This explains game journalism perfectly.

The problem is that competitive games take time to "settle" in a way that makes them incredibly difficult to review on the level that the author is asking for. It takes some pretty rigorous testing by a competitive community to really break a game down all the way, and find out all the most efficient ways to play the game utilizing everything there is to offer, even the stuff that's completely unintentional on the part of the developers. Only then can it be determined if a game is balanced or even fun at a high level.

And in the end, most people don't give a shit. The vast, VAST majority of people who buy Street Fighter 4 will never care about frame counts; they just want to shoot Hadoukens and Hundred Hand Slap people while Guile's theme plays in the background.

That might sound like the same thing as "Most people just want to see explosions, so Michael Bay movies should get good reviews" but I think there's a fundamental difference. No matter how shallow or deep your appreciation of film is, the actual act of watching a movie is virtually identical for everyone and requires an identical amount of time investment. You might not understand how good cinematography affects a movie beyond "It makes it more visually interesting and dynamic" but you're still ultimately experiencing the exact same thing as everyone else.

On the other hand, a low-level Street Fighter match is fundamentally different than a high-level one and moving from one level to the other requires a level of dedication that's just not reasonable for the 99% of the population for whom fighting games are NOT a primary hobby, and specific information on why the game is great at a competitive level is useless for them since it's not something they'll ever even encounter.

Of course, there's absolutely nothing wrong if you're super into a specific game or genre, but expecting that kind of dedicated, niche, coverage in release-date reviews of a game on sites geared toward a more mainstream crowd seems a little bit naive.

@kentonclay: For me, I don't expect reviewers to be intimately familiar with all the mechanics of every game they play, the costs to benefits of that obviously don't add up. Instead what I'd like to see is games writers working harder to better express their own feelings about the mechanics they encounter while playing a game. Mechanics aren't necessarily what make a game a "game" but, from what I've seen, they're one of the aspects that people have the hardest time explaining to others. Evaluating and comparing what works and what doesn't, how something could have been better implemented, explaining how they integrate into the rest of the experience, explaining why somethings get boring while others hold their appeal over time, these are all things games writers need to do a better job of addressing. I guess I'm just tired of hearing "it's tight".

I don't see that as being very different from Editorials and opinion pieces in newspapers to be honest.

What bothers me (and I find occasionally on n4g.com or example) are links to gaming websites where it's like top 20 something or other (for example), you go to the site and its just a messy advert ridden site with 2-3 words per line because they haven't applied CSS properly or the ads squeeze the text and you have to go through 21 clicks to fully read the article (I usually don't bother reading if I find that mind you).

It's not so much the 21 clicks that bother me. If the site looks decent enough I'll pay that. But when it looks like a ad ridden pile of hot garbage in poorly implemented CSS mess I usually leave a comment giving them info like what sort of computer, resolution, browser/version I'm using and what it looks like to me hoping they improve it. 1/10 times I'll get a response where they'll genuinely care about my feedback and ask more about it or ask for screenshots which I'm more than happy to give.

9/10 times they'll delete my comment and come weeks later they have a new article and its the same shitty looking site. I find that really pathetic and my memory is good enough to remember those sites and avoid.

Re: Click bait articles, well usually you can spot them a mile away. Best thing to do is not go there. If clicks is what they want then you're only giving them what they're after. Revenue!

@random45: Holmes definitely chose unnecessarily callous words to describe fans of Melee, but I find it hard to believe that this was conceived of as click bait, given the detail he put in to describing why he preferred Brawl. And, even though he apparently was wrong about tripping being a major factor in why a defensive playstyle is more effective in Brawl than in Melee, that doesn't change the fact that the games do indeed play differently.

As for Wagar's response, I appreciated learning about what exactly accounted for the differences in Brawl, but he doesn't seem to grasp the concept of objectivity. The words "good" and "bad" and "better" and "worse" are inherently subjective, no matter how many arguments you can posit. You can say there is greater landing lag in Brawl, and you'd be correct. That's an objective statement; all it does is describe something, explain what it is. You can say that Melee is better than Brawl, and that's something you can believe, but that value statement is, once again, inherently subjective. And, while it certainly would be helpful if games journalists spent a greater deal of time and effort understanding the intricacies of mechanically complex games so as to better explain what players can do, I find it hard to fault the games press in general for reviews that speak only of the more basic mechanics in games that don't require you to pull off anything incredibly complex in order to complete the main body of the game.

And, with regard to your statements about media outlets always writing opinion pieces about controversial topics, you should understand that controversy is the reason for editorials in the first place. It's easy to become frustrated with such pieces when their authors make some kind of attack on a particular audience -- which, I agree was the case here -- but the whole point of editorials is for members of the press to share their views as a means to foster discussion and so that their audience knows where the author is coming from. For example, now that you know Holmes doesn't have a certain degree of knowledge regarding fighting games, you can know how much stock to put in his opinion on other such games, should you decide to read them. Holmes even gave several reasons for what he believes makes game exciting, and it's possible for readers to take that knowledge when reading his other work and think about how that might affect his opinion.

@kentonclay

I don't think reviewers should go super in-depth in the mainstream, at least for fighters, but at least make sufficient explanation of design and how the mechanics reflect upon one another. Reviewers are tasked to evaluate what's given including design, visual, sound, etc. While many people who review fighting games in the past can acknowledge the latter two, the game design is where they lack the most; this can be a case for other genres as well. For the fighting game genre, it's the most important since it's what most people will engage in.

The reader/consumer who probably doesn't engage too much into fighting games like the community itself should still be educated regardless since design is integral. Maybe not the nitty gritty but enough for them to digest easily. Fortunately we are not in the 90s anymore. People are not disgusted by throws and those who call fireball spam are for those who will never touch a fighter anyways (and bad people). Folks want to understand if writers can appropriately explain.

Fortunately there have been writers, in both independent and mainstream departments, who have been leading the wave of breaking down the games in a reasonable format. They don't want to alienate both the community that supports it nor the reader who might want to engage but are frightened. All in all that's the best you can really do. Examples include Haunts' reviews for 1UP, before working for Capcom, and Vince at IGN, knowledgeable in design and a supporter of the scene.

I defiently agree with a lot of the article's points. There have been a LOT of game reviews that I have found pretty silly when I realize the person reviewing simply is not understanding a mechanic.

That said, I don't know that I can agree with him on the solution. If games like say, SC2 were only reviewed by Master league players, I'd have no idea how I, a Diamond League scrub, might enjoy it, since they play on such a different level then me. Similar arguments apply to Smash bros. Although I understand why people like Melee better, I also actually liked brawl better, mostly because of the cast and stages and items were more fun. The fact that it was slower and honestly, a much worse game to play competitively at high skill levels, didn't effect my enjoyment.

Meh I look at game reviews the same way as movie reviews, find a reviewer who likes the same kinda shit as you, read their stuff.

Games and music reviews seem to line up a bit more than game and movie reviews. In that both use a lot of references to other music/games.

http://www.destructoid.com/two-pros-are-edgy-about-slight-landing-lag-in-smash-bros-4-277991.phtm

(Just posting the link for reference but I quoted the entire news article here.)

Yesterday I wrote an article about why I'd like to have the option to turn on tripping in Smash Brosfor the Wii U and 3DS. It upset a lot of people. Sorry, guys.

One part that some people found particularly insulting was inspired by this interview with Mew2King and Aramada, two of the best Smash Bros players in the world. When asked if there was anything they'd change about Smash Bros 4, Armada stated that "...landing lag was a bit longer than in previous Smash games, so after you land an aerial you can’t move as fast afterwards. An improvement could be to reduce some of the lag to make the characters move faster, which also would mean that you could use a lot more aerials while playing."

Mew2King agreed, stating "I completely agree - the landing lag is definitely the number one thing. Kirby in this game seems pretty good with the landing lag - there’s some lag, but it’s not very significant. I think if more characters went a similar route to how Kirby plays, like with his down air or back air, the game’s tension would be increased. I would also add directional influence, which is where you can control which way you get hit by using the control stick. But if there’s one thing that matters above all, it’s definitely the landing lag."

Interview: Pro Smash Competitors Armada & Mew2King on Super Smash Bros. for Wii U [Nintendo Life]

They may be right. We'll lave to wait and see before we find out how bad the landing lag is for the majority of characters, and how much it bothers the majority of players. Still, doesn't the fact that these two amazing players are put off by a slight delay in how long it takes to get back into the action after landing make them sound... a little obsessive? Obsessed with being in control of their characters, impatient during even a split second before they can move again, and always hungry for more tension?

I don't know how anyone who doesn't have the tendency towards being an obsessive, adrenaline-loving, "impatient control freak" could ever become an expert at Melee. If you don't love the rush that comes from quickly and efficiently executing total control over your character, you're not very likely to get that good at the game. Maybe a better way of saying the same thing would have been - "These days, Melee attracts a lot of people who thrive off constant action, where the player has seamless, immaculate control over nearly every aspect of player movement."

Or maybe it was better to just say "impatient control freaks"? It's certainly a lot shorter. What do you guys think?

Wow , Jonathan Holmes is actively starting a feud here. How the fuck does his logic lead him to automatically conclude that they're control freaks?

Are they (Destructoid) really going to just let the guy just call people out like that?

Bullshit.

Holmes is actually right, this rebuttal is well written and well reasoned, but it goes to the same point the worst elements of the fighting game community or any other enclosed community of gamers use so very often to make games worse:

"But we like it and we own the game because we play it a lot".

Ugh.

Here's a point that Holmes sort of makes but doesn't follow through on:

Street Fighter 3 is a horrible game that almost single-handedly killed the genre. Like, not just the franchise, the entire genre of fighting games.

Street Fighter 3 is a game built for the experts. It superficially feels like it plays like the other games in the series, but then is full of hard-to-execute stuff that concedes an impossible to compensate advantage to the more skilled player. This will cleanly divide the community in two: players who can do this stuff and players who don't. Players who don't will go play something else and players who do will enjoy their time. And then they'll notice that SF3 was a really, really expensive thing to make that didn't do very well on either dwindling arcades or consoles and that they totally need the accessibility to continue funding their hobby.

Here's another one: I love the blue shell. Not even the MK8, actually avoidable blue shell, just the concept of the blue shell.

This is unfashionable, but it's true. It's a great design decision. It bypasses everyone in the middle of the race and lets the guy in the back suddenly have agency about the very front of the pack. It's genius.

"But it lets the less skilled win!" shout the haters. This is not true. The blue shell is a random chance. It's balanced. There's the same likelihood of being hit by a blue shell by anybody running first. And MK competition is played on a series of races, not just one. I've played enough hours of every MK ever to be able to tell you this: if a person in a group is better than the rest at the game, they'll win every four-race GP. Not every race, if they get unlucky with the items on the last lap, but definitely every four race GP. That is fantastic balance. It means you can play with a guy who's better than you and still hope to beat him... once. But if you want to win championships you need to get good.

So while the rebuttal is heartfelt, and I do believe the guy who wrote it is genuine, his ultimate point is a bad one. He's outright saying that you can't put yourself outside of the "community" to discuss a game. That by speaking as an "observer" you demean the game and lose your ability to discuss it in a valid manner. You can say that as nicely as you want... but it's not true. Not of all games, anyway. You can maybe make that argument for EVE or DOTA, games where the close-knit community is sustainable and economially viable for the creators of the game to keep their jobs. Street Fighter, Smash Bros? Those are universal constants of gaming. They are games made for masses and newcomers, using huge budgets and expecting mass appeal. The position of the observer may be the most valid one.

I mean, sure, Holmes' article is basically aiming to get artificial conflict and clicks. In general, when you write an opinion piece, you don't write it with the most universal, unoriginal opinion out there. It's the outlier, the editor with the unpopular opinion, that ends up going "hey, nobody is saying these things, maybe I should put them out there". Holmes does seem gleeful about pissing off the masses with this. I can also relate to that one. As a contrarian nerd, I appreciate it when I make a fighting game aficionado go livid by expressing my distaste for SF3 or when I state that Candy Crush Saga is one of the best new arcade game since the 90s. Could I say why in a less contentious way? Hell yeah. Those arguments are actually a lot more nuanced than the one-line summary suggests... but having people overreact to them is half the fun of having a genuinely constructed unorthodox opinion.

I liked the article until I got to the end. Revealing the depth of a game and why a broad-based games reviewer won't be able to appreciate it in more mechanically complex games is good. I think their audience knows that, because their audience is also broad-based and likes to play a multitude of genres instead of becoming experts in a few.

Gettin mad that reviews are subjective is dumb. They intrinsically are. And the only reason he doesn't think they are is because he thinks he has an objective opinion about what is more fun to play.

I do like his point of how most games writers nowadays are more interested in starting cultural, us-v-them situations on every single front than they are in talking about games and why they like them. It's not about expressing why video games capture your imagination, it's about finding the bad people and making them unhappy.

@noelveiga said:

That's a bit exaggerating. The Street Fighter III games just came at a time when the genre was more or less irrelevant, culturally, outside Japan. Personally I assume that the SF/Mortal Kombat clones as well as the overblown coverage of Street Fighter in the 90s are more of a catalyst in the genre's weakening at the time. The SFIII games were just in the middle of it, like a crying child in a crowd of adults that don't care.

Surely SFIII isn't SFII or Alpha. If I want to be specific, SFII superficially plays like the original SF. I can also say compared to SF, SFII is full of hard-to-execute stuff that concedes an impossible to compensate to the more skilled player. Joke aside, there is a something to 3rd Strike when it's still being played to this day over in Japan, especially with special events like Tougeki and Cooperation Cup. There is also something to it when a community, with a majority of folks coming post Street Fighter IV-boom in 2009, would want to have 3S available on modern consoles with no changes done. No doubt, SFIII is designed to be harder to play and is more or less for experts but I can guess it was developed with the assumption that players, at least in Japan, were familiar with things like footsies and can execute stuff in a snap.

Judging by how you iterate your statement, a lot of fighters have apparently "killed the genre." Guilty Gear, Blazblue, The King of Fighters, Super Smash Bros. Melee, even Street Fighter IV, etc, etc. They have precise, and hard to execute, mechanics/quirks that give advantage to the most skilled player. Sure there is struggle for folks but if the person is still motivated to keep playing, they will try to learn it and become part of the crowd who can perform this maneuvers. Everyone starts off not knowing but they can get educated and apply in practice.

I play The King of Fighters XIII and the idea of doing super moves with motions like half-circle-back to quarter-circle-forward was very intimidating and challenging to me. I wasn't able to do these properly for a while but I wanted to keep on going since I acknowledged that these provide necessary damage to normal situations and during HD combos, a core mechanic special to KOFXIII. I never gave up on it and I can do em consistently.

In this sense there is no black and white. If a player wants to keep on going despite originally not being able to take advantage of various things, then the player will learn and apply so he can dominate. I don't want to be grim on it but if a player can't, they can't. It's not necessarily a bad thing. They can play another game that's fine. If they don't want to give up on learning it, that's something.

Here's another one: I love the blue shell. Not even the MK8, actually avoidable blue shell, just the concept of the blue shell.

This is unfashionable, but it's true. It's a great design decision. It bypasses everyone in the middle of the race and lets the guy in the back suddenly have agency about the very front of the pack. It's genius.

"But it lets the less skilled win!" shout the haters. This is not true. The blue shell is a random chance. It's balanced. There's the same likelihood of being hit by a blue shell by anybody running first. And MK competition is played on a series of races, not just one. I've played enough hours of every MK ever to be able to tell you this: if a person in a group is better than the rest at the game, they'll win every four-race GP. Not every race, if they get unlucky with the items on the last lap, but definitely every four race GP. That is fantastic balance. It means you can play with a guy who's better than you and still hope to beat him... once. But if you want to win championships you need to get good.

It's a great design decision in the sense it caters to non-competitive play. In the other side of the spectrum, it's a flawed product.

If a player is better, then he/she is better. They worked hard to get there and they deserve a victory. That's how it is but add an artificial element that can dramatically punish him for his status? That doesn't make sense in the competitive realm. I might as well force Daigo Umehara to handicap his health to 1% since he will likely get a perfect on me 99% of the time.

We don't have blue shells in shooters, fighters (aside from the topic at hand: tripping), RPGs with PvP elements, racing games, probably even MOBA. Not in real life we have a blue shell in regulatory conditions. If I hope to beat a player in most things, I need to learn and do better. I need to do good as you said; Contradictory don't you think?

I generally avoid "Gaming Journalism" if it is about "Sexism" or "How Minority [X] isn't represented!". The over-sensitivity is quite frankly saddening and I just can't bring myself to give a care in the world in regards that the LBGT community isn't represented in gaming or how there are so few powerful female characters (even though there totally are and people just ignore anything that isn't a AAA release by a well-known company. Seriously, why does no one mention Tohsaka Rin or Arturia Pendragon when speaking about strong female characters who are absolutely badass? Oh right. VN. No one cares about VNs).

In regards to reviews. There are only a handful of people who I trust to give a good review. Giant Bomb (of course), as well as some reviewers over on Destructoid and Jim Sterling at the Escapist. Otherwise I just go by what my friends have said and look at videos (which is why I love the Quick Looks, gives me a good idea of what I will be getting into or if I will enjoy it). I completely avoid Polygon and Kotaku as both have just pissed me off too much in regards to over-sensitive whining (especially the click-bait Dragon's Crown articles).

Maybe it's because these examples aren't visible that people are complaining?

Quite possibly, but when I mention it to various groups they immediately say something along the lines of "Oh, Visual Novels aren't games.", "It's Japanese! It is probably just tentacle porn or some shit.", or "Oh, it is a cartoon. It is for children." All three of those are actual quotes that I dug up by various posters on other sites I used to frequent. There are quite a few people who are trying to get these games more well-known, but as most of them exist via Fan-Translations and the stigma of Japanese games in general (at least in America), people either ignore or deny them before they ever try to play them.