Amusingly bad reviews

[Skykid]

I Know What I'm Talking About Best Game Journalism Knowledge Quiz

1) You're writing a review on a new vertical 2D shoot'em'up
A. Compare to Ikaruga
B. Do not compare to Ikaruga

2) Sine Mora is..
A. The greatest shooter
B. One minor patch away from becoming pretty good

3) Gradius V is ___ ____
A. Too short
B. Too long

4) Regarding difficulty
A. The infinite continues make it too easy
B. Without infinite continues it would be impossible

[guigui]

5) Regarding length and story ...
A. 25 minutes to clear the game is too fast, latest FPShooter gives 45+ hours of action packed gameplay
B. Scenario is not convincing enough, why do I have to save the earth again ?

[KAI]

5) Graphics...
A. 2D full HD, for retro gamers.
B. 3D, but not as good as Crysis 3.

[trap15]

Sine Mora is the new Ikaruga. It's the nec plus ultra of shmups.

Hnngh. I think you're right. I'd prefer if they just stuck with Ikaruga though, at least that game isn't horrible.

[DocHauser]

Was looking through some scans of the old UK Sega Saturn and Sega Dreamcast Magazines...


http://www.outofprintarchive.com/articl ... mcast.html

http://www.outofprintarchive.com/catalo ... azine.html

Lots of material there, such as...

You might be able to squeeze about an hour's worth of enjoyment out of GigaWing, but we seriously doubt it (35%)

Cannon Spike: A complete waste of time and effort...the game is incredibly easy to finish. Switch the game onto the easy setting and you can plough through all ten of the levels in little over ten minutes. (54%)

Gunbird 2: Despite feeble attempts, this game fails to deliver in almost all departments. (51%)

Whereas, say, Gigawing took nothing more than 10 minutes to finish, Mars Matrix takes a great deal longer.

Surprisingly, they gave Mars Matrix a pretty positive review (74%).

[DocHauser]

From the Saturn link above, the Radiant Silvergun review...

http://www.outofprintarchive.com/articl ... M35-1.html

We get flooded with Japanese shoot 'em ups every few months, and most of them are rubbish...right out of nowhere, Treasure has revived the flagging shoot 'em up genre.

Ah yes, all those terrible Japanese shmups on the Saturn. Unless they're talking about Steam Heart's, I suppose...

[TransatlanticFoe]

Galactic Attack:

http://www.outofprintarchive.com/articl ... SM3-1.html

Two paragraphs on it having 2D graphics, one explaining the tate option and another bemoaning the lack of shooters on the Saturn. Yet still it gets a decent score even though there's barely any mention of the game itself.

[DocHauser]

Two paragraphs on it having 2D graphics...

The review for In The Hunt is a bit like that as well:

Admittedly the graphics look a bit dated...It's not your spectacular 3D 'check out the new technology' kind of game.

[Observer]

The funny thing is that those "2D dated graphics" still hold up damn well today compared to the "3D check out the new tech" bullshit.

That RayForce/Galactic Attack one is hilarious when you factor you are NOT killing lifeforms but machines controlled by an AI. The guy didn't even bother to check what little story is available. Plus it suddenly goes and calls it "Layer Section", I have no idea wth the guy wrote in there. lol, "a bit more nineties". Nothing makes sense in there, did these mags even have editors to proof read?

[BareKnuckleRoo]

That Giga Wing one is the worst thing I've read all month.

[moh]

That Giga Wing one is the worst thing I've read all month.

what was worse than it from last month?

[Softdrink 117]

This has probably been posted already, but I can't resist. I'm not even sure it's legitimate-- the notion that people might actually think this way is incredibly hard to comprehend.
http://www.the-nextlevel.com/features/e ... cism.shtml
Enjoy.

[AntiFritz]

I hope that is a troll article.

[DocHauser]

The sad thing about that Dreamcast Magazine is that I actually bought it from time to time. Even then I used to think the reviewers were idiots. Martin Mathers and Alex Warren seemed to be the main offenders. Check out the '2nd Opinion' at the bottom of the Street Fighter III: Double Impact review:

http://www.outofprintarchive.com/articl ... ne8-2.html

[Lord Satori]

the notion that people might actually think this way is incredibly hard to comprehend.

Lol, that's a brilliant way of putting it. This statement can apply to so many situations in life it's not even funny.

[DocHauser]

Martin Mathers (who wrote that GigaWing review) is now reviewing games for the 360. He reviewed Sine Mora! The first thing he does is slag off Cave games!

http://www.360-gamer.com/review/3425/review-sine-mora

(He also gave Fez 10/10.)

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Martin Mathers (who wrote that GigaWing review) is now reviewing games for the 360. He reviewed Sine Mora! The first thing he does is slag off Cave games!

On the plus side, it's nice to see the game review industry is open to hiring even the severely mentally retarded.

I hope that is a troll article.

It is, this line is the giveaway:

"we can force Atari to change the colors in Ikaruga to blue and orange, to avoid any further harm"

They're already hued blue and reddishorange.

[Vyxx]

Martin Mathers (who wrote that GigaWing review) is now reviewing games for the 360. He reviewed Sine Mora! The first thing he does is slag off Cave games!

http://www.360-gamer.com/review/3425/review-sine-mora

Mainly, it's because it falls squarely into a genre that's been labelled 'Bullet Hell' shooters thanks to developers like CAVE - games that take the shoot-'em-up concept and then use patterns of fire so intense, you need insane reflexes to make it through in one piece. Such gameplay means it's about as niche a genre as you can get, since anyone outside the fanbase rarely wants to play what's essentially sadomasochism in digital form.

Delicious tears.

[hail good sir]

ball

[Skykid]

The sad thing about that Dreamcast Magazine is that I actually bought it from time to time. Even then I used to think the reviewers were idiots. Martin Mathers and Alex Warren seemed to be the main offenders. Check out the '2nd Opinion' at the bottom of the Street Fighter III: Double Impact review:

http://www.outofprintarchive.com/articl ... ne8-2.html

Wow, I don't even...

[Kyper]

A little off-topic, but the name Martin Mathers sounds familiar. Was he that person who counter-stopped Virtua Cop on some TV show?

[ciox]

The sad thing about that Dreamcast Magazine is that I actually bought it from time to time. Even then I used to think the reviewers were idiots. Martin Mathers and Alex Warren seemed to be the main offenders. Check out the '2nd Opinion' at the bottom of the Street Fighter III: Double Impact review:

http://www.outofprintarchive.com/articl ... ne8-2.html

That is legendary... reading that feels like one more piece from the puzzle of why SF3 was buried.
Also, Oro has both arms.

[null1024]

The sad thing about that Dreamcast Magazine is that I actually bought it from time to time. Even then I used to think the reviewers were idiots. Martin Mathers and Alex Warren seemed to be the main offenders. Check out the '2nd Opinion' at the bottom of the Street Fighter III: Double Impact review:

http://www.outofprintarchive.com/articl ... ne8-2.html

That is legendary... reading that feels like one more piece from the puzzle of why SF3 was buried.
Also, Oro has both arms.

Reading that second bit hurt me. The first one hurts a little [even though the "too many games" thing probably the most common complaint about SF at the time and it was true, getting multiple SF games/revisions in a year was a bit much. SFIII was buried because there were too many SF games at the time], but the second one was just "why are you even reviewing it if you don't like 2D fighters". It's like a person who despises FPSes doing a review on one.

[z0mbie90]

Well ofc why have a game like Street Fighter III on a dreamcast when it can be runned on an Nintendo 8bit system eh, Dreamcast is for super modern 3D games guy did't you know that.

Well jokes aside, some of these game reviewers don't even know shit about games. Even today if the game don't have super A graphics or Call of Duty/Halo like multiplayer it sucks!

[Skykid]

The first one hurts a little

It's all completely atrocious. Like all SF games, III may have taken a little time to get cooking, but 2nd Impact was superb. There are aspects of it I preferred to 3rd Strike.

Also, in that pros (and specifically) cons section:

"Hands up who hates 2D graphics?"

Those guys should be burned at the stake.

[DocHauser]

On the plus side, I fired up SFIII: 2nd Impact on MAME earlier and, looking through the service menu, I discovered that it had a widescreen option. I wasn't even aware of it before. It looks pret-ty sweet too, I have to say. So at least one good thing has come from reading those reviews

[DocHauser]

Another edition of the UK DC mag has been uploaded to Out of Print Archive...

http://www.outofprintarchive.com/catalo ... zine4.html

Alex Warren is at it again in the SFA3 review...

...this is the sort of game which should stay banished from the glorious realms of the Dreamcast. Street Fighter was a great game on the SNES but on the Dreamcast it's like a minnow swimming with the sharks of Soul Calibur and Ready 2 Rumble. Anyone foolish enough to spend money on this deserves to suffer for their stupidity.

There are similar comments in the Marvel vs Capcom review. Elsewhere in the mag, he declares Ready 2 Rumble his game of 1999.

Not much shmup action in this edition, apart from a quick import review of Giga Wing (35%, calls it 'Giga Wings') and a brief preview of Bangai-O ('released in December, and will probably leave you wondering why on earth [Treasure] bothered. You see, it is hardly next generation and doesn't exactly push the Dreamcast to its limits').

[Skykid]

^ I tried to look back on this retrospectively, to the time when the DC was fresh, and attempted to place myself in their shoes. It makes no difference, though. If I'd read those comments then, I still would have considered those "journalists" unfit for any purpose except being ground up for lawn fertiliser. What a bunch of fucking goof-offs.

I'm really glad OOP is archiving their work, it deserves to hang over their heads for the rest of their lives.

[TransatlanticFoe]

I'm going through my old GamesMaster mags, discovered in my parents' loft. Anything 2D was rounded criticised for not being jerky, low-framerate poorly textured 3D - because that was new and exciting at the time. Bizarrely, the exception is Capcom's 2D fighters. Some of the writign, complete with basic mistakes about the games themselves, is appalling. There's basically no shmup reviews outside of the 16 bit era and anything which involves shooting gets called a shoot 'em up instead (from Duke Nukem 3D and Hexen through to X-Wing vs TIE Fighter and Wing Commander). I think they finish just shy of the Dreamcast release, but it's definitely all about the fancy graphics (for the time) in old mags.

[Cagar]

This has probably been posted already, but I can't resist. I'm not even sure it's legitimate-- the notion that people might actually think this way is incredibly hard to comprehend.
http://www.the-nextlevel.com/features/e ... cism.shtml
Enjoy.

Good stuff