tempest in a teacup

I’m a regular watcher of Zero Punctuation, the five-minute review series started by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw on Youtube and later continued at The Escapist. His reviews are basically highly cynical, sarcastic looks at various games and their idiosyncrasies. He’s usually quite funny, but as of late I’ve come to realise that it’s hard to treat much of his work as “reviews.”

The first sign was his review of Super Smash Bros Brawl. He prefaced his video with a claim that he didn’t understand fighting games. That made me raise my eyebrow, but the rest of his review raised some valid points, so I let it slide.

Until today’s review of Soul Calibur IV.

Let’s get one thing straight - I’m not a Soul Calibur fan at all, and I have no idea how expert players regard this latest installment. Yet Yahtzee’s review, prefaced with the exact same disclaimer about not understanding fighting games, rags on inconsequential nonsense like the story, single player modes, AI and create-a-character modes. Unfortunately, the standards he uses to measure the other games he plays are simply irrelevant in the case of fighting games. They’re nice window dressing, but they shouldn’t take attention away from the fighting system, and more importantly, how the game holds up in versus play.

Needless to say, Yahtzee mentioned neither, therefore making his review another footnote (a humorous one, but still nonetheless a footnote) in the history of people who try to review fighting games without actually knowing anything about them.

That goes for all genres, really. Yahtzee’s best reviews tend to be the ones where he reviews games from genres that he likes, like FPSes and action games (although even these have some duds among their ranks).

Maybe I’m taking his efforts too seriously, but Yahtzee has indicated at times that he wishes to be taken seriously as a critic of videogames. However, without the necessary expertise, his videos are nothing more than humorous bile.

There’s a much more comprehensive and better-written take on the same subject here.

DISCLAIMER: I’m not singling out Yahtzee for doing this - he just happens to be the most recent example of a thoroughly irritating phenomenon present in just about all mainstream reviews these days.

Well, no, he doesn’t. But at least this snippet from this interview with him from Shacknews suggests that he thinks that sane system requirements are entirely a developers’ responsibility:

Shack: Does the responsibility lie somewhat with the hardware manufacturers to market their products in a reasonable way, or is it up to the developers to set sane requirements?

Doug Lombardi: Oh I think it’s totally the fault of the developers. Totally the fault of the developers. I mean the graphics guys, their job to keep pushing the envelope, and as they push the envelope, move the lower-end cards down to a nice price point, so that there’s always this evolution that’s happening. If you’re a hot rod type of guy, and you want to spend $400 on the latest thing, you want to have a smoking machine, and when Left 4 Dead comes out you want to run it at its highest resolution with killer framerates, and call your buddies over for a beer and make them all drool over your system, awesome. But if you’re just a guy who wants a decent PC for less than a thousand bucks, and wants to be able to run games on it, there should be a card out there that runs games at a decent famerate and decent fluidity. Then it’s on us to write for both of those guys.

It’s a business decision, really. Too often I think the development side of things runs the house. People say, “Oh, we’ve got to target those high-end core gamers. We have the best graphics, sweetest screenshots, and we’ll get more press, and we’ll win.” Okay, well, you’ll win in the pre-launch phase. Then when the game comes out, and 60-70% of the people who don’t have that sweet machine–maybe even higher numbers, maybe 80% don’t have that sweet machine–well you just cut off your ability to sell to all of those guys.

You know, it’s hard to be able to have games that scale, and to write performance on the high end, and write performance on the bottom end, but you know, winning in any industry means some hard work, and there’s a certain level of hard work that developers have to take responsibility for. And when you see games that do that, where they have solid gameplay, and they scale well across machines, usually those games do well.

Nothing much I can disagree with there, really. Writing an engine that doesn’t scale to lesser systems and then whining that no-one is buying your game is kind of asking to be laughed at.

On a side note, I downloaded the Painkiller demo yesterday (after watching Yahtzee’s review, obviously) and gave it a whirl. It definitely reminds me of Serious Sam a whole lot; it features a ridiculous number of enemies with rather stupid AI who try to basically gangbang you, while you run backwards firing your weapon furiously. The graphics are definitely very nice for 2004 (although I think Half-Life 2 and Far Cry probably outdo it considerably). If anything in the level moves, you pretty much need to shoot it.

Oh, and the gun that shoots shurikens and lightning? It’s awesome.

Yesterday’s Zero Punctuation featured Painkiller, a first-person shooter from 2004 that somehow flew under my radar. He seemed highly appreciative of the fact that it was an FPS cut from the same mold as Doom, Doom II and Serious Sam, with the shooting action being its primary focus. It certainly sounded appealing to me, so I made a note to check it out at some point.

Today, I logged onto the Steam website and beheld the following:

Well, I guess that’s a far better endorsement than anything the major gaming websites could dream up :D

I think I love you.