There’s a certain type of video game that you’re supposed to like. It’s the game that has a big marketing budget, gets great preview articles, and scores above 90 on Metacritic with dozens of reviews.
It’s the game that wins Game of the Year awards from a variety of websites and magazines. It’s the rare game that people you know actually preorder. You know the type: games like GTA IV, Fallout 3, LittleBigPlanet, Bioshock, Super Mario Galaxy. The games that mainstream press fawn over.
But…do I actually like those games? I’ve played all of the games on the list above, and I wouldn’t necessarily list any of them as my favorite games. Is it because they have so much expectation baggaged with them? Is it because games that fall into this paradigm end up being somewhat formulaic? In other words, do only certain types of games become media darlings?
Then, there are the games that I actually really like. I’m pretty that list is different for every person. Those games rely so much on the circumstances of discovery and the experience you had the first time you played them that it’s hard to imagine one conclusive list. Factor in people’s individual tastes and the spread of possible favorite games grows larger.
Of course, most games that I like are on certain lists of games that I’m supposed to like. Portal, Ico, Meteos – they all got decent reviews and a good amount of press. It’s less confusing to understand that games I thoroughly enjoy are also well-reviewed critical successes.
But why are certain really well-reviewed blockbuster games so disappointing? How can I dislike a game that has a 98 Metacritic? This is where game reviewing fails, in my eyes. What reviewers are collectively telling me with a 98 Metacritic game is this: if you don’t enjoy this game, there’s something wrong with your tastes.
That can’t be true. Certain games are just not for certain people, but it’s hard to make that judgment when something receives such widespread praise. People who don’t enjoy urban open world violent games aren’t going to be converted by GTA IV. Dislike large-scale RPGs with lots of resource management? The thematic pull of Fallout 3 isn’t going to change your mind.
And it makes it even harder to disagree publicly. I can state that I didn’t really get into GTA IV (that it felt like every other GTA game I’d ever played, to be perfectly frank) and that I find the amount of world in Fallout 3 overwhelming but the actual gameplay underwhelming. But the reviews aren’t there to back me up, and that’s a scary place to be. I must the outlier, right? The one person in a thousand that would think such garbage.
Maybe. But I don’t think that’s true. I think there’s more of us out here for each well-reviewed game than you might think. Maybe it’s the way that certain games get reviewed that’s actually broken, and not us.