Gears of War 2. Relevant?

[shadow skill]

My point is that one needs to have his or her own opinions about games period. Metacritic and gamerankings are in no way decent ways of backing up opinions on the quality of games because te reviews themselves may just be a load of crap so if a poorly done review gets placed into the average it can fuck the whole thing up. Ratchet and clank future for example has something like 37 90+ scores on metacritic 20 80+ scores. Review scores simply don't tell you whether a game is good or not for that one would have to A. Read the review itself and B. Pray that the person writing te review actually talks about the game. I've seen games get 9's even though the person reviewing the game actively recommended skipping the normal difficulty because it was too easy.

How the hell does that make sense? "This game is a nine but you will have to up the difficulty otherwise you will just blow through the game." I found myself saying wait a minute if the game is so easy that you recommend what is essentially hard mode be what people start out with, doesn't that mean something is seriously wrong with the way the game was made? Wouldn't that mean that the ease was taken to such an extreme that the game actually stops being fun at all on normal? I've also seen games loose points because they do not have multiplayer; I've heard people say Bioshock sucks because it is sinle player only. (Granted the game is not really good at all but not for that reason.) Ratchet and clank got docked points for having mini games in one review I guess the reviewer forgot that the target audience is really ten year old kids.

One review for Assasin's creed complained that Altair has an American accent even though the reason for this is given within the first ten or fifteen minutes of starting the game! I've read reviews for Tenchu games where people complained that you could just run to the end of the level, completely missing the whole point of the game which is to leave a body trail without getting spotted doing so. There simply is not a need to force the player to kill people since in principle it should be possible to navigate an entire level without killing anyone at all.

 

[dan_the_manatee]

My point is that one needs to have his or her own opinions about games period.

And my point was that people were comparing GoW2 (which they cannot have an opinion about) to Haze and KZ2 (which they cannot have an opinion about) and mostly unfavourably. Clearly, that's a fanboy approach or just plain being daft. We can speculate before it's release; we review and compare after. We can't damn the game - or laud it - based purely on a trailer. This is the entire source of hype and word-of-mouht that games of the current gen of consoles live and die by, and to me, it reeks of bullshit.

We can speculate to a certain extent the content of GoW2 - it shouldn't be that far from the truth, as it's a sequel to a game on the same system, with the same engine, and Epic don't have a track record for innovation (e.g. the Unreal series).

As far Far Cry 2 comparisons... again unplayed, and won't be on consoles until 2009. UT3 didn't seem particularly popular on any platform, and AFAIK PS3 mods still required a PC platform first. Plus, couple in the fact that COD4 (with no user content) is now topping Halo 3 (with user content) on XBL and you basically have a community that doesn't give priority to mods. Personally, I'd rather have a decent, stable single player game than a mod any day. Iv'e had my fingers burned with PC mods a lot; I don't want to brick my 360 to play a crap goldeneye clone.

 

[shadow skill]

Look at when Gears of war came out, there was a complete void of games for the 360 what is Gears 2 up against right now and in the not too distant future relative to its release time frame? Do you really think Gears would have gone anywhere if Halo 3 had come out at the same time? There is literally no way in hell it would have the visuals are the only thing it would have to stand on since Halo 3 is actually superior in terms of gameplay! The question posed here is predicated on the fact that Gears 2 is not out yet, its asking whether we think that the game will be relevant by the time it comes out this November. IE. Will people care about the game by the time it is released. My answer being no save for the hardcore fans of the game simply because there are too many games that it is in direct competition with within the same general time frame.