Metareview: Brutal Legend

Except it was Ryan Davis who reviewed the game, Jenks.

The Giant Bomb review and the Joystiq review both seemed to hit on the same marks. If I were to get a star value to the Joystiq review based off of what they thought I would say it'd probably be in the neighborhood of 3/5.

Metacritic is a great tool but people have to understand it isn't an end-all means. I'd rather people just stick with a review site whom they tend to sort of agree on and go from that. I generally tend to agree with Giant Bomb's reviews and between it and Joystiq it was fairly clear I was just going to wait and rent Brutal Legend instead of spend the $60.

I think if most people actually read the review instead of just look at the score they would understand a lot more. However we live in a world where anything that isn't 5 stars is just "god-awful".

Jenks, I wish you were next to me, because I would hurt you.

I would hurt you bad.

Wait, so WiiSports Resort is 2 stars better than Brutal Legend? Hmmm, I've played each one and only BL blew me away. This is strange as Giant Bomb is usually on point.

Perhaps Ryan Davis was just bitter than he never made it as a rockstar and took his aggression out on Ozzy. Or maybe he's just wrong. Grrrr!!!

Damn r-word dot org'ed comment system.

3 stars is not a bad review, at all. 3 of 5 should not be translated to 60/100. That's just lazy translation on the part of the person doing the conversion. If it were a letter grade, that'd be a D minus, which means you'd be reserving 2 whole stars for different levels of failure. Unless you can demonstrate that all the review sites you're comparing it to use *50* as the average score, *which they don't*, then making 3 stars into 60 is just broken.

Seriously, find me any review system ever used anywhere where 3 stars was "bad".

It'd be like converting a 1up "C" into a 50, because it's "average" between 0 and 100.

Stop it.

"Try going back to school and convincing all your teachers that their grades for your papers were all just "opinions" and see how far that gets you."

Did...did you just try and compare video game reviews to homework?

Let me explain why you're wrong.

Do you understand why reviews are usually found in the editorial section of a newspaper or internet site? It's because the entire point of that section is to feature articles that are based on the editor's opinion. video game reviews are no different. There is no such thing as a review that is completely objective because people have different standards when it comes to anything in the entertainment world. Video games/movies/music/books are not like a math problem where there's only one way at looking at things, whether you like it or not people will have different opinions on what makes a good video game.

Besides, it's absolutely absurd to claim that a reviewer should not put his/her personal opinion in a review (even though that's the entire point). A reviewers job is to inform the people on whether they should spend their hard earned cash on a product. If you were in the shoes of whoever was writing that article would you be alright with giving a game a 4/5 or a 90% even though you felt the game was broken, or that certain aspects of the gameplay didn't work?

3 of 5 is not bad. 3 of 5 stars is "good" in any review system. It's just not "excellent". Converting 3 of 5 stars to "60" is dumb. If you take the end points as 0 and 100, respectively, then 3 would get you 50, as being in the dead center. That's a different dumb way to look at it. Think about this, if you convert 3 stars of 5 into "60", that means that 1 star is 20. So your entire range is 20-100. You've left out an entire fifth of your supposed range, so your score is actually 20-100, which normalizes a 60 to 48. Further, that necessitates that 5 stars is a zero width "100" So each other range covers 20 points, but 5 only covers 1.

It's just *dumb* to equate a star system to an equidistant numerical range. 3 stars should be 'average', so if you want to assume that letter grades correspond mathematically and that "C" is average, a 3 star review should be *75*, not *60*. 60 is a *D*.

This is all nonsense, anyway, since sites don't use the same scales, anyway.

At any rate, a star scale is more logarithmic than linear. Successive differences from 3 should be treated as larger gaps. 3 is average, 2 is poor, 1 is terrible, 4 is very good, 5 is outstanding.

In no reasonable system of approximation is a 3 star review the same as a D.

STOP

DOING

IT

"Real professional reviewers don't just say whatever they feel like..."

Point me in the direction of the work of a real professional video game reviewer, would ya? It'd be a refreshing change from the too-clever-by-half "writers" posing as video game bloggers.

Steve you fail at life.

The lowest score for Psychonauts was 70%.

The average for the Xbox version is 88%.

I myself never quite understood the Psychonauts love. It's got beautiful art direction and has very clever/witty writing. The gameplay has good variety but the gameplay itself I never found very good. Very floaty control, mediocre collision detection etc.

It wasn't a bad game by any means but at some point it attained some classic status I've never understood. I'm all for great writing and art design but at the end of the day the gameplay has got to be there.

The sub-par gameplay in Pyschonauts is what killed the game for me. I like to have a good story in a game, but if the gameplay is miserable or unpolished I'm not going to stick around to find out what the story is about.

I played the Brutal Legend demo the other night and really liked it, though. Except for the gimped steering on the car. I don't know why the hell anyone thought it was a smart idea to purposefully strangle the controls like that.
I'm still a bit hesitant because it supposedly turns into a full out RTS as you progress (which I find boring), but if the store I was at yesterday had it, I'd have probably picked it up instead of Dead Space Extraction.