Normally I try not to do this column too often considering I certainly understand the problems of deadlines, space limitations, and the ever popular crappy game that you just can't finish because it's so freaking broken! But in this case I made an exception because this review is of the stellar Street Fighter IV and it seems that someone at Hardcore Gamer Magazine is nipping at the crazy juice. When I read this in a meta-review break I was like WTF?
"If there’s one gripe I can find with this title—and believe me, it’s exactly one—it’s the issue of the game’s unlockable content. This is a fundamental problem not exclusive to this game, and it centers around the fact that the audience for Street Fighter is much older than it used to be. Sure, there are new gamers, young and old, being welcomed to the fold each and every day, but this game was meant to get back a lot of the older players that the genre had left behind.
As older players, our time is more limited than it used to be, so when you lock half of the game’s playable cast behind the Arcade mode, it tends to chafe. Furthermore, when you create a challenge mode that unlocks incentives which are average at best (icons, player titles, and the ever-riveting concept art!), you’re bordering on insulting. Namco, the notorious king of pointless unlock criteria, has gotten better by this by tying its current games’ mission modes to a bevy of visual character customization content, and making its characters brain-dead easy to unlock—many in a matter of seconds. Even Sega’s Virtua Fighter gets it right: all characters are unlocked at start, but with novel game modes that help you grow as a player and are unique and fun to boot. Compared to these companies’ efforts, Capcom looks to be behind the curve… though to be fair, they’re nowhere near approaching Nintendo’s Smash Brothers ludicrousness.
It’s true that sometimes players will find themselves between opponents, and there should be material on the disc that allows them to amuse themselves during that time. However, this is the wrong way to go about it. Don’t force us to play your game the way you want us to in order to get access to your content, and more to the point, don’t hide boring content behind hard challenge missions. Unlock your essential content from the get-go, and then build on that with creative modes and incentives. The locked character issue is mildly more problematic on the Xbox 360, which won’t let you get Achievements if you download a save file to quickly get the characters unlocked. Even so, I expect full-saves to crop up soon for both versions, and be thoroughly abused once they do. "Hardcore Gamer Magazine.
Has Racewing (?), been playing fighting games for the past ten years? This is pretty standard faire. Other than the aforementioned awesome VF5. EVERY OTHER SINGLE FIGHTING GAME has a similar setup. When i saw the unlock list posted on various other websites like IGN, Giant Bomb, and Gamespot. I pretty much just nodded and decided that I was going to have to at least TRY every character in the game to get the character I wanted, Akuma. So what? It adds longevity to the game. I don't mind... The alternative is NOT as he points out to have them all unlocked at the start but to have us pay for unlock keys like they are doing with the alternate costumes. At least I doubt it will work any other way; considering the state of the industry right now.
Not that this is my issue. My issue is with a three paragraph rant and still give the game a 4.5/5 and then the reviewer disclaims the whole thing by saying that this is all he could complain about. So instead of taking .5 points off for your nativity about how fighting games are setup. Perhaps, he should have just sucked it up and given it a 5/5 like his "second opinion" reviewer did. Oh, perhaps that's why they have a second reviewer so they both can have arbitrarily different scores.
The explanation that this is supposed to appeal to older gamers is hysterical. According to IGN it takes around 10 min a character to unlock them all. So if you don't have an hour or so to unlock characters perhaps you don't have the time to play the game.
As a reviewer it's our responsibility to give everything the proper weight and time in our reviews. It's easy to harp on things you don't like but in an otherwise awesome game it's pretty irresponsible to let your own uninformed personal opinion to drive more than 25% of your review.
1 comment:
As someone who actually knows him and knows what he likes and what he doesn't, I can definitely vouch for his reasons for writing the review down like he did. I'm actually laughing at you for bitching about him shaving off .5 off the review for paying for unlocks (and to be honest, a good majority of these alternate getups are headscratchers, at best). And to question how long he's been at this gig? The guy's been a Street Fighter fan since the original II back in '91. I'm sure he knows exactly what he's talking about.
My advice to you: Shut up and color.
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