Friday, June 05, 2009

Metacritic's greatest hits


Above: Mitch Krpata reads the Metacritic page for inFamous, immediately after scoring it a 5.0/10.

It's a little tradition of mine that after finishing my own review, I pop on over to Metacritic and see what everyone else has to say. The Metacritic page for inFamous, besides giving me the increasingly familiar "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!" feeling, contains this gem from GameFocus:
The overall quality of the game is not as high as I expected because I love the Sly Cooper games but as the first game this generation from Sucker Punch it makes this a must buy for PS3 owners. Just do not expect anything stellar or new in terms of gameplay, as we have seen much this game has to offer before and done slightly better.
Their score? 90.

Metacritic, by the way, once declined to include the Phoenix's reviews in their aggregates.

Crazy pills.

Links coming this afternoon.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

inFAMOUS is simply one of the most fun games I've played this generation and probably the most fun game I've played this year

Eurogamer Portugal on MetaCritic. This guy doesn't even know if it was the most fun game he played. Also scored it a 90! haha

cheers,
George Brof

Peter Saumur said...

That's some hot critical reviewing right there.

Gary said...

I'm not sure if I want to laugh, or throw my monitor through the window.

(Oh, and Metacritic passed on including any of the VVM stuff (Game On, Joystick Division) as well.)

Simon Ferrari said...

The game certainly isn't a 90, but it isn't a 50 either. For reference points, what did you give Assassin's Creed and Crackdown?

Mitch Krpata said...

I gave Crackdown a 9. (Here's my review.) Never played Assassin's Creed, unfortunately.

Gary A. Lucero said...

I don't think Well Made Game necessarily equals Fun Game, or vice versa. No one expected anything out of Crackdown but tons of people loved it. I didn't, but then there are a ton of games I don't like that lots of people do like.

Metacritic is a great way to look at the sites you care about to see what they are thinking at a glance, but like we've talked about before, reviews are less and less important. They are a great way to confirm what you already believe, and I'm sure someone uses them as a way to find new games, but I find myself reading less and less of them as time goes by.

Lately I either go with games from developers I love, word of mouth, or gut feeling, as reviews are just all over the place and it seems to me that they often use a grading curve and most conglomerate in the same general area.

Simon Ferrari said...

Hmm, we definitely don't see eye to eye at all then :) I found Crackdown stagnant, filled with absurd gang spawns, and rife with ethnic stereotyping. So it goes. Think you might have liked inFamous slightly more if you'd experienced the "variety" of side missions in Assassin's Creed :)

Mitch Krpata said...

Crackdown reminded me of how fun games were when I was a kid, if that makes sense. It was ridiculous, but so much fun.