Adventure Gamers - Forums

maladroid - 19 April 2014 07:20 PM

But a review is also meant to serve as a consumer’s guide, no? I don’t think price should be measured each and every time but in extreme cases or when the production’s quality just doesn’t merit the asking price, it should be taken into account. After all, one of the reasons why retro/indie/pixel-art games are getting fair reviews is because they usually ask for much less money than AA titles, I feel.

yeah i think its okay to mention it when its a really unusual case, but even then it shouldnt influence the review score.

OrionO - 19 April 2014 04:21 PM

I know that I come to Adventure Gamers to see honest, civil discourse about adventure games new and old.

Hi, OrionO, thanks for the post explaining your views—and belated welcome to the forums, by the way. I would like to let you know about an issue I had with something you said many pages back and why I feel that that comment was one of several things that contributed to the prior tension in the thread, but I will send a PM about it rather than rehash all that here.

OrionO - 19 April 2014 04:21 PM

I would have to give Moebius 1/5 stars, and it has a lot to do with the game’s asking price. I compare the game to what else is being offered for that price. I understand that Jane Jensen had a limited budget and maybe couldn’t afford an expensive, top-flight developer for Moebius, but then the price to gamers should be adjusted accordingly.

From a consumer point of view, sure, if a game doesn’t seem worth X dollars to me, I should either wait for a sale or buy a different game that seems more worth those X dollars. That’s totally fair.

However, I don’t believe that this necessarily means that the developer should adjust the price. Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software has a good post about this. (Actually, all his posts about indie game pricing are worthwhile.)

As for whether price should impact a game’s review score . . . eh, I’ll leave that debate to others. Personally I don’t put too much stock in scores except as a shorthand for communicating people’s impressions, so I don’t have that strong an opinion about it.

maladroid - 19 April 2014 07:20 PM

But a review is also meant to serve as a consumer’s guide, no?

Not in the sense that it should tell the consumer what to buy. That judgement lies with the consumer, and should be respected by the reviewer.

A good review should be valuable to readers regardless of if they share the reviewer’s feelings for the game or not, because it should provide insightful criticism of the games flaws and merits that can be understood by people on both sides.

It’s then up to the reader to interpret the review and determine if this game has the things that HE likes regardless of what the reviewer likes. He then weighs this against the game’s costs, his own financial means, the game’s value, his free time, etc and then makes the decision to buy or not buy.

It’s not a reviewer’s job to tell someone how “worth buying” a game is, even if his analysis might help someone make that decision on his own.

I think people are taking things so seriously and exaggeratedly because people are emotionally involved in the game doing well because they paid toward the kickstarter.  The same thing happened with Broken Age.

What was this thread about again?

Tad - 20 April 2014 03:56 AM

Just read the AGs review. The animation and modeling is no surprise, but you’d think the characters and story would be better considering who’s writing this. Seems like it’s not just POS that should helod their hand up here.

Just checked the review, thanks to your post and rep+1 to Adv Gamers.
I thought it will be super biased review with strings attached but they did
Advgamers versions of that RPS review.

What i found more funny is the rage from fans. The pressure on site must be too much,
the comments there are loaded with same heat that my posts brought up here.

#Dealwithit

I know I’m late to the party, but I’ve just finished the game, and so I need to post a few thoughts.

After playing the beta of the first two chapters several months ago, I knew the game would have some rough edges, but I never expected that its downfall would be the writing. And yet, it is. There are some good elements and some bad elements, we can spend hours discussing those atrocious character models or that stupid maze, but at the end of the day, it’s the writing that killed the game for me.

I feel that Jensen never managed to sell the two most important things:

1) The Moebius theory. The whole thing is ridiculous, and the specifics of that particular case are even worse: [spoiler]Senator Whatshisface marrying some woman will instantly lead to 200 years of prosperity for all?!? What?[/spoiler] It could have been possible to sell this, but the execution was lacking, and the game never managed to make the whole thing even remotely convincing (contrary to, say, the no-less-preposterous notion that Ludwig II was a werewolf). I feel that the game really lacked a sceptic. I understand that Jensen didn’t want to go back to the Scully & Mulder dynamic that she’s mined in her previous games, but all the characters instantly buying the theory 3 seconds after being told about it (“Oh, you’ve found Livia Drusilla? Well, I guess I’ll ditch my girlfriend of three years this very minute then!”) robs the game of the chance to convince the player. Ultimately, I could never get invested in the story, because it all felt so daft.

2) Malachi. I get what Jensen was going for: a man with a very abrasive personality, but who’s worth putting up with because he’s genuinely brilliant and a good person at heart. Somebody like House or the BBC’s Holmes. Except that she never managed to make Malachi that man. He’s really not that brilliant (the way he reads people makes him look like a complete hack: “That woman is a librarian, and she’s wearing purple: she must be sexually frustrated!”). And if there’s some humanity deep-down, there’s never any hint of it. He’s just a prick, and not even a terribly amusing one (at first, I liked how he dissed everyone’s choice of furniture, but that got old fast). His connection with David never felt genuine to me; I knew the game wanted me to see that incredible chemistry between those characters, but I never felt that it was actually there.

So yeah, that was a disappointment.

I’m willing to believe that Jensen has more great games in her, but maybe she needs to move on from historical/paranormal thrillers. She’s 20 years older than when she made GK1, and maybe her tastes have shifted to other types of stories. She’s shown time and again that she can do better than this, but here it feels like she just phoned it in. Maybe she should do what she’s interested in (whatever that is), rather than what her fans want.

In any case, I wrote off the GK series many years ago when Sierra fired everyone. But playing Moebius has made me actively hope that we’ll never see a GK4.

Doom - 20 April 2014 03:54 PM

nomadsoul - 20 April 2014 03:22 PM

I thought it will be super biased review with strings attached but they did
Advgamers versions of that RPS review.

Isn’t that enough reason for a “fan rage”? That RPS review is incompetent and biased, written only for cheap laughs. AG “version” is more rational, but it still describes everything in a negative light. And I think I made fair points during my rage.

I’ve seen lots of complaints over the RPS review, but I haven’t seen a detailed breakdown of how it’s wrong. In fact, when comparing with other reviews, it seems to cover many of the same issues, and the differences are mainly in subjective reaction. John Walker *really* disliked Malachi and took particular umbrage to some of the parts of the game. You may disagree, but that doesn’t make his reaction invalid. (And I must say it’s hard not to look at the “28% likelihood of rape” screen and not wonder WTF the developers were thinking.)

Kurufinwe - 20 April 2014 04:24 PM

2) Malachi. I get what Jensen was going for: a man with a very abrasive personality, but who’s worth putting up with because he’s genuinely brilliant and a good person at heart. Somebody like House or the BBC’s Holmes. Except that she never managed to make Malachi that man. He’s really not that brilliant (the way he reads people makes him look like a complete hack: “That woman is a librarian, and she’s wearing purple: she must be sexually frustrated!”). And if there’s some humanity deep-down, there’s never any hint of it. He’s just a prick, and not even a terribly amusing one (at first, I liked how he dissed everyone’s choice of furniture, but that got old fast). His connection with David never felt genuine to me; I knew the game wanted me to see that incredible chemistry between those characters, but I never felt that it was actually there.

Yeah everything about malachi is completely botched imo. Right now im playing the samaritan paradox, another game where the protagonist is supposed to be super intelligent, and in the first 10 minutes of the game the main character does somthing cooler and more convincing than anything malachi does throughout all of moebius. He looks at a book, sees that the ISBN doesnt look right, connects each number in it to an atomic number in the periodic table, and uses the letters of the elements to make a sentence. Thats the kind of super-memory-power thing i expected from malachi. Instead hes just laughable.