Since I started reading game reviews in OPS2 Magazine 10 years ago, the model of evaluation has stayed largely the same. A reviewer will smash a given game into four shards: Gameplay, Graphics, Lifespan and Sound. They will write a few paragraphs on each piece, culminating in a score from one to ten; then the scores from each category will be squeezed together into a rough average, creating a complete score for the game.
I imagine that a devotee of this system would have a similar experience to that of a veteran flat-earthist watching the moon landing in 1968, whilst playing Obsidian's new title Fallout New Vegas: back-muscles contract, stomach churns and spasms, spine transforms into a huge icicle and drips freezing water down your back... The best way to explain this reaction would be to attempt to review New Vegas with the old model. So: Here we go.
The Gameplay is buggy, jerky, quirky, schizophrenic and drunk on stale lager. If you played Fallout 3 or Oblivion for half an hour, you'll instantly know what I'm talking about. With their new Call of Duty style iron-sights, aiming and firing in New Vegas is slightly easier than it was in Fallout 3; but it's still one of the shoddiest examples of combat from the current generation. Focusing your sights on the head of even an immobile NPC will take more than a few seconds, with the sights zipping across the screen at the slightest nudge of the analog stick. As in Fallout 3, an enemy will have to either be running directly at you or standing perfectly still for you to stand a good chance of putting them down without losing most of your HP and half of your ammo; I'm going to be in a lot of trouble when Ceaser's Legion realize that they can achieve virtual invulnerability simply by running horizontally across my field of vision.
Less than an hour into the game and I'd already seen a whole field of crabs sink through the desert floor; a mugger teleport 12 feet into the air; and a corpse blink at me. Yahtzee calls these bugs "Immersion breakers", because they throw you out of the game and back into the body of an unemployed, badly dressed teenager playing videogames on a Friday morning. But in New Vegas these elements don't break immersion; they happen so often that they eventually, inevitably, become part of your Fallout world. Worse still, If Bethesda ever releases a patch that fixes these bugs and quirks (Hahahahaha!), the absence of them will be even more noticeable than the bugs themselves. Like Junk addicts, we've lived with the sweating, nausea and lapses of gravity for so long that returning to normality is not an option; The gameplay is so bad that fixing it would make it worse.
The graphics are a national disgrace and belong somewhere between the PSP and the Wii. From any spot in the wasteland you can see textures in the distance popping, tearing and quivering. Facial animation is non-existent, with every player displaying the countenance of a man searching his pockets for change at a supermarket checkout or unloading the dishwasher. Inevitably, an open-world game like New Vegas will be significantly uglier than a linear story-based game like, say, Uncharted 2; It would take decades and millions of dollars for a team of artists to tailor-fit every inch of the Mojave Wasteland in the same way that they fitted Shangri La for Naughty Dog; but when you recall the massive Mexican mesas and miles of unspoilt mountain-lines of Red Dead Redemption (Also, very fittingly, set in a desert), you realize just how badly Obsidian squandered the potential of their game, either through laziness or a tragic over-estimating of the limits of this generation of consoles. Like the gameplay, the graphics are anachronistic and lazy.
It's hard for me to comment on the lifespan of the game, since I haven't played it through yet. So here, I'll assume that it's about as long as Fallout 3: 100 hours for me. Although we should note that lifespan alone, the sheer length of the game, does not contribute positively if the game is lousy. Would you rather spend four hours inside Keira Knightly, or one hundred hours inside your dad? (I know. I know, sorry, sorry)
Sound: bang bang bang, "ow ow", "you filthy swine", "you dirty double-crossing rat" "lets get-him boys!" There's plenty of 50's music on the pip-boy radio, and drifting out of bars and outposts. This is good if you like 50's music; this is bad if you dislike 50's music (50 the decade, not fiddy). To my delight, Matthew Perry voices the antagonist and does a wonderful job.
Conclusion:
Gameplay: 2
Graphics: 2
Lifespan: 8
Sound: 5
Overall: 4.5/10
And here lies the problem with the reviewing system. I broke New Vegas into four pieces and weighed them like slaves. I was completely honest; the graphics were woeful and the gameplay was hellish. But, if you read this review you probably wouldn't have guessed that when I picked this game out of my postbox at 11, I ran to the playstation, jammed it in, ground my teeth through the installation, and then played it until 6:45. I love this fucking game. Compared to Red Dead Redemption, the graphics are awful, and the gameplay is a tragedy. But would I play Red Dead Redemption for 7 hours? I would rather eat the case.
So, I propose a new system of game reviewing: How long you can play a give title for, before putting it down? Modern Warfare 2 would last an hour. Red Dead, maybe two or three. Fallout New Vegas pushed me until I was too exhausted to continue. Six and a half hours until I quit because my eyesight was blurring. So, full marks for Fallout: New Vegas.
I imagine that a devotee of this system would have a similar experience to that of a veteran flat-earthist watching the moon landing in 1968, whilst playing Obsidian's new title Fallout New Vegas: back-muscles contract, stomach churns and spasms, spine transforms into a huge icicle and drips freezing water down your back... The best way to explain this reaction would be to attempt to review New Vegas with the old model. So: Here we go.
The Gameplay is buggy, jerky, quirky, schizophrenic and drunk on stale lager. If you played Fallout 3 or Oblivion for half an hour, you'll instantly know what I'm talking about. With their new Call of Duty style iron-sights, aiming and firing in New Vegas is slightly easier than it was in Fallout 3; but it's still one of the shoddiest examples of combat from the current generation. Focusing your sights on the head of even an immobile NPC will take more than a few seconds, with the sights zipping across the screen at the slightest nudge of the analog stick. As in Fallout 3, an enemy will have to either be running directly at you or standing perfectly still for you to stand a good chance of putting them down without losing most of your HP and half of your ammo; I'm going to be in a lot of trouble when Ceaser's Legion realize that they can achieve virtual invulnerability simply by running horizontally across my field of vision.
Less than an hour into the game and I'd already seen a whole field of crabs sink through the desert floor; a mugger teleport 12 feet into the air; and a corpse blink at me. Yahtzee calls these bugs "Immersion breakers", because they throw you out of the game and back into the body of an unemployed, badly dressed teenager playing videogames on a Friday morning. But in New Vegas these elements don't break immersion; they happen so often that they eventually, inevitably, become part of your Fallout world. Worse still, If Bethesda ever releases a patch that fixes these bugs and quirks (Hahahahaha!), the absence of them will be even more noticeable than the bugs themselves. Like Junk addicts, we've lived with the sweating, nausea and lapses of gravity for so long that returning to normality is not an option; The gameplay is so bad that fixing it would make it worse.
The graphics are a national disgrace and belong somewhere between the PSP and the Wii. From any spot in the wasteland you can see textures in the distance popping, tearing and quivering. Facial animation is non-existent, with every player displaying the countenance of a man searching his pockets for change at a supermarket checkout or unloading the dishwasher. Inevitably, an open-world game like New Vegas will be significantly uglier than a linear story-based game like, say, Uncharted 2; It would take decades and millions of dollars for a team of artists to tailor-fit every inch of the Mojave Wasteland in the same way that they fitted Shangri La for Naughty Dog; but when you recall the massive Mexican mesas and miles of unspoilt mountain-lines of Red Dead Redemption (Also, very fittingly, set in a desert), you realize just how badly Obsidian squandered the potential of their game, either through laziness or a tragic over-estimating of the limits of this generation of consoles. Like the gameplay, the graphics are anachronistic and lazy.
It's hard for me to comment on the lifespan of the game, since I haven't played it through yet. So here, I'll assume that it's about as long as Fallout 3: 100 hours for me. Although we should note that lifespan alone, the sheer length of the game, does not contribute positively if the game is lousy. Would you rather spend four hours inside Keira Knightly, or one hundred hours inside your dad? (I know. I know, sorry, sorry)
Sound: bang bang bang, "ow ow", "you filthy swine", "you dirty double-crossing rat" "lets get-him boys!" There's plenty of 50's music on the pip-boy radio, and drifting out of bars and outposts. This is good if you like 50's music; this is bad if you dislike 50's music (50 the decade, not fiddy). To my delight, Matthew Perry voices the antagonist and does a wonderful job.
Conclusion:
Gameplay: 2
Graphics: 2
Lifespan: 8
Sound: 5
Overall: 4.5/10
And here lies the problem with the reviewing system. I broke New Vegas into four pieces and weighed them like slaves. I was completely honest; the graphics were woeful and the gameplay was hellish. But, if you read this review you probably wouldn't have guessed that when I picked this game out of my postbox at 11, I ran to the playstation, jammed it in, ground my teeth through the installation, and then played it until 6:45. I love this fucking game. Compared to Red Dead Redemption, the graphics are awful, and the gameplay is a tragedy. But would I play Red Dead Redemption for 7 hours? I would rather eat the case.
So, I propose a new system of game reviewing: How long you can play a give title for, before putting it down? Modern Warfare 2 would last an hour. Red Dead, maybe two or three. Fallout New Vegas pushed me until I was too exhausted to continue. Six and a half hours until I quit because my eyesight was blurring. So, full marks for Fallout: New Vegas.
