Reviewing Games Without Finishing Them

@The_Nubster:

Again, this could be made irrelevant later in the game by designing the scenarios around those limitations.

@Spoonman671 said:

@ez123 said:

If people are okay with this, they should be okay with a game getting 5 stars and being half-played.

They've done that. Everybody was fine with it.

Except that wasn't the case. Brad had already finished the story mode by the time he got around to doing the Quick Look posted a day after the review.

@Berserk007 said:

@LooseChange said:

I won't even read the review so it won't matter to me.

wow thanks for contributing to the conversation

no problem.

@Video_Game_King said:

@The_Nubster:

Again, this could be made irrelevant later in the game by designing the scenarios around those limitations.

No it can't.

@nintendoeats: You clearly didn't read the review, since you would know that the games controls weren't going to magically repair themselves if you did. Read some other reviews; it was a one star game on its terrible interface alone judging by the general consensus. If you seriously think that game will get better by the end you are hopelessly optimistic or straight up unintelligent.

@Dallas_Raines said:

@Video_Game_King:

How much would you have to play of ET on the Atari to be able to tell people, 'Hey, shit REALLY sucks, don't waste your money on this"?

All of it, which pretty much constitutes clearing one round.

@Spoonman671 said:

@Video_Game_King said:

Except that wasn't the case. Brad had already finished the story mode by the time he got around to doing the Quick Look posted a day after the review.

He didn't complete the game. You can't complete Skyrim in 60 hours.

Except he did complete it, or at least he completed the main story line.

@The_Nubster said:

@Video_Game_King said:

@The_Nubster:

Again, this could be made irrelevant later in the game by designing the scenarios around those limitations.

No it can't.

Is this going to devolve into a 40s duet?

@Spoonman671 said:

He didn't complete the game. You can't complete Skyrim in 60 hours. What if the quest to find Red Eagle's sword was fucking terrible? How would he even know?

I really hope you're not being serious. If a reviewer had to finish every single aspect of a game to give it a score (such as finishing every side or miscellaneous quest in Skyrim), reviews would no longer exist nor be able to be written in a timely matter to make them relevant. Also lol at not being able to complete Skyrim in 60 hours. The main quest as well as pretty much all of the faction quests can be done in 60 hours. Not to mention that Skyrim has radiant quests that go on forever which means it's technically not possible to finish that game.

Anyway, I agree in principle that if a game's mechanics are so flawed/broken as to make the game basically nonfunctional, then it's not necessary to complete the game to give it a review score, as long as that's elucidated within the review itself. Also what if the game itself was just broken and could not be finished at all? Does that mean no one could post a review?

@Video_Game_King: If it takes seven hours for a game to get worth playing I probably stopped playing 5 or so hours ago. If the beginning and middle of a game don't make you want to play more, the end is kind of pointless, isn't it?

@MikeGosot said:

@Video_Game_King said:

@MikeGosot said:

I can't believe you're suggesting that the devs suddenly decided to make the game good at the last fucking half of the game.

Some would say that FF13 did exactly that. Some. Also, this is some pretty dangerous logic, since you could potentially justify any game as being shit if you couldn't bother slogging through some arbitrary amount. Get to the end, damn it!

FF13 used it's mechanics to make an interesting situation in the later half of the game. Steel Battalion is broken to it's very core, to the point you can't make something worthwhile with the mechanics, because you can't get them to function.

As an example - my review of Lost Odyssey - bought the game (AU$110), played it for five or so hours, bored, returned it for store credit. I didn't have to finish it to know if it was worth my money or not. I don't need INSTANT gratification, but fuck some games need to cut the shit (unless that 'shit' is the whole game). People have jobs like myself can't spend 30+ hours to find the good part of a game - jobs, family and friends are as big apart of most adults lives.

A review is a buyers guide - it's a way of knowing if something is worth my time and money, both of which are not unlimited. I'd rather a review say "I played it for four hours and it sucked" instead of acting like the reviewer played more than they did or sticking with it for longer than any normal person would and apologising for bad design. More games need to hit the ground running and cut the shit, and more reviewers need to use the entire range of their review scores like Brad did. He thinks Steel Battalion sucks, he said it does, what more could I ask for? If I don't agree that's my prerogative.

@Spoonman671 said:

@Video_Game_King said:

Except that wasn't the case. Brad had already finished the story mode by the time he got around to doing the Quick Look posted a day after the review.

He didn't complete the game. You can't complete Skyrim in 60 hours.

Except he did complete it, or at least he completed the main story line.

@Brendan: Actually I had to read the whole review; he doesn't mention that he didn't finish it until about halfway through.

Regardless, this is a philosophical issue and doesn't strictly have anything to do with the specifics of the game at hand.

If the game is virtually unplayable, I have no problem with the review not finishing it. My 2 cents.

Them finishing the game or not doesn't matter to me at all. If it's good they WILL finish it and if it's bad more often or not they finish it. When they don't finish it obviously something is wrong with the game and it seems like good reason to stop playing to me. If Brad only played the game a few hours, didn't finish it then gave a raving review of the game would be more of an issue than continuing to play a broken game.

@YI_Orange:

If the game is eight hours long, then that's a problem; if it's eighty, you're just being a dick.

@PandaBear said:

As an example - my review of Lost Odyssey - bought the game (AU$110), played it for five or so hours, bored, returned it for store credit.

Let's take a trip to HowLongToBeat.com aaaaand it's 50 hours long. You're calling 100% of the game shit based on the first 10%. That's a terrible idea.

@Spoonman671:

Then he'd have to play the Thieve's Guild sidequest, as that constitutes that the main story now.

@Video_Game_King: You probably didn't watch the quick look, where the controls didn't work. Y'know, in a way where your hopelessly optimistic prediction of accommodating level design wouldn't make it okay? Because the problem was literally inside the tank itself and had no bearing on how the design of levels worked. Not being able to function properly in any way isn't going to be worked around.

Or you could continue with your conspiracy theory logic where you stick your head in the sand and continue saying "But you just don't KNOW, man!" "There's no way of KNOWING." Well sure, if you don't think then there's no way of knowing. But if you apply intelligent thought to the situation its pretty cut and dry.

@Brendan said:

@Video_Game_King: You probably didn't watch the quick look, where the controls didn't work.

I did, though. Just saying.

@Brendan said:

Y'know, in a way where your hopelessly optimistic prediction of accommodating level design wouldn't make it okay? Because the problem was literally inside the tank itself and had no bearing on how the design of levels worked. Not being able to function properly in any way isn't going to be worked around.

Except you're still ultimately navigating the levels and doing things in them, therefore meaning they have some bearing on the game's quality.

@Brendan said:

Or you could continue with your conspiracy theory logic where you stick your head in the sand and continue saying "But you just don't KNOW, man!" "There's no way of KNOWING." Well sure, if you don't think then there's no way of knowing. But if you apply intelligent thought to the situation its pretty cut and dry.

You don't, though. You have no way of knowing. Sure, you could predict what would happen, but without actually going through it and experiencing it for yourself, you have no way of knowing if your predictions are true; they're mere speculation, uncertainties, potential falsehoods.

I think the "Play the whole game" thing is overplayed. You can usually tell if a game is worthwhile after 4 hours (why would you ever consider putting up with hours of dross; there are plenty of amazing games). Some are impractical to finish too (Diablo 3, Skyrim, most MMOs, how many times through civ?).

The only real issue to me is in terms of games that drastically decline in quality toward the end - so if a game is longish I would tend to want to know that at least 10 hrs of it are good. But thats hardly the case in something like Steel Battalion, where the input method itself is flawed.

From the reviews that I have read, plus the various gameplay videos that I've watched, it appears that the game is broken on a fundamental level. The Kinect controls don't work as advertised and make the game virtually unplayable. This is not just one opinion, this appears to be almost universal from reviewers and other feedback online.

So how does playing through a broken game to completion make a review better? What if the reviewer gets to a place where it is impossible to proceed? Should they just not review it? Aren't the mechanics not working properly a valid thing to review in the game and a valid reason to dock the game points? It's clearly stated what the issues with the game are and why that makes the game unplayable at it's very core.

From reading the review, it sounds like there are positives, the graphics and style are mentioned, but when the game can't be played at a most basic level, what is the point?

@Spoonman671: unpleasant but accurate

@Zekhariah said:

I think the "Play the whole game" thing is overplayed. You can usually tell if a game is worthwhile after 4 hours (why would you ever consider putting up with hours of dross; there are plenty of amazing games).

That's the type of logic I despise. By that logic, I can reduce any game to shit by picking a shorter game (there's always a shorter game) and saying that it can deliver the goods in less time than the first game and why should I put up with that shit?

Wow, this devolved very quickly.

I understand that it's a reviewer's job to provide advice on whether a game should be bought/played or not, and for different games that means different things. If it's a long-arse Skyrim thing, then you'd have to try out a large portion of it, but I don't know if it's necessary to get everything. Would the score have been lower if Brad had played it to complete everything, and thus got sick of the bad combat, mediocre story, and other aspects which aren't strong in the face of the amazing, expansive world?

But if it's a short game, and it's just plain bad at the start, does it warrant any other playing in the hope that it'll become much better? If it's bad upfront, why would developers choose to back-load all of their best content and make you suffer through however many hours for it? Unless they are actively antagonistic to the player, it seems unlikely.

@Video_Game_King: You mention the idea of a game getting much better later on, regardless of a bad start. What are good examples of this, out of curiosity? You mentioned FF13 and a Fire Emblem game, and I'm trying to think of other examples.

@Video_Game_King said:

@YI_Orange:

If the game is eight hours long, then that's a problem; if it's eighty, you're just being a dick.

@PandaBear said:

As an example - my review of Lost Odyssey - bought the game (AU$110), played it for five or so hours, bored, returned it for store credit.

Let's take a trip to HowLongToBeat.com aaaaand it's 50 hours long. You're calling 100% of the game shit based on the first 10%. That's a terrible idea.

@Spoonman671:

Then he'd have to play the Thieve's Guild sidequest, as that constitutes that the main story now.

So every game you Reviewed you played to completion?

• My Little Pony Crystal Princess: Runaway Rainbow?
• Super Meat Boy?

@Spoonman671:

Then he'd have to play the Thieve's Guild sidequest, as that constitutes that the main story now.

@RPGee:

(I wasn't really using Fire Emblem, but whatever.) Lemme think...

• Persona 4
• Phantom Brave; We Meet Again
• Fire Emblem: Monshou no Nazo (assuming you play the books in order, of course)
• Dragon Quest VI
• Xenoblade Chronicles
• Dead Island is kind of the reverse, as was Earthbound on my first playthrough (I LEARNED)
• Depending on the time you grant me, just about any game ever

@Spoonman671:

Perhaps our definitions are in conflict. I use "complete" to mean "beat", whereas you could be using it in another fashion.

@Dagbiker said:

So every game you Reviewed you played to completion?

• My Little Pony Crystal Princess: Runaway Rainbow?
• Super Meat Boy?

Yes on both counts.

@Paul_Is_Drunk said:

Still no mention of Wolpaw's Law? (Ah, there probably will be by the time I post this).

If a game is so bad that the final parts of the game being the pinnacle of all human achievement up to that point couldn't save the game from getting the absolute lowest score, then there is no point in finishing the game. To add Godwin's Law to this: It's like saying that even if Hitler cured cancer and brought world peace, what he has already done was enough for him to get 1 star (out of 5).

Brad even paraphrased Wolpaw's Law in his closing remarks.

Curing cancer and bringing world peace? That should at least bump him up to a 3.

I am a tad worried that we've had two reviews, within relatively close temporal proximity, of games that were not finished by the writer. Specifically I'm referring to Steel Battalion and Scott Tenorman's Revenge. I could deal with the Sotuh Park game because it was pretty clearly a cash-in with no real value, but I was genuinely interested to hear if Steel Battalion eventually got good. What did we actually get out of the review that we didn't get from 2 minutes of the Quick Look?

I remember back in the early days that Jeff Gerstmann was considering doing a write-up without a score of Dark Sector (he eventually finished the game, making it GB's first review). I would rather see a separate category for that type of written content, so that reviews can retain their value and status. I don't think that this is an unreasonable thing to request, as it ultimately serves us the users better by clearly differentiating formats of criticism.

Is that game going to suddenly fucking redeem itself in the last hour? Come on, dude.

@Napalm said:

Is that game going to suddenly fucking redeem itself in the last hour? Come on, dude.

Only if it caused the kinect to transform into a tank. 

@The_Laughing_Man said:

@Napalm said:

Is that game going to suddenly fucking redeem itself in the last hour? Come on, dude.

Only if it caused the kinect to transform into a tank. 

Guys, I kind of want my own tank.

@Video_Game_King:

I'm with you buddy! Fully finish the games... I dno about everyone else but Braid turned from a 3 star game to a 5 star game in the last world(world 1). And I can say that I would have given KOTOR like 3-4 stars until the twist. Its just that sometimes games take awhile to really flourish, FF13 was like a 1-2 star game until like 70% through the game where it opened up and then it turns out much better.

This isn't just with games though... I mean I would have given SAW a very low rating if I hadn't seen the last 5% of the movie... sometimes all the pieces fall into place.

@RPGee: Every 3D Zelda game is a steaming pile of shit for the first hour or two, Persona 3 and 4 don't even let you play the game for about an hour. I've seen numerous people say that Castlevania: Lords of Shadow doesn't get good until the middle of the game then turns to crap again once you near the end. Brutal Legend doesn't even turn into an RTS until the second third of the game.

There are lots of games that get better(or worse) the farther in you get, which is why reviewers need to finish a game if the game isn't completely broken or ridiculously long.

There's no point to playing the whole game. I mean it's just his JOB. What else does Brad have to do? Play more Starcraft?

@gamefreak9 said:

This isn't just with games though... I mean I would have given SAW a very low rating if I hadn't seen the last 5% of the movie... sometimes all the pieces fall into place.

Except when they don't :P.

Since the whole idea for GB reviews is to show the opinion and experience of the reviewer, I have no problem with them not finishing a game for review. Jeff has been saying from day one, that you cannot really write a review that will serve everyone, since video games are so big now. So when I read a review, that is presented to me as a personal experience I have no problem with the author saying: "This game is so bad on so many different levels, that I could not make myself finish it." The question one should ask is not about the reviewer not finishing the game, but about does that person agree with the reviewer on different opinions about games. If one agrees, then they should have no problem with the reviewer not finishing the game.

As for all the comparisons to Dragons Dogma, then they don't really work. There are games like To the Moon, where story is the main driving force, so they don't wait for the last moment to show why you should care about the story. Dragons Dogma is not that type of a game. Nor is Steel Battalion. The difference here is, that the gameplay is more fun in the RPG.

Giant Bomb and all of its staff members are supporters of Wolpaw's Law of game reviews. 

@WarlordPayne: Fair, fair, those are very good examples.

I'll agree with you for the most part, that reviewers need to complete as much of the game as they can. Someone mentioned Fez, which is a great example of a game that is kinda meh until after you complete it once, and then opens out into an entire other thing. It's a buyer's guide; they're telling you, based on their own experiences, whether the game has some merit or not, and you can agree or disagree. It's important, to some extent, and more information is needed to get a good sense of it.

My only issue is knowing what the line between 'enough info' and 'not enough info' is. It concerns me less with SB:HA because I had no intention to ever play it, but where's the line to stop at for some games? Do X number of multiplayer games need to be played to properly judge it? If the gameplay is great, but the story is rubbish, how far in do you need to go to know exactly how it'll play out? I won't pretend to know, but I can safely assume it must matter much more to reviewers than players. I'd imagine figuring out as much as they can about the game is paramount.

I don't think it should be a regular occurrence, but reviewing a game without finishing it is perfectly acceptable in my eyes. A review is meant to express an opinion about something. The matter is akin to reviewing a movie in which you walked out halfway. Ultimately, the decision to not view all the material in a product is a choice made by the reviewer that must be duly explained in the review. It is the reviewer who must justify this decision (i.e.- poor quality, moral indignation, etc.) and the reader who must decide if the justification passes muster. If the reader finds the reviewer's justification to lack merit, the reader should look for other reviews on the subject.

I read the Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor review and I believe that Brad's decision was justified. Someone else may decide that Brad's decision was unjustified and that position is fine too. Other reviews have been and will be written on this game and a thoughtful consumer should explore a number of views on a product before making a purchasing decision. I think the greater concern in game review writing is when the writer does not finish the finish the game and does not provide a disclaimer to the reading audience. Even if you don't agree with Brad's decision, you can at least appreciate his transparency.

@Dagbiker said:

@Video_Game_King said:

@YI_Orange:

If the game is eight hours long, then that's a problem; if it's eighty, you're just being a dick.

@PandaBear said:

As an example - my review of Lost Odyssey - bought the game (AU$110), played it for five or so hours, bored, returned it for store credit.

Let's take a trip to HowLongToBeat.com aaaaand it's 50 hours long. You're calling 100% of the game shit based on the first 10%. That's a terrible idea.

@Spoonman671:

Then he'd have to play the Thieve's Guild sidequest, as that constitutes that the main story now.

So every game you Reviewed you played to completion?

• My Little Pony Crystal Princess: Runaway Rainbow?
• Super Meat Boy?

You hit the nail on the head @Dagbiker

@Video_Game_King So if you put Superman 64 into your Nintendo 64 (extreme example I know), do you have to finish it to know it sucks? That first (fucking awful and hard) level is less than 10% of that game. Are you saying you can't judge it? That nobody can judge? That a reviewer who may spend a few hours on that first stage and give up because it's awful can't say "it's not worth your time or money"? Of course they can.

As long as it is mentioned somewhere in the review that the game wasn't played to completion I have no problem with it.

@PandaBear said:

@Video_Game_King So if you put Superman 64 into your Nintendo 64 (extreme example I know), do you have to finish it to know it sucks? That first (fucking awful and hard) level is less than 10% of that game. Are you saying you can't judge it? That nobody can judge? That a reviewer who may spend a few hours on that first stage and give up because it's awful can't say "it's not worth your time or money"? Of course they can.

No, they fucking can't. It's the first level. Things can change a lot after the first level. You wouldn't even know that there's shitty combat or shitty level design or shitty powers or a shitty spelling puzzle or a shitty explanation for why exactly you're going through those rings. Again, for all you know, it could become Panzer Dragoon after those other levels. How do you know if you don't play it?

if it's like a gmae that takes 50 hours to pick up then it's not worth it. if it's only an 8 hour game, suffer through it.

@The_Laughing_Man said:

@Spoonman671 said:

@The_Laughing_Man said:

@Napalm said:

Is that game going to suddenly fucking redeem itself in the last hour? Come on, dude.

Only if it caused the kinect to transform into a tank.

Guys, I kind of want my own tank.

If we pool our money. We can make it happen.

We could buy a defunct Soviet Russian tank and FIX IT OURSELVES.

@Video_Game_King: My point is, regardless of length, if all logic dictates that a bad game is not going to improve and I've already put some hours into it, why would I want to keep playing that game when I can go play one that's enjoyable? And later if someone asks me if they should play that game, I'm not gonna be like "I don't know, I didn't finish it", I'm gonna be like "Hell no, that game's shit". That's basically what a review is. If a review can tell me that after hours the game is still terrible, I sure don't wanna trudge through that to see more of the game which could by some miracle be a game worth playing but is probably just more of the same terribleness.

@Spoonman671 said:

I can tell you that shit stinks without sticking my nose in a pile.

Amen brother.

@YI_Orange said:

@Video_Game_King: My point is, regardless of length, if all logic dictates that a bad game is not going to improve and I've already put some hours into it, why would I want to keep playing that game when I can go play one that's enjoyable?

Because it's possible that it could become totally goddamn awesome in the parts you didn't play. At the point you describe, rendering an opinion on the entire game is a grave injustice. All you know is that those parts of the game are bad; you know nothing of the parts you refused to touch.

@RPGee: For multiplayer and huge games like Skyrim I feel that it's down to the reviewers' judgment, which is why you need to find reviewers that you trust(and I do trust the Giant Bomb crew). But this is their job, they are paid to do this and if a game isn't unreasonably long or so broken that it isn't possible to finish it then they need to do their job and finish the game. And if they are so vehemently opposed to completing the game then they shouldn't review it. They can talk shit about it during the Bombcast and write a story about it if they feel they need to, and be done with it.

If a piece of entertainment fails to engage me after some time invested, than that piece of entertainment has failed to do its job. It does not matter how good it could eventually get, someone should not have to experiences something bad to eventually experience the good, especially in a product that is paid for.

@Video_Game_King said:

@PandaBear said:

@Video_Game_King So if you put Superman 64 into your Nintendo 64 (extreme example I know), do you have to finish it to know it sucks? That first (fucking awful and hard) level is less than 10% of that game. Are you saying you can't judge it? That nobody can judge? That a reviewer who may spend a few hours on that first stage and give up because it's awful can't say "it's not worth your time or money"? Of course they can.

No, they fucking can't. It's the first level. Things can change a lot after the first level. You wouldn't even know that there's shitty combat or shitty level design or shitty powers or a shitty spelling puzzle or a shitty explanation for why exactly you're going through those rings. Again, for all you know, it could become Panzer Dragoon after those other levels. How do you know if you don't play it?

The point is that no normal person would keep playing. By your logic any game could become better or worse. ANY game. You've NEVER played a game for a few hours, not liked it and never went back? Never?

Let's be realistic here - you know as well as I do that what you propose isn't going to happen. And more to the point, if you want to struggle through hours and hours of boredom to find a grain of fun (or even a lot of it) that's your prerogative. But life's too short. I'm not going to spend what little time I have to play games not having fun, hoping it gets better. And if someone reviewing video games for a living can't summon the fortitude to push through a crap game, hoping there could possibly maybe be a little fun to be had, I don't blame them and want them to tell me so I don't waste my time.

You saying a game could become fun is arbitrary. It could get worse. Either way, if it doesn't prove it's worth in, let's say four or five hours, I don't care enough to go on playing it. Game's time is precious, don't waste it.

@Video_Game_King said:

@YI_Orange said:

@Video_Game_King: My point is, regardless of length, if all logic dictates that a bad game is not going to improve and I've already put some hours into it, why would I want to keep playing that game when I can go play one that's enjoyable?

Because it's possible that it could become totally goddamn awesome in the parts you didn't play. At the point you describe, rendering an opinion on the entire game is a grave injustice. All you know is that those parts of the game are bad; you know nothing of the parts you refused to touch.

Not all games have equal potential. Games don't just magically "get better" in the drastic way some people in this thread are implying they can. I played FF13 for 24 hours and stopped. I hear it gets great RIGHT after the part I was at. Would it be worth getting there? No. It wouldn't. The bad would outweigh any good that could possibly come.