully selected writers, cautiously crafting your own finely balanced thoughts from the individually weighted aspects of each critique, painstakingly cross-referencing the previously published standpoints with your own experiences, but I know a faster way of finding out that a game was a complete turd.

I'm not saying that there's no room for considered analysis. Of course there is. It's part of the reason I still subscribe to Edge. But it's ultimately a hobby where we pay to be entertained, and most of the time a good way of finding out if you'll like something is to find out what a large number of people thought.

Regarding the Edge website, it died years ago. Last time I visited, the newest of their three most recent updates was a month or two old.

IanHamlett

There are also reviews as entertainment. The matthewmatosis ones I've been on about have a spoiler warning FFS. He often advises you to play the game first. So those kind of things aren't to help you make a purchase. I also watch some Jim Sterling and Giant Bomb stuff for games I have no intention of ever playing. But yeah, a big reason I used to spend £4 on Edge was so I didn't spend £40 on a shit game.

Brooks

The best functional purchase-or-not review is a handful of minutes of Youtube gameplay footage, sans commentary.

Long form analysis frequently, for me anyway, is usually so rich that if you then go try the actual subject first hand you wonder what on earth the fuss was about.

IanHamlett

You can pick up a lot from seeing a game move but I've played games that were good for a couple of hours then just didn't progress. Or progressed too far from the original premise.

mistercrayon

adkm1979 wrote:

most of the time a good way of finding out if you'll like something is to find out what a large number of people thought. .

Of course large is completely ambiguous so you can really mean what you want. Oh I meant six. or a hundred or 12 or EA or SONY or whatever, so it's a bit of a tricky point to address. Also you say most of the time and encompass many ways ("a good way") to derive your opinion on the matter. It feels just like a contrarion point of view couched in ambiguity and vagueness.

It also seems like a bizarre world where upon hearing about a game, the first port of call would be metacritic. Is that a thing real people actually do? go to a robot version of an opinion hive mind?

99 times out of hundred I hear about a game not in abstraction but in the context of a person stating that a game is coming out or talking about a game on a podcast at which point I go to a site and find out about that game. Usually the opinions or videos are a person writing or presenting their view.

I can see merit in curiosity ("do my opinions match the MASSSES"!!!!!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!") or even just as a place where you don't have to google the name of the game you want to see a review of. But as a primary way to decide a purchase an average number???...............eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwww

IanHamlett

Last time I used it it was for an 3 year old game that I'd heard 2 people mention in the space of a week. I could've gone to a few individual review sites, and hoped that they'd reviewed it and their search function isn't shit, or I could go to the place where it was definitely listed and would have links to all the other places where it was written about. What's not useful about that?

mistercrayon

mistercrayon wrote:

I can see merit in curiosity ("do my opinions match the MASSSES"!!!!!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!") or even just as a place where you don't have to google the name of the game you want to see a review of. But as a primary way to decide a purchase an average number???...............eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwww

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