Geo Da Sponge said:
Personally I think that a game without any polish will be terrible no matter what, whereas a game without any creativity can still be fairly good, even if it won't be perfect. So if I had to choose one when I'd get none of the other,
CheeseFlareUK said:
Curtmiester said:
CheeseFlareUK said:
Curtmiester said:
CheeseFlareUK said:
Also, a game called darkest of days got horrid reviews only because
A. It had no boobs.
B. It had a new concept.
C. It had new gameplay ideas like enemies you have to keep alive or you skew the timeline.
I highly doubt game reviews give bad reviews because a game is different. I know many games that got great reviews BECAUSE they are different.
Name one.
Pikmin
Flower
Scribblenauts
Brutal Legends
The Sims
Care to name a good one?
Actually, you just proved his point. If those games aren't any good, then they got the high review scores just for being creative and different. But to add games which are good
and creative
and get good review scores:
Abe's Oddysee or Abe's Exodus.
Braid.
I'd hesitate to call Pikmin, or the Sims bad. When I hear 'this game is bad' without justification, I generally just take it to mean 'This game does not appeal to my particular tastes, and therefore it cannot be good because my asthetic is the only one that matters.'
Which is a lot nicer way of putting 'Durrr, it not involve shoot things with same guns as other games so it is terrible.' Replace 'involve shoot things with same guns as other games' with 'anime characters in awkward social situations' or whatever game genre-fanboy-ist jingoism you want. (Zero Punctuation falls into this trap, Yahtzee can critique a game in a genre he likes very well and to exact technical detail, but outside of that comfort zone, his lack of understanding of those other genres leads him to critique them poorly and ignorantly. q.v. Valkyria Chronicles as an example of a game critiqued incorrectly, like critiquing a romantic comedy by calling it on its lack of gunplay.)
The Sims, for example, is one of the most successful games -outside of tradition gaming demographics.- It had the ability to grab many people that your standard FPS/RPG/Platform games don't, and it struck a strong chord with them, from which they derived great amounts of pleasure and enjoyment.
Given the purpose of entertainment is to entertain, that would make The Sims a very strong contender in terms of quality of games, as it did it's central purpose; It entertained many people.
Videogames are a burgeoning art form, and the language doesn't fully exist to express true appreciation of it. Especially given the interactive and challenge based elements, which alter the experience from a passive to an active one.
And 'creativity' is too broad a term; Would you kindly look at BioShock for example. In terms of gameplay elements, it wasn't very creative at all. The actual play of the game is fairly standard First Person Shooter.
However... the -way- that familiar elements are put together to give the player the illusion of freedom of choice in a game -about the illusion of freedom of choice- is what made it creative and brilliant. In a sense, the -fact- it used the familiar so well is what made it creative and unique.
Mind you, the game was well polished as well. But the polish isn't what people noticed about the game, and isn't what made it so darn good.
'Good' is a subjective term, however you can examine and understand and appreciate different kinds of good. Tetris is a good game for different reasons than WoW is a good game, for different reasons than BioShock is a good game. Most arguments against these being good games stem simple from the reviewer failing to understand or appreciate the material, and being unwilling to accept that the 'good' that particular game exemplifies is just not the kind of 'good' they go for. But that doesn't make the game less good, it just means the critic is less able to appreciate it.
