A site that starts with a K and rhymes with “yeah right” has proclaimed Destiny as dead. Huh? How does this work? Oh, game journalist flip their proverbial shift keys over this idea that Destiny is some mainstream game that appeals to no one and is boring because there is in total 7 enemies, meanwhile the rest of collective society shakes their head that the disconnect between review scores and reality is so deep.
Right now on Metacritic, the user score on some of the consoles is good, as in the 6s, which is unheard of on Metacritic the home where every game is a 1. Right now, very few games in the user score area pull more than a 6 and the vast majority of them are games like Shovel Knight and Marvel Heroes for some reason. Not that Shovel Knight isn’t pretty much the epitome of a great game.
I think there is some problem we have and it’s a scary problem. We’re no longer satisfied I supposed with the status quo. No one is angry that Destiny is just Halo with some RPG elements. No one is angry that the amount of time spent hiding from enemies outweighs the time you’re shooting. Nah, they’re mad it’s literally a shooter and doesn’t give you some crazy off the wall game on the side.
Until we have a revolution in controllers, you’re not going to get a different game. WiiU is literally the best console on the market and is still sold out everywhere that I go to, the local GameStop doesn’t have a very big WiiU section because well, all of the WiiU stuff is sold out all of the time, so they can’t keep enough stock to keep the display wider. You know why the WiiU is awesome? It has a controller that increases the depth of available control schemes, which increases the available types of games that can be made.
Look guys, there is only so much you can do with a controller. Sure, games like Shovel Knight nail side scrolls like Gordon Ramsay nailing a Beef Wellington, but unless it’s perfect, a reproduction doesn’t cut it, and that’s just the reality we have to accept. Until a new control scheme comes along, like the Oculus, or the Wii Gamepad actually being sustainable and brought into the next-next-next-next gen of consoles here in about 20 years when the PS4 becomes dated, there isn’t much to do.
So people need to just settle down and be happy pointing their trigger at something and shooting. Reading these Destiny reviews is reading a really drawn out “yeah this is all good but, it’s a shooter and it’s made by Bungie, which isn’t an indie studio, so yeah 6.0!”
Maybe we need to standardize reviews. Maybe take on an idea like food blogging, where there are several key components that every dish has like smell and taste, and just focus on what makes a game fun, versus what makes a game trendy. I think a review should be about how much fun is had in the game, how much you lose yourself, how much you want to keep playing versus if it’s the next Shakespeare or if it’s going to revolutionize gaming or some arbitrary bullshit.
That’s all for today, tomorrow I’ll talk about bacon or some other pop culture thing.
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