Video Game Reviews 101.

Alright d00ds. I'm back. I've actually found that writing these once-every-2-day bloggerings to be fairly easy to do. Actually, I'm beginning to realize it's because I can just, literally, stream of consciousness the whole damn thing and instead of going "man, that whole thing made no sense," I can be all like "*****" and then slap a period on that baby and call it good.

*****.

OK, that aside, I've had a lot of fun with my newly established blog, and it's clear that I love attention, so I'll take some of your tips in mind and implement them in my writing. If you have any particular topic that you'd like me to froth about, feel free to email, or post up some suggestions in the comments.

+1 for *****.

Anyways, today I promised that I would be talking about Aion, but I want to briefly talk about the industry that reviews these things first. So you'll get Aion... just not today? Yeah.

Jerry Holkins over at Penny Arcade once said (loosely paraphrased) that the reviewing approach employed by many game critics is generally a very ****ty way to review games, and, personally speaking, I have to agree. The way I look at all of this is equivalent to the concept of other 'reviewable' things, like Books, Movies and Music. Generally speaking here, people don't review junk that they don't finish completely from front to back. I don't think anyone can cite a time when some Literary critic was like "oh ****, I read the first two chapters of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and I think I can extraplolate the quality of the entire series from it." He would probably (correctly) extrapolate that the series is awesome, because it is, but that's not the point. Going with a different example, I don't think anyone would trust a CD review where the dude was like "well, I really liked Sk8r Boi, so I just listened to that 12 times in a row instead of her other songs, and now I can say that Avril Lavigne is a genius." Doesn't happen. Thus, does anybody find it abso-*******-lutely bizarre that we're allowed to do that in video games?

In reality, part of this has more to do with the genre rather than some force of reviewers with downs. Games are designed to take at least 30+ hours to complete, and no reviewer has that kind of time to dedicate to playing a game unless he was planning to play the game forever and ever anyways. Let's do a little excercise before I go any further: I want you to imagine that you are forced to play video games at least 8 hours a day, 365 days a year. Now I want you to play a new game every four days, and I want you to finish each game within that time span of four days. You must also take part in every aspect of the game, including that random fishing (WHY DOES EVERY RPG HAVE FISHING!?) activity that nobody cares about. Can you imagine how long you can keep this going? I'm willing to bet not very long, and anyone in the industry will furiously nod their head in agreement with you.

Fact is, books, movies and music are all designed to take you on an everything-included trip of the creator's mind as they use their artistic license to force feed you "how they see the world." Your typical review of said force feedery is to taste what it is they're stuffing into your mental orifices and then decide if it is indeed a tasty treat. If you find that it does not appeal to your particular tastes, some more intelligent critics (there are very few of these) will analyze the nature of the creole that they are eating and then perhaps suggest that an individual with a different palate would definitely appreciate this, even if this particular critic does not. Stupid critics will never admit that they 'lack the range' to appreciate all things, and will therefore denounce the **** out of whatever it is they can't bring themselves to like, or if everyone else likes it, they'll simply hop on that gravy train and lie out the butt. By example, pretentious ******** might call Gran Torino a 'cultural tour de force,' but I say it stops short of that because someone doesn't know how to cast some real Asian actors, so the two Vietnamese kids had the emotional range of my penis (up, down, hard and soft, but never happy). Don't even get me started on reviews that rely on any form of corporate accountability.

Anyways, I got really side tracked here: MMORPGs are the toughest of games to 'properly' review because they take massive time sinks and the reviewer must have some form of mild schizophrenia. Some more learned readers might note that schizophrenia doesn't always suggest split personalities, but I'll say that that's not what Hollywood thinks, so you can shut up. Either way, the thing of MMORPGs is that they're designed to never be 'fully completed,' and they're designed to be enjoyed (not played; ENJOYED) in a plethora of different ways. For those of you who don't understand the distinction between enjoyed and played, I mean this in the sense that MMORPGs are designed for most players to not participate in every possible activity, rather, they are meant to choose, buffet style, what they like and don't like, and then run with that. The problem, therefore, is that a lot of MMO reviewers will base their reviews upon the first ten to twenty or so levels of the game, and then toss out an extrapolation that the rest of the game will be like this or that, but perhaps with flashier spells. Truth is, nobody's got the time to really play your stupid MMO all the way to endgame, because nobody has the time for that.

The media is constructed in such a way that everyone thinks we all need news on a daily basis. I could care less what kind of news it is, but for some reason we like to think that because we have so many great ways to communicate instantly, then we must... be communicating at all times. This is particularly true with news, in that we think that news must be happening every day, and if it isn't happening today, well, we've got to make something news-worthy. Music tends to be reviewed based upon the reviewer listening to CD about two to five times, trying to find meaning and derive enjoyment in different ways each time. Books are meant to read once, maybe twice, and then pondered upon for their cultural impact. Movies need only be watched once before the critic can then go out extolling the virtues ofUp, just because he cried in the beginning (who didn't? And Up was surprisingly good). All of the above 'reviewing methods' can be done in the time-span of a single day, whereas MMORPGs require us to spend an inordinate amount of time playing, just so we can lead the pack, but never stand on top of the mountain.

Thus, readers, I implore you, when listening to idiots reviewing MMORPGs, always take their preferences into mind, even if they are making themselves sound like the pinnacle of all video game judgementery (especially if this). MMORPGs are a very subtle beast, and in order for one to properly review them, my personal belief is that you must find a way to play your way through as many faucets of the game as possible; you must try to examine the game from as many sides as possible and, in the end, stop pulling arbitrary numbers or grades out of your ass to somehow encompass the entirety of your gaming experience. I really don't give a **** if Aion ranks an A or an 8.2 in your books; I'd like to know what your gaming history is, what you wanted from this game, and whether or not you made sure your avatar was super hot (THIS IS IMPORTANT).

*****.

(See what I did there?)

P.S. I'm trying to include images to keep the wall of text from critting you, but seriously, it's hard to find pictures for this kind of abstract crap.