This fall was a big season for console games – basically every major release of the year came in the last 2-3 months, and very few blockbusters debuted outside the fall season. All of the blockbuster sequels are on an annual, November release schedule at this point, and this past month or two saw heavyweights like Call of Duty, Uncharted, Assassin’s Creed, Elder Scrolls, Gears of War, Zelda, Marvel vs Capcom, and the Batman franchise release new entries. Fall has always been a popular release target, with the hopes of a small price cut for Christmas boosting sales after the real fans already jumped in, but this year has really been lopsided.
I’m the kind of fan who believes that games have the potential for art, even if they don’t all realize it, and as such I had reason to be skeptical of the fall schedule from the start – There is no original game in the entire schedule. Every single major release has been a sequel, if not the third or fourth or fifth entry in a series. That’s not necessarily terrible, and plenty of my favorite games have been sequels (MGS4, to name just one, is one of the greatest games of all time), but the trend of game developers cranking out sequels rather than working on new properties concerns me as a consumer looking for works with more artistic content. What’s even more concerning is how these games have been received.
So what did the reviewers have to say about this fall lineup? Here’s IGN’s article on the topic, with a spoileralert title of “Was Fall 2011 the Best Season in Gaming History“. I don’t have a huge problem with many of the games (I also haven’t played a majority of them, so I refrain from mentioning those), but some of the scores really don’t reflect the major flaws in the games, and the criticism reflects a lack of perspective on the season as a whole. Some of my biggest gripes: 8.5 for Assassin’s Creed: Part 4, a game which, in my experience, has the buggiest multiplayer of any game I’ve ever played (it wavers in and out of being completely unplayable, and often freezes to the point of needing a hard reset… a truly grave offense given that Part 3 had the same issues but less frequent). A 9.0 for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3: a sequel to a sequel that’s seen a spinoff, but it has added remarkably little to the multiplayer experience in two renditions, the campaign mode’s story reads even on paper as if it was written by an ADD seventh grader from a military family after a sugar binge, and the main addition to the franchise still isn’t even functional. Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 adds 12 characters to the game before it, nothing more, and got the same 8.5 as it’s predecessor. Battlefield 3 received a 9 despite the fact that the reviewer described the campaign as forgettable, and the multiplayer takes hours of grinding to achieve parity with your opponents, and was so buggy that hundreds of players were banned within weeks of release for exploiting glitches. Many of the other games on the list suffer from questionably high scores, but my gripes are less concrete, more along the lines of “how can adding almost nothing to a good game yield a higher score” sort of gripes.
Does this deserve a 9?
The problem of inflated reviews for entertainment on websites that make their money advertising for entertainment isn’t new or unique to console games, but there’s a disturbing trend in game criticism to actually berate critical reviews. IGN recently ran a piece where they got a psychologist professor of psychology psychology major to look at scores on Metacritic, and have him corroborate their complaints that too many users are giving Modern Warfare 3 a zero with some cold hard science. The student seems to understand the user complaints better than IGN –
reviews suggest that there is at least a significant minority of players who feel that the Call of Duty franchise is no longer delivering along those long-held gaming values of originality, innovation, what-have-you
Seems like a valid complaint to me, and when all anybody wants to do is give the game a 10, I feel like I’d give Call of Duty a 0 as well (Full disclosure: I have never reviewed anything on Metacritic. And I’d give call of duty a 7). When the media charged with critiquing games is minting every big-budget release as a 9 or a 10 just for being playable, can we really expect more discretion from anonymous users on Metacritic? And it isn’t just IGN, though I focus on them here.
The industry really has no critical perspective on games as a medium, as component pieces of a large entertainment medium that will keep pumping out derivative works if we pay for them and review them favorably, and it’s not doing much for the argument that the field can produce an experience with artistic merits. It definitely still can, but the November blockbusters aren’t heading in the right direction, and I’d appreciate it if at least one mainstream site would acknowledge that. End rant. I’m off to play Catherine for a third playthrough.
danielmarkmiller.net 
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