‘Boring’, ‘trite’, and ‘irritating’ - all totally subjective.
You think a writer who is writing an opinion of a thing should somehow not use subjective terms?
Reviews should include what then? Measurement of framerate? Numbers of lootable items encountered per hour?
Those are objective things, but who cares?
I tell you what, I’ll do you a favour: you say here exactly when John is permitted to use “gruesome” when writing about a game, and I’ll email him personally to make sure he does what he’s told.
No, you guys don’t understand, it’s John Walker FFS. He’s not right. Stop defending him!
It shouldn’t be totally subjective, completely unmoored from some objective description of the game. Listing adjectives isn’t good criticism.
Listing adjectives isn’t good criticism.
Which is a subjective opinion of yours. That’s fine, but all you have done here is say “I don’t like it.” with a 1000 words instead of 4.
That is exactly the thing you are taking Mr. Walker to task for.
"You can choose to focus on three aspects, combat, tech and biotics, which correspond to fighting, mechanics and magic. Each has its own (samey) skill tree and you can put abilities together in groups of three, and then switch between the groups on the fly. I began by putting everything into biotics, but then running out of uses for skill points there (when you’ve maxed out an ability, it’s a waste of time really to start on another that does almost the same) and so have improved the passive skills in the other sections. I focused on pistols, sniper rifles and biotic Pull and Throw, which can be used together for fun combos.
"In play, this works out like any other third-person action game really, except with the ability to blast baddies into the sky for entertainment. Headshots, ducking in and out of cover, sitting back and letting rival enemy groups beat each other up for a bit… You know the score, and it’s all delivered well enough. "
That is just from the first 1/3 of the review! Yes, there are also swatches of opinion, interjections of opinion, perhaps even curmudgeonly ejaculations of opinion along with descriptions etc… but that is literally a game’s writer’s job.
Saying that is has no descriptions of the game is manifestly untrue.
Did you actually read that thing before citing it?
I have no idea what Mr. Walker did to personally offend you, but your criticism (as you had laid it our here) seems entirely disconnected from reality.
But obviously Walker doesn’t only write paragraphs like that.
it reads like it’s written by someone who cares more about venting his considerable spleen than informing his readers.
totally subjective, completely unmoored from some objective description of the game.
Then when confronted with large tracts from the article you chose, you move the goalposts.
Again, the only things you have expressed here is “I don’t like it.” and “His style isn’t how I would have done it.” That’s fine, but that is all you have managed to say.
But I was critiquing the paragraph, not the article; I didn’t shift the goal posts at all. That paragraph doesn’t belong in a professional review, for the reasons I gave (to which there was more than ‘I don’t like it’, whether you choose to see it or not).
Oddly, a plurality of highly successful reviewers across virtually all entertainment lanes seem to have missed that memo from the Department of Professional Writing of Opinions.
It is a common construct for reviewers from Siskel and Ebert to Car and Driver to Camille Paglia to Gordon Ramsay to Yahtzee.
Oh no. You used the S word. Down your glass!
I hope this thread doesn’t come across as the whole community (what’s left) piling on the new guy.
But for context, the whole Subjective VS Objective game reviews thing has been done to death, been gone through dozens of times, and if you are looking for Subjective game reviews then RPS is going to do nothing but annoy you.
And I quote: First: Rock, Paper, Shotgun, has no desire or aim for objectivity.
RPS was basically founded on the idea that writing about games should be more than just listing objective facts and should be more interesting and also (sometimes) more deep.
Lots of the original guys have left now, but that basic philosophy hasn’t been watered down too much, and John is one of the original guys.
As for the paragraph you quoted, what those adjectives do is make the piece more interesting to read. I don’t think that particular paragraph is supposed to be funny, but it’s definitely more entertaining to read than “the start of the game is dull, with bad writing and a bad UI”.
"Watching the original Mamma Mia! in 2008, I had something approaching an out-of-body experience. Having initially scoffed at everything from the contrived join-the-pop songs plot to Pierce Brosnan’s unique vocal stylings, I felt my feathery inner self depart from my dour exterior and start dancing in the aisles. One minute I was a miserable critic; the next, everything had gone pink and fluffy. As I said at the time, never before had something so wrong felt so right."
Don’t get hung up on the word ‘subjective’. Of course, reviews, being opinions, are by definition subjective, but if you think that precludes one from criticising a review for being too subjective, then you are being obtuse. There’s a difference between saying ‘The novel is a hideously dull trawl through page after page of verbal excrement’ and ‘The novel is peopled by shallow, implausible characters in a meandering, uneventful plot that goes nowhere’, for example. That it’s too subjective is just one problem with the paragraph I’ve admittedly been banging on far too much about anyway: It’s poorly worded (‘a gruesome trudge’ might be a good phrase for walking through an abattoir, or reading American Psycho, but for playing the opening hours of a mediocre sci-fi action game it is not) and gives you no information about the game. Someone above said it tells you the game is ‘boring’, etc. No, it tells you John found it boring, and that’s all. It exists for no discernible reason other than that John wanted to vomit out his displeasure at having played this game he didn’t like. It’s ugly, unprofessional, and occurs far too often in his writing.
That’s a fine opening paragraph. ‘An out of body experience’ is a nice, pithy way of saying the movie deeply confounded his expectations and his inbuilt aversion to films such as this; ‘…contrived join-the-pop songs plot’ is a clever play on words that neatly sums up the film’s biggest flaw in the sentence’s dependent clause before segueing nicely into the main clause where he elaborates on the ‘out of body experience’, and ‘pink and fluffy’ are perfectly apt descriptors for an experience that transcended his critical faculties, evoking the mild embarrassment and indignity of enjoying something that felt so right despite him knowing intellectually that it was so wrong.
It’s ugly, unprofessional, and occurs far too often in his writing.
Maybe just stop reading John’s writing? Other writers are available.
So calling enjoying a film “an out of body experience” is “nice” and “pithy”, but calling something a gruesome trudge is “poorly worded”, unless it’s a 100% literal description of walking through an abbatoir?
Honestly, just get over it. Stop reading John’s work and get on with your life.
Don’t be so wantonly thick.
but again, it’s not mean or moaning or negative in tone, it’s just fun.