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A game I love is two notches away from a game I'm disappointed with.
That doesn't bother me as much as it should, and I think that's what bothers me. It took writing a couple reviews myself to really think about it. In particular, I refer to my reviews of Arcanum and Deus Ex: Invisible War. After reading them back-to-back, something about them bothered me; namely, seeing one of my favorite games score a mere one point above a title that let me down several times over.
Obviously I can't take back the scores, and I don't anyway. I feel the numbers give a fairly accurate reflection of the nuts and bolts of each game. Invisible War is functional, but has several crippling flaws and disappointing aspects. Arcanum is buggy, unbalanced, and cursed with an engine that, to be charitable, is unwieldy. The point of difference largely can be attributed to Arcanum's comparative versatility and open-endedness, whereas the same cannot be said of Invisible War.
And yet, Arcanum is one of my all-time favorite games, easily my second or third-favorite RPG (behind the original Deus Ex, and occasionally Baldur's Gate II). No matter how much I preface a description of the game with conditionals, the end result is I can't say enough good things about the game's story, world and roleplaying options. To be sure, it's not enough to fully compensate for the game's highly visible flaws, but it does a better job of making them tolerable, which is more than can be said for Invisible War - this, I think is what that point of difference is meant to represent.
Does that say something about my own tilt? Probably. But this is not to compare the two games, so much as it is to question whether personal enjoyment can factor into a score, or if that's something that must be left to the text itself.
On the one hand, a comprehensive review should, at some point, highlight the game's strengths and weaknesses in as objective terms as possible. If a core gimmick in the game can safely be ignored, or if the game chugs on a less-than-cutting-edge PC, I think that's fairly important information that should be reported, no matter how jaw-dropping the graphics or immersive the experience. On the other hand, there is legitimacy to a reviewer's personal tilt. If the experience of playing a game is such that it can make you forget its flaws, then that in itself is valuable.
The question then becomes, what happens when the experience fades? This is typical with replays; the surprises are gone, the story has been told, the drama loses some of its punch. I think a good review should at least try to answer this question, but does that factor into the game's overall grade? Does the score mean nothing but a cold-blooded analysis of the game's tangible, visible facets, or should something less substantial permit the reviewer to bump the score a few notches higher? I feel predisposed towards the former, but I honestly can't say for sure.
Where that leaves me, however, I'm not sure. Reviews being what they are, I couldn't possibly expect them to be without any mention of the reviewer's enjoyment of the game. Still, I feel at least some effort should be made to acknowledge the game's flaws, no matter how close to perfect it might seem - or, for those that do warrant the 5's, 10's and 100%'s, an explanation of how those flaws are mitigated by the rest of the game.
Meanwhile, a game I love is two notches away from a game I'm disappointed with, and I still haven't figured out why that doesn't bother me - and why that not bothering me, does.
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