Thread 725611827

How much did video game reviews actually matter in the 90s and 2000s? Did you ever not buy a game back then because a publication or reviewer you trusted said it was shit?

>>725611827 (OP)
I can only speak personally, but I did not give a shit about reviews for anything back then.

>>725611827 (OP)
Quite a bit. People formed their own opinions but the writers were reasonably charismatic and were able to find things that might not be possible on one’s own (e.g. playing through every pathway to find bugs, playing through to tell if a game was uncommonly short, checking localization to tell if a game was barely trying).

That time was marked by an increase in avant garde games like Army of Two, Portal, and WarioWare: Smooth Moves. Reviewers were more necessary than normal and the Gerstmann debacle broke the trust. GamerGate later broke games journalism entirely.

If you want to destroy your childhood and remember that time, go to gamespot.com now and weep.

>>725611827 (OP)
More then, because youtube and streaming so you could see the entire fucking game wasn't a thing .

>>725612732
Holy zoomoid
If you had gamespot in your childhood you shouldn't be on this site

8.8??????!!!!!!

>>725613179
You are a 40 man year old man obsessing over 30 year old men

>>725613350
he was 29 and a half you sick fuck

They didn't matter back then either, if you weren't a retard and knew to play and buy from the developers and genres that you liked. If you were paying attention even back in the late 1980s, you knew of scandals where publishers would yank precious ad revenue from magazines if magazines dared to give shitty reviews (wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Recall_(video_game) , http://www.defunctgames.com/history/7/in-the-beginning-there-were-no-reviews ) , so you knew that reviews were little more than paid advertisements for the past forty fucking years. There never was any kind of Siskel & Ebert of video games, in that there never was any reviewer that the common person was dimly aware of, much less give any kind of deference.

>>725611827 (OP)
Nintendo Power was pretty effective at conveying enough information about games they mentioned to tell me whether I’d like a game or not
I don’t remember any “actually no, I’m not going to buy that” decisions I made, though

>>725611827 (OP)
The thing about the gaming mags in the 90s and early 00s was that you could tell a game was shit anyway. Very rarely were the reviewers actually dishonest and misrepresented the games one way or another. Sometimes there might be a really oddball Japanese game that would get an unfair review because the reviewer didn't understand it.

As much as they do now. One review means nothing, unless you know the reviewers standards and agree with them but if the majority of reviews come to the same conclusions, there's probably something to it.

Back then reviewers wrote magazines, so either very talented writers or extremely passionate gamers wrote the articles and reviews. Another thing was back in the day gaming was ultra niche, normies didn't game and it was either for turbo nerds or children. So reviewers wrote for a very specific audience that mostly demanded similiar things. If a person whose judgment you trust says a game sucks, you won't ask your parents to buy it. There were mistakes, a local magazine gave Q3 Arena an overall 6/10 because it had no single player campaign and the following issue fans flooded their mails with hate so much that they had to apologize and had a different person rewrite the review (he gave it an 8 or something for the same reasons, mind you this was the most played game at the time). But in general people trusted game reviews a lot and made choices based on them.

>>725615468
I dissagree strongly. Reviewers back then at least played video games. Even played the video games they were reviewing.

>>725616141
Eh, not always. Pic related, you can tell the reviewer didn't even boot it up.

>>725611827 (OP)
No, reviews were just content shat out by magazines and websites to fill pages. I was quite young when I saw reviews for an Armored Core game that gave it a poor score because of "too much customization". That settled my opinion of professional reviews to the present day.

>>725616847
why are the worst magazine game reviews always british?

>>725611827 (OP)
Kinda, before the rise of the internet, magazines were legit the best way to find out about upcoming games, and as a kid, you had pretty limited spending options

>>725611827 (OP)
When I was a kid I heavily weighed IGN's opinion and visited other review sites, especially metacritic. I was fascinated with those IGN top 100 of all time lists.

Who was the guy that gave melee a 3.5/10

>>725613179
>mfw I’m 34 and remember GameSpot’s reviews as being the absolute pinnacle of authority on vidya quality
I think it was around the time they gave GTA IV a 10/10 is when I stated losing faith in their judgement.

>>725611827 (OP)
A lot more, but back then they at least pretended to be primarily about informing consumers rather than trying to dictate what their opinions/tastes should be. Now if you want that, you basically have to know which individuals you trust and seek them out, because anyone writing for a major gaming/tech publication is just there to feed into the industry.

I think people here are forgetting about rentals.
Back in the day, you could rent a game for a week for $1.

>>725620954
>$1
I sure don’t remember it being that cheap. But maybe there were some dollar rental places? Rentals were pretty awesome, though. The entire process of selecting media was always fun from start to finish.

>>725621084
My local video shop had cheap ass tuesdays where every movie or game was one dollarydoo (except new releases).

anyone else remember this magazine?

>>725613334
Ocho punto ocho XD

>>725611827 (OP)
It mattered a lot more BUT... you could reliably buy something from certain companies without even looking. I bought DRAKENGARD just cause it was published by square back then.

And dont forget, there was less random indie flood. You bought the new square or Blizzard game, and it basically had to be kinda decent.
Most releases for SNES were at minimum passable.

But you wouldnt look for niche stuff, and there were tons of quality games every year. So a bad review wont make you miss out.

>>725612282
Agreed. I think Black and White was what finally woke me up. Eagerly reading all those previews of 100% grade-a bullshit and rushing out to buy the greatest game ever made and it was so fucking disappointing I still feel the sting decades later and get mad

>>725611827 (OP)
Reviewers used to be a big deal who could move a lot of copies and got wined and dined a lot by publishers.
I think by the time the internet outcry over review scores was in full swing, they were already in heavy decline already. Most magazines folding due to subscriber bleed, internet journos rapidly just becoming headline clickbaiters where nobody even read anything other than the title and score. By that point you had a wide enough internet userbase that some gamefaqs forum comment had as much individual sway as journos.

And it's not like journos were ever good. Have some ass, because this industry was always ass.

>>725624290
for me it was reading reviews over games like Mega Man Battle Network 6, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, and other games I enjoyed in the past. I can get that reviewing BN titles year-on-year can get tiring, and it's different when you're a fan of a given series, but some of those review scores felt criminal or intentionally bashing a game down.

>>725621084
Yeah man, same. Walking into the store, looking at all the box art on the shelves, trying to pick just ONE for the weekend-it was an event. You’d spend more time picking something out than actually playing it sometimes. Nothing hit harder than renting a game based entirely on the cover and realizing it was absolute trash, but hey, you only spent a buck and a trip to the store. Still better than burning $70 on a digital preorder now based off some 9/10 review from a dude who played the tutorial and wrote an essay about "ludonarrative dissonance."

>>725613350
>man year

>>725611827 (OP)
In the 90s, absolutely nothing.
In the 2000s, a lot more stuff got aggressive "critical darling" treatment to the point it was a point of advertisement.

>>725611827 (OP)
EGM had good reviews. I guess I avoided buying Spawn:Armageddon because it apparently blew. Never tried it myself. Usually paid more attention to the highly rated games, but paid the most attention to whatever had a good demo back when game demos were more common in stores

K&L was okay at best desu

>>725611827 (OP)
There was this German game about dwarfs (the Wiggles iirc) which looked cool in ads but, the reviews were 6/10 or so.
The Kane & Lynch scandal was probably a turning point. And now broken turds like Outlaws get 7/10s.

>>725627573
EGM was the gold standard, simply because they made it a policy to tell publishers to go fuck themselves. Dan Hsu's very first EIC column was telling everybody that Capcom threatened to pull exclusives over a bad coverage, followed by a count of the ludicrous amount of Street Fighter cover stories they'd done and how that shit was going to stop. His second EIC column was about how they'd worked things out. They also did it with Assassin's Creed, saying the original game looked like shit in an E3 preview, then letting readers know that Ubisoft refused to send them review copies because of that.

>>725611827 (OP)
reviewers back in the day wernt afraid to piss off some publishers

>>725617176
British “people” went through two exoduses that expelled anyone of integrity to the US and anyone of daring to Australia. All that’s left are spineless psychopaths too lazy to even become serial killers despite wanting nothing but to do so

>>725616847
>>725628062
the duality of bri*ish man

>>725612732
>That time was marked by an increase in avant garde games like Army of Two, Portal, and WarioWare: Smooth Moves.
Bruh

Reviews mattered WAY more back then, before Youtubers and social media really took off you had video game sites like IGN, Gamespot, Gametrailers etc. People lost their minds when Jeff Gerstmann gave Twilight Princess *only* an 8.8.

>>725611827 (OP)
>How much did video game reviews actually matter in the 90s and 2000s?
Back then if you didn't buy game mags from corner kiosks, you didn't know what was happening in the industry. You actually had a CDROM and played the demos which came with the CDs if you were a poorfag. You read the articles in the mags two or three times, it was like a victoria's secret catalogue but for men. The dudes who wrote for those mags were actual gamers, not trustfundies or chosen because they colored their armpit hair the right LGASDF+ color.

tl;dr video game reviews were the only thing that mattered back then and video game journalist was the dreamjob for many young dudes