Deus Ex HR reviews up...

[Stark]

The price of LAZY ports, unless you think implementing proper UI settings for PC costs a great deal of time or money. That it's considered acceptable the blame xyz platform for something as simple as mouse smoothing, or fov, or whatever option is just sad.

Netko, the reviews largely bag the hacking game for UI issues like sluggishness or lack of response, which seem like it might be a pretty general complaint about the game overall.

[Chardok]

Well, I got it preordered, and I'll be picking it up later this evening. Hopefully, It's a wise investment. Destructoids Jim Sterling called it "A serious game of the year contender" and since he is a fellow Dynasty Warriors fan, I'm going to give him a bit o' cred.


Interestingly - all the features, I hear being touted as awesome as well as some of the criticisms being levelled at the game are

1. features which were done previously quite well

and

2. the same criticisms being levelled at a little game called:


Alpha Protocol



So reviewers can, in general, fuck off.

[Vympel]

The sheer amount of fail associated with most AP reviews is a travesty. I wonder if AP got raked over the coals where this game didn't purely because AP is an original IP.

[TC Pilot]

Depends on whether or not Deus Ex is as terribly ported as AP was. We already have two completely contradictory statements to that effect here already, so that remains to be seen. I'd certainly like to know, as for me it's the difference between getting it now for the PC or waiting for a price drop for the 360.

I mean, if most "mainstream" reviewers were actually honest, the average 6/10 review scores for AP are probably pretty accurate (at least so far as the ratings go) as to its overall quality. But in the context of "Woo GTA4 is perfect!!!1 10/10" then yeah, it's complete bullshit. AP was bad, but not that bad.

[CaptHawkeye]

SEGA just didn't have enough spare cash to buy out the reviews like Take-Two could.

[Vendetta]

The sheer amount of fail associated with most AP reviews is a travesty. I wonder if AP got raked over the coals where this game didn't purely because AP is an original IP.

I think at least part of AP's problems are down to the tutorial not emphasising certain things enough. All of the reviewers who claimed the pistol was useless, for instance, could have been enlightened if the tutorial had pointed out how important it was to line up a critical with the pistol (then they would have been able to accurately complain that the pistol is far too good and destroys 90% of the challenge).

Other games have suffered the same fate. Too Human, for instance, wasn't as bad as the reviews made out (it wasn't great, but once you learned how the fighting worked, and learned that you were invincible during the dodge roll, it became a competent loot trawl, and still has the best vendor trash handling system ever, as you can set a minimum pickup quality and anything below it is auto-trashed). However, the tutorial was basically absent, which means that reviewers didn't figure out how to play it, died all the time because some things are counterintuitive (you can avoid enemy ground slam moves by jumping them, which is what every other game makes you do in that situation, but the timing for doing so is so tight that you'll never get it right consistently, but dodge rolling makes you invincible for the duration of the move which is easily long enough to avoid damage), and so complained about the combat and about the length of the death animation.

Though reviewers, of course, complain when they get those "how to play our game" sheets that publishers include to make sure their tiny little reviewer brains aren't too easily fuddled by New Things. The complaint is misdirected, they do need telling how to play a game, especially if it doesn't strictly follow the conventions which govern that type of game, but the mechanism for doing so should be the ingame tutorial.

[Molyneux]

I just saw Shamus Young's take on it; he likes it, that's good enough for me to give it a look-see.
(He's my general "if-even-THAT-guy-likes-it-then-it-must-be-worth-playing" marker.)

[DaveJB]

Depends on whether or not Deus Ex is as terribly ported as AP was. We already have two completely contradictory statements to that effect here already, so that remains to be seen. I'd certainly like to know, as for me it's the difference between getting it now for the PC or waiting for a price drop for the 360.

I believe that we're seeing one of my pet peeves with multiplatform releases; the copy-paste review. I mean, look how many horrific console-to-desktop ports we get nowadays - and yet the reviewers rarely ever seem to mention the glitches present in the PC versions. Judging by my own experiences, I have a feeling that most sites only bother to review the Xbox 360 version of any particular game, while only touching the PS3 version when absolutely necessary, and completely ignoring the PC one.

[Terralthra]

SEGA just didn't have enough spare cash to buy out the reviews like Take-Two could.

As someone who worked at a Take-Two company, gotta say, I call it the Rockstar effect. Their games got ridiculously favorable reviews compared with other games I worked on.

[CaptHawkeye]

Yeah that's the just typical of the video game industry these days. It's totally dominated top-to-bottom by people who are fans for the sake of being a fan. They're so desperate to see the advancement of an industry which they're emotionally tied to they'll ignore its blatent weaknesses and failures. One of the reasons the industry is really at a point of stagnation these days because of the feel-good circle jerk going on all over. That's not how you improve, that's just what you do when you're insecure.

[Vendetta]

I think it's more a signifier of the unhealthy relationship between the gaming press and the publishers. The games press is kept as a pet, paying for "exclusive" access to new titles with positive copy.

The "Rockstar Effect" isn't that the games press is just fanboying because they're locked in to the medium for it's own sake, but they don't want to be the one that breaks ranks and gives a critical appraisal of a big name title because they'd get cut out of the loop for future releases. (Like 2K have done to Eurogamer after their 3/10 for DNF, and their almighty sulk when EG scooped the official reveal of Borderlands 2 which was supposed to be "exclusive" for Game Informer).

[Stark]

That is ALSO why once a game is on the 'bad list', absolutely any 'hilarious' negative reviews are totally acceptable regardless of actual merit.

The idea review sites ignore PC versions when they generally have an entire PC section (full of 'PC rules' articles generally) is ridiculous. Lots of cross-platform games have late PC versions, which might create this impression.

[Terralthra]

The "Rockstar Effect" isn't that the games press is just fanboying because they're locked in to the medium for it's own sake, but they don't want to be the one that breaks ranks and gives a critical appraisal of a big name title because they'd get cut out of the loop for future releases. (Like 2K have done to Eurogamer after their 3/10 for DNF, and their almighty sulk when EG scooped the official reveal of Borderlands 2 which was supposed to be "exclusive" for Game Informer).

The 3/10 wasn't for DNF, it was for Mafia II, which was frankly a stupid rating. Even the text of the review refers to it as a polished but otherwise mediocre game, and they gave it a lower rating than games which literally didn't work. I think EuroGamer was expecting other game reviewers to give it a shitty rating instead of the mediocre rating it ended up getting, and they wanted to be out in front as the first critics.

[Chirios]

It might well be a bad game, but from where are you getting the negativity? All the reviews are some variation on positive, with only a few things like crap hacking and boss fights as negatives.

Using Dragon Age 2 as an example of a 'bad sequel' (or whatever) is pretty funny.

The stuff about it being buggy mostly. It might be brilliant, but if it's so buggy that IGN couldn't even post a review then what's the point? And Dragon Age 2 was a bad sequel.

[Stark]

I thought the 'benefit' of being a PC gamer was waiting on patches and fixing games with mods? Surely some of the guys on SDN have the PC version and can comment.

Does 'bad sequel' mean 'not amazingly boring'?

[Vendetta]

The "Rockstar Effect" isn't that the games press is just fanboying because they're locked in to the medium for it's own sake, but they don't want to be the one that breaks ranks and gives a critical appraisal of a big name title because they'd get cut out of the loop for future releases. (Like 2K have done to Eurogamer after their 3/10 for DNF, and their almighty sulk when EG scooped the official reveal of Borderlands 2 which was supposed to be "exclusive" for Game Informer).

The 3/10 wasn't for DNF, it was for Mafia II, which was frankly a stupid rating. Even the text of the review refers to it as a polished but otherwise mediocre game, and they gave it a lower rating than games which literally didn't work. I think EuroGamer was expecting other game reviewers to give it a shitty rating instead of the mediocre rating it ended up getting, and they wanted to be out in front as the first critics.

They gave Mafia II 4/10, which according to their scoring policy (which admittedly doesn't always manage to be consistent) represents "Below Average". Given that Mafia II only managed 7/10 on the four point scale IGN use for major releases, calling it "below average" is probably accurate. (And we could always go back and talk about the stupidity over Gerstmann being given the boot at gamespot for giving Kane & Lynch as shockingly low a score as 6/10)

[Chirios]

I thought the 'benefit' of being a PC gamer was waiting on patches and fixing games with mods? Surely some of the guys on SDN have the PC version and can comment.

Does 'bad sequel' mean 'not amazingly boring'?

Improving games with mods, not fixing. Patches are always annoying. But there's a difference between a patch for a small bug, to the game being damned near unplayable on release. That's the difference between say, a patch for Dragon Age 1 and KOTOR 2. If Deus Ex is that badly coded on release, that doesn't bode well.

[Gaidin]

Improving games with mods, not fixing. Patches are always annoying. But there's a difference between a patch for a small bug, to the game being damned near unplayable on release. That's the difference between say, a patch for Dragon Age 1 and KOTOR 2. If Deus Ex is that badly coded on release, that doesn't bode well.

Except I don't think thats an issue unless the showstopper bugs people are complaining about in Deus Ex are just that random. I haven't run into a single one after playing since 4am today(930pm now) minus 5 hours for errands. All I can think of is a wierd hardware combination and sheer bad luck has the game going haywire. There's going to be a bunch of people(though hardly anywhere near a minority, forget a majority) that will have this on any computer game.