NPfeifer

Suuuuuuuubmitted!

Sliiiiiiimy stuff. Great article.

Maybe it doesn't win for any particular award, but no one's Top 10 list, either? The best heists of the year and some of the most intense multiplayer I've ever played was in Monaco this year. I can't be the only one!!!!!

I loved these, but the rubberbanding/lack of feedback as you mash the A button didn't help things. I was getting passed by people in the exact same spots the two times I did it (once as Michael, the other as Franklin). I was actually pretty irritated they didn't have any challenges like this in GTAO.

Blasphemy! Muse was great!

I watched the first two hours and the last two hours of the master GB Extra Life stream (the second 24 hours) and was wondering what were some good highlights I missed in those 20 other hours. I know the archive will be up soon!

I realize that, but their implementation was tacky on top of Trevor ranting on about it afterward to the torturee afterward.

Plus, it's not necessarily a matter of opinion: that story had very few bones, or they were randomized in their structure to the point where the ending just felt cheap and abrupt, like they describe.

When I started reading video game reviews, they were in PC Gamer in 1995, which has always used a 100-point percentage scale. It was something I got very used to over the years because as I got to know the staff - churn was a lot lower in print in the late nineties - I got to understand their nuances. A strategy game like Master of Orion 2 or X-COM: Apocalypse, both well-meaning and -produced but mired in micromanagement, got 86%. I began to hate the five-point system in Extended Play because they wound up giving most of their games a 3 out of 5, which doesn't really describe the quality of the title compared to the hundreds of others games they gave the same score. When I asked a Extended Play producer about it at E3 a decade ago, he flipped the question on me: what would the difference be between a 74% rating and a 75% rating as a point of reference?

When I started reviewing movies as a fun thing a few years back, we boiled it down to a three-point scale: Must-see, Meh and Avoid, which is the exact kind of response you'd give a friend who'd asked. If your mom asked you if you liked the newest action flick, you wouldn't say "Oh, I think it's a 3 out of 5" or "I think it's a 53%", you'd just say whether you liked it or not with a recommendation or not. Our scale worked for our little review experiment.

The reality is that there's a happy medium and everyone does things differently. Jeff explained that some publishers won't send them games unless they know it'll get a 5-star review because of how Metacritic translates their scores, which he's perfectly fine with. Garnett Lee was mad at Metacritic a number of years back for mistranslating their letter-grade verdicts at 1UP. Tom Chick was similarly frustrated when Metacritic took his number for StarCraft 2 and Browder called him out for it in an article he wrote.

I don't think any system is more or less efficient than any other when provided with the appropriate context. No one uses 100-point scales anymore because they're too granular and people will always try to assign comparisons between two similarly-ranked but very different reviews. On the other end, people don't use <5-point scales because they don't give enough information.\

Basically, it's all good in the hood. Just chill.

I didn't mind Chris.

I guess it's no surprise though that as video game journalists, they couldn't - as others have pointed out - highlight how disjointed and bad the story was. The torture scene/Azerbaijan assassination felt completely out of place and were only given limp justification. Only Michael's arc comes anywhere near a resolution. People appear out of nowhere and then disappear only to justify mission setups. Etc.

Yep, which is probably why they spent E3 and SDCC showing the game off to potential co-financiers. AMD bit.