There\u2019s a certain type of video game that you\u2019re supposed to like. It\u2019s the game that has a big marketing budget, gets great preview articles, and scores above 90 on Metacritic with dozens of reviews.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the game that wins Game of the Year awards from a variety of websites and magazines. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
But\u2026do I actually like those games? I\u2019ve played all of the games on the list above, and I wouldn\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n
Then, there are the games that I actually<\/em> really like. I\u2019m 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\u2019s hard to imagine one conclusive list. Factor in people’s individual tastes and the spread of possible favorite games grows larger.<\/p>\n Of course, most games that I like are on certain lists of games that I\u2019m supposed to like. Portal, Ico, Meteos \u2013 they all got decent reviews and a good amount of press. It\u2019s less confusing to understand that games I thoroughly enjoy are also well-reviewed critical successes.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t enjoy this game, there\u2019s something wrong with your tastes.<\/p>\n That can\u2019t be true. Certain games are just not for certain people, but it\u2019s hard to make that judgment when something receives such widespread praise. People who don\u2019t enjoy urban open world violent games aren\u2019t going to be converted by GTA IV. Dislike large-scale RPGs with lots of resource management? The thematic pull of Fallout 3 isn\u2019t going to change your mind.<\/p>\n And it makes it even harder to disagree publicly. I can state that I didn\u2019t really get into GTA IV (that it felt like every other GTA game I\u2019d 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\u2019t there to back me up, and that\u2019s a scary place to be. I must the outlier, right? The one person in a thousand that would think such garbage.<\/p>\n Maybe. But I don\u2019t think that\u2019s true. I think there\u2019s more of us out here for each well-reviewed game than you might think. Maybe it\u2019s the way that certain games get reviewed that\u2019s actually broken, and not us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There\u2019s a certain type of video game that you\u2019re supposed to like. It\u2019s the game that has a big marketing budget, gets great preview articles, and scores above 90 on Metacritic with dozens of reviews. It\u2019s the game that wins Game of the Year awards from a variety of websites and magazines. It\u2019s the rare […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[152,153,25],"class_list":["post-312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-year26","tag-journalism","tag-metacritic","tag-video-games","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}