Video Game Review Review: Polygon's Virginia Review
93 replies, posted
bitching about video game review for 8ish minutes.
[b]this is the second one[/b]
[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTJxSIGGpcU]here's the first one[/url]
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNGbB_9esTI[/media]
critique this. mic audio is a little better but i was sick recording it. i tried to normalize audio without destroying it. also why redub audio you made mistakes in when you can just play it off as a joke ha ha
don't stop, don't ever stop with this.
Also david cage would have a world with you on game failure states ;D
[I]noooooo COOOOOLLLLLLLIIIIIINNNNNNNNN[/I]
Your videos make me wish the best gamers still made videos. Why did they have to be such poopoo heads and get lives and stuff to do.
earned yourself a new subscriber man. this shit is pretty great
[QUOTE=Ithon;51271265]don't stop, don't ever stop with this.
Also david cage would have a world with you on game failure states ;D[/QUOTE]
david cage is a very creative idiot. i'm not sure if he meant failure states, though, when he talked about "game overs". i think he might've implied a LIVES system that arcade and mario games use, that also his own fucking game indigo prophecy used-- one that forces you to start an entire level over. in which case i agree with him. fuck lives. but also you need to fail and you need consequences to failure, so there's gotta be some balance there.
but i guess to kind of explain, when i say failure state i mean a "you died" or "you lose" or something like that. in "games" that have no way to lose, like gone home or layers of fear, you're basically just playing with an interactive story. it's a story-telling technique that doesn't have any gameplay involved. this trend of praising non-games and then docking points like polygon did on actual video games like shadow warrior 2 for "being racist" needs to stop. journos and hipsters don't even want to play video games, they just want shit to be shown to them. but only if it's what they want to be shown, like a documentary on racial divides of the FBI force in the 90s.
congrats you found a niche
I honestly expect this to explode eventually and for you to be the next Brutalmoose / h3h3 / other youtuber people like
[QUOTE=TheBloodyNine;51271491]I honestly expect this to explode eventually and for you to be the next Brutalmoose / h3h3 / other youtuber people like[/QUOTE]
i'm not necessarily looking to explode although it would be nice (give me that youtube ad revenue), i just want to educate. if more people were openly critical of bad games press and made videos just like these i'd probably be happiest.
This is pretty good
Is 'interactable' a word? Did you mean to use 'interactive'?
[QUOTE=TheJoey;51271498]i'm not necessarily looking to explode although it would be nice (give me that youtube ad revenue), i just want to educate. if more people were openly critical of bad games press and made videos just like these i'd probably be happiest.[/QUOTE]
You are inspiring me to work on my own scripts doing a similar, although hopefully markedly different thing
This is pretty excellent stuff, always thought there should be some well-thought out criticism on video game reviewers. Enjoyed this enough to check out the one you did on PCGamer's Shadowrun 2, so I think you've got a real good thing going here.
P.S. Your voice, though a little cold-stricken, is great.
You're doing god's work.
[QUOTE=nerdster409;51271510]Is 'interactable' a word? Did you mean to use 'interactive'?[/QUOTE]
uhhh oops. yes. blame robitussin.
Just a little FYI, a site giving a game 10 points doesn't meant it's a perfect game, at least I'd hope it isn't. It usually means just full points, nothing can be 100% perfect.
These are fucking amazing. Subbed.
what are your thoughts on Firewatch? Because 37 seconds in and these are exactly my thoughts on Firewatch.
Need more of this
Good points, great video all around. In this episode I feel like you turned the notch up on aiming comments directly at the author, not sure why, but it gave me the 'im calling X out on youtube!!' vibe.
Just my thought!
[sp] yeah I subbed though [/sp]
[QUOTE=General J;51272715]what are your thoughts on Firewatch? Because 37 seconds in and these are exactly my thoughts on Firewatch.[/QUOTE]
i don't remember if you can fail or die in firewatch... if not then it really falls under the same category of interactive story and i don't consider it a video game. its like a goose bumps choose-your-own-adventure where you just get different lines of dialogue depending on choices. those aren't games, no matter what you think of the story. and i don't remember there being any sort of puzzles that required much thinking, so... i think of it as, if you can just watch a youtube video of it and get the same exact experience, why didn't you just make a fucking movie?
You're great at this man, I loved your last video, but I just can't finish this one because jesus christt what the FUCK is wrong with polygon
Thank you for ripping him a new one.
[QUOTE=BlackMageMari;51273344]You're great at this man, I loved your last video, but I just can't finish this one because jesus christt what the FUCK is wrong with polygon
Thank you for ripping him a new one.[/QUOTE]
Polygon is why we need GG
I just subscribed. Well done man.
[QUOTE=TheJoey;51273195]i don't remember if you can fail or die in firewatch... if not then it really falls under the same category of interactive story and i don't consider it a video game. its like a goose bumps choose-your-own-adventure where you just get different lines of dialogue depending on choices. those aren't games, no matter what you think of the story. and i don't remember there being any sort of puzzles that required much thinking, so... i think of it as, if you can just watch a youtube video of it and get the same exact experience, why didn't you just make a fucking movie?[/QUOTE]
I generally agree. However, don't you think some puzzle and adventure games are exempt from this?
Primordia for example is an in-depth point&click game the like of Monkey Island, but as far as I recall you cannot ever die or get permanently stuck in it.
On a very technical level all you do is click things in the right order, but it challenges you to think and make choices to progress.
[QUOTE=Talishmar;51273377]I generally agree. However, don't you think some puzzle and adventure games are exempt from this?
Primordia for example is an in-depth point&click game the like of Monkey Island, but as far as I recall you cannot ever die or get permanently stuck in it.
On a very technical level all you do is click things in the right order, but it challenges you to think and make choices to progress.[/QUOTE]
I believe puzzle games can fall under the category of game because even if you can't die there is still a failure state, which is dealing with the urge to figure out the current puzzle and progress. Can't figure it out, can't progress. Myst and Riven did this perfectly, and those are two of my favorite games.
[QUOTE=Talishmar;51273377]I generally agree. However, don't you think some puzzle and adventure games are exempt from this?
Primordia for example is an in-depth point&click game the like of Monkey Island, but as far as I recall you cannot ever die or get permanently stuck in it.
On a very technical level all you do is click things in the right order, but it challenges you to think and make choices to progress.[/QUOTE]
so i replied to a comment on youtube about puzzle games and in hindsight i should've added something about that (but it'd get lengthy)
but basically puzzle games have the same parameters, instead of "failure state" i probably should have called it just "bare minimum challenge" but even that's really vague. the bare minimum challenge for puzzle games is figuring out the correct response. the failure is not figuring out what to do. i guess if they called firewatch, gone home, or virginia "puzzle games" i'd be more lenient on calling it a non-game, but they'd be pretty shitty puzzle games as the "puzzles" are entirely linear.
Personally I think the video would have benefited from more game footage to illustrate your points.
For example, Up!'s prologue is pretty infamous for telling a simply, emotionally engaging story without words, and games are a medium in which narrative can be silently expressed through gameplay or level design. So it's possible that the game's achieved that, and we've got the Polygon side saying it did and your side saying it didn't, and neither brings up any examples that would help the viewer agree with one side. A "uh-huh - uh uh" style argument just isn't very compelling for me unless I'm already so familiar with the game that I can draw on my own memories for confirmation, and all I had learned about Virginia until that point was that it's a Walking Sim where you walk around in an office hallway and you have a UFO dream at some point.
Similar deal with the part where you talk about facial expressiveness - Pixar for example was able to do a lot with very little in the case of Wall-E (barely even has a face), but it's easy to do wrong as well. Instead of a slide of TF2Scout's face being pulled apart I would have preferred to see some Virginia footage to see what you're talking about.
This is in contrast to how you for example explained how the game wasn't very similar to Twin Peaks and showed game footage from the UFO encounter, instead of just saying "no it's not similar, wtf are you talking about?" and zooming on a text paragraph. If you don't want to/cannot show footage, it would at least help me if you described how exactly the game executes a thing that the Polygon reviewer thinks works and you think doesn't work.
Maybe it would help to either explain the game up front to set a baseline of understanding or, Yahtzee-style, take the viewer through a hyperbolic sightseeing tour and stop to talk about certain points as they come up.
On a more positive note, I really appreciated you trying to keep up the pace/comedic timing by cutting a joke just before it ends, because the viewer can already tell how it's going. Like at around 6:06.
Tho personally I think if you're gonna use that technique several times, it would go better with a faster-paced video in general so the jokes can really hit the viewer over the head in quick succession and don't just come off as a compensation for covering up weak/non-existent punch lines. But some jokes are all about not having a punch line. Which is why I wanted to preface this caveat as probably more about personal taste than my other suggestions.
Small note about you looking at the 100 Metacritic scores and deriving that these critics thought the game was literally perfect: Metacritic converts everything to its 0-100 scoreboard. The ratings of those two critics were 10/10 and 5/5, which could simply mean the game was better than 9/10 or 4/5 and the score was rounded up because those rating systems aren't as incremental as X/100 for example.
The overall point of that clip, the absurdly high review scores, still stands firmly of course, but since the assumption about the "perfect" scores wasn't necessarily correct, it put a small damper on things. Usually I wouldn't point out something that small, but I could easily see you cross-referencing Metacritic again for more videos like this one, so I thought this info about "perfect" metacritic scores might come in handy in the future.
The ending that kinda got "political" sort of confused me tone-wise since the rest of the video was so firmly planted around judging the game by its actual merit and even the voiceover was still about the game whereas the text was about the reviewer/industry. The points in scare quotes around 7:37 for example could have just been expressed as people being inherently biased to subject matter that interests them (whether it's political or not). The "journos" around 8:04 seemed like a relic from those old "it's actually about ethics in video games journalism" arguments and felt kind of odd to read in a review, something that makes you a "journalist" as well. I think it's already been quite some time since people realized that "games journalists" aren't just the faceless goons at the big name sites, it can be anyone from Jim Sterling to some dude with a blog as long as their content is of the same nature.
But maybe that's just the impression I've been getting and I'm getting too political here myself. I guess my main point is that it would have served the video better if the voiceover matched the text and/or this section had clearer signposting. Maybe put some of the political stuff in the beginning to quickly inform the viewer what type of video they're about to get into, but maybe I was just oblivious to the cues until the very end.
Lastly, just general format-wise, this didn't really strike as a review of a review, more like general venting or criticism. I get that the "review review" title makes for a bit of an inherent joke just by virtue of being recursive and using the same word twice, but it took me most of the video to realize that I wouldn't be actually getting a review that analyzes the writing style or composition or any of that. Nowadays there's a lot of traditionally big name outlets that write more like bloggers because platforms like YouTube and Patreon really encourage creatives to create a personal cult and a comfortable amateur environment of "ironically bad but not really ironic" type production value, instead of ascribing to the stiffer more professional standards people had when the line between creative job and hobby wasn't quite as blurry as today on the net.
Hope a few of these things help!
[QUOTE=TheJoey;51273195]i don't remember if you can fail or die in firewatch... if not then it really falls under the same category of interactive story and i don't consider it a video game. its like a goose bumps choose-your-own-adventure where you just get different lines of dialogue depending on choices. those aren't games, no matter what you think of the story. and i don't remember there being any sort of puzzles that required much thinking, so... i think of it as, if you can just watch a youtube video of it and get the same exact experience, why didn't you just make a fucking movie?[/QUOTE]
I was just thinking that your definition of a game, where there's a fail or game over state, means that certain point-and-click adventure games like Neverhood or Monkey Island aren't considered games.
I respectfully disagree with pretty much your entire opinion, but what I don't appreciate is the feeling that, missing the point, you consider the game devs as incompetent idiots who don't pander to your own vision of what is a video game or not. I could argue again why walking simulators are perfectly good video games like any other, but I'd rather not unless asked to.
I haven't played Virginia, but I've read my favourite magazine's review of it (a French magazine), and regarding references to Twin Peaks, I quote: "[...] Variable State [...] has two obvious references: David Lynch's productions (the visual and musical shout-outs to [I]Twin Peaks[/I] actually lack in subtlety) and [I]Thirty Flights of Loving[/I], a short game by Blendo Games released in 2012." I hope that helps.
Also
[QUOTE=TheJoey;51273195]i don't remember if you can fail or die in firewatch... if not then it really falls under the same category of interactive story and i don't consider it a video game. its like a goose bumps choose-your-own-adventure where you just get different lines of dialogue depending on choices. those aren't games, no matter what you think of the story. and i don't remember there being any sort of puzzles that required much thinking, so... i think of it as, if you can just watch a youtube video of it and get the same exact experience, why didn't you just make a fucking movie?[/QUOTE]
Those are some really, really poor arguments.
Also you have the right to not like walking simulators, they're obviously not for the average gamer. But you don't have, like so many others who pretend to be "real gaming connoisseurs", have to argue why walking simulators are not true games. Just refrain from paying attention to those games and leave it at that. Their popularity is not going to stop other gaming genres.
I don't like platformers but you don't see me explaining why they're a disgrace to everything video games have evolved through to this day.
Being a literalist and arguing that a video game isn't actually a video game because it doesn't fit a classically 'gamey' worldview is incredibly masturbatory.
If you took one minute you could think of a dozen games that you know don't fit this definition. All a game needs is play and all a video game needs is interaction.
That's the core strength of the medium. Cookie clicker is still a video game. It's shallow and gets old quickly, but it's still a game.
Games don't need a typical "game over" failure state. In Virginia the failure state would be not finishing the narrative. Same for Journey, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Machinarium, Sam and Max, Thirty Flights of Loving, Gone Home, etc.
Hell, with this video's hyper-literal definition Dark Souls (or any game with a checkpoint system) isn't a video game since there's no real failure state. When you die the only thing you lose is time.
You could say that the "you died" screen is your fail state, but you can get your souls and fight back to the boss like nothing happened. Death in Dark Souls is the same as wandering in a "walking simulator". It keeps you playing and takes up time.
The only reason to argue a video game isn't a video game is to try to distance it from what you find comfortable because it's not for you. It's a futile and arbitrary argument that ends up with endless concessions of things that are, in fact, video games.
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