From The Editors: Games Are Hard Work Too

Games Are Hard Work Too

From The Editors

From The Editors is Resolution Magazine’s weekly “what it says on the tin” column. This week, Daniel Lipscombe’s been thinking about reviews.

SO IT’S about time I backed up Lewis with this editors’ column, particularly as it was my idea. And what a week to start. There’s been previews galore from an EA event early last week, plenty of games to play and one more review backlash involving our friends at Eurogamer. Which review? Well, you can’t see it any more, but it was a review by Quintin ‘Quinns’ Smith of the new expansion for Age of Conan.

Now I’m not going to sit here and defend or lynch Quinns, but I would like to take time to talk about reviews on the whole. At Resolution, we take our reviews very seriously, sometimes to the point where Lewis and I will speak to a writer for a good while about something as tiny as the score. Whether we like it or not, that little number at the end of a review means the world to some – and a livelihood to others.

All work; no play?

But reviewing games, despite what some might say, can be tricky. In a perfect world we would receive games with plenty of time to play and scrutinise every inch of the latest releases. Unfortunately things get in the way. Publishers may not receive enough copies themselves, consoles and PCs break down, and postal strikes – well – strike.

When Red Faction: Guerrilla dropped the the letterbox at Resolution Towers, it arrived very early. Lewis managed to play through the campaign in its entirety and even played for a few hours online with the developers themselves. This allowed him to write a solid and in-depth review, but what if we can’t do either of those things?

Sometimes games arrive with an astonishingly small amount of time to spare, yet they still need to be played and written about before the embargo drops. As if you didn’t know, running a successful website is at least partially about traffic – we need those deft fingers of yours to find us through any means and read our wonderful writers’ prose. Without you, we cease to exist. Many readers will look for that first review: they will wait for the embargo to drop and pounce on any site that has the lowdown on the game they so desperately want.

Many games today require hours of play before a review can be written; this is something we try to do every time. We don’t have a policy that we must finish all games before writing about them, but on the occasions where we don’t complete a title, for whatever reason, we aim to always be transparent about this.

Regardless of embargoes and finishing times, reviews are always fickle. A case in point would be the reviewer that tells you, “it doesn’t get any better than this” when they score something a perfect mark. That is until the sequel is reviewed a year later and improves on the system, again receiving a full mark.

Ultimately reiewers are human – at least, ours are – and humans suffer from opinions. This is exactly what a review is: an opinion. We play games how we always play them, we decide if they look pretty, sound fancy and keep us entertained, and then we bring you that opinion. Sometimes we don’t have time to look at every single challenge, sometimes we feel a game is pretty dire four hours in and that feeling never changes, and sometimes we get it right.

What I’m trying to say is: no matter who is reviewing a game, they are a gamer in their heart. They don’t want to give a low score any more than you want to read one. They also adore games with every inch of their being, and are writing about games rather than something far more financially vaible because of this love. Sometimes even the best of us may get it wrong – but we’re only human, after all.