Fixing Reviews: The Lying Score

Review scores are tricky; they are not for everybody. For a scoring system to have any worth, it must have consistency. Not everybody is ready for that. You can’t call a game a master-piece only to call it a disappointment at the end of the year. Review scores must also be honest and, believe it or not, even less people are ready for that. Here, I’m not talking about the flawed notion some outlets have that the average between 0 and 10 is 8. That’s just being mathematically deprived. Instead, I’m talking about Metacritic, Amazon, App Stores and whatever other place that aggregates scores from users in order to present a single information: that the cosmos has voted and decided that game X is a 8.6 out of 10.

Guess what? They are all lying.

They are lying because they encourage users to lie in their reviews. Yes, that means the liar is ultimately you, Mr. User.

Games as symbols: Child of Eden

Child of Eden, the Kinect’s “killer app” for hardcore gamers, was a bomb. A big, fat bomb. The spiritual sequel to Q Games’ classic rhythm/rail shooter Rez, this was supposed to be a slam dunk. A bit of The Same

Tetsuya Mizuguchi Wants to Tear You Up

“The final goal of this game, the big emotional movement… I want to make you cry. I don’t know if it’s possible or impossible yet, but I want to make this kind of a chemical reaction, an emotional reaction.” said

Less Is More

Remember the trailer we posted for El Shaddai? Now, at the time, I couldn’t exactly tell what was gameplay and what was a cinematic. Now, I realize why: there was no HUD that cried out “THIS IS GAMEPLAY FOOTAGE,” and

Child of Eden the Game Microsoft Needs to Pimp Kinect

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-19kRd4Yk0&hl=en_US&fs=1&] They need it because this is the real deal. This is the good shit. Black gold. Texas tea. Iraqi milk. Child of Eden is summed up best as the sequel to Rez. Hey, that’s the guy who’s heading production