Who was the worst review source of 90s gaming?
>mega man review from a 90's british magazine.jpg
gayman in the cliton years
>>12115278I don't know why bongs hated Mega Man so muchIt's not an isolated case either, it happened in different bong magazines
>>12115269That's Gamepro, right? I don't think I've ever cared about review scores.
EGM
>>12115429Great Britain is a grey hell, so British hate joy as a result
>>12115429Mega Man X just can't compare to Soccer Kid.
>>12115269Next Generation / Edge
>>12115278Those should not even be counted.I wish we could have a game magazine thread on /vr/ without the thread getting derailed by those stupid things.
>>12115429Because it doesn't involve muslims and/ or men in short shorts prancing around a soccer field.
>>12115429>you want a game that doesn't have bullshit?>play zombies ate my neighbors
>>12115429Hating Mega Man X is bizarre.Hating it purely because of the difficulty is even more so. Isn't X kind of forgiving by NES/SNES platformer standards? There's a couple of gotchas but the worst that can happen is you haven to redo a level, you can't lose-lose the game and have to redo it all like was kind of the standard. Like 2 enemies and 2 hazards a screen, fairly easy-going pace, I was under the impression that X was a little on the easier side.
>>12115429American magazines would have stuff you disagreed with from time to time, but bongs were on a completely different level of retardation.
>>12115627>I wish we could have a game magazine thread without magazines
>>12115635
>>12115635Yet the Brits call it just "Zombies" and do edits like replacing the chainsaws of the masked men with axes that still buzz like chainsaws.
>>12115269hey bro can i get video essay link?
>>12115278>>12115627>>12115630>Legends fans when nobody gives a fat shit about Hideki Anno's Rock N Roll Megavangelion
>>12115429honestly though bike sections and a lot of the end bosses in those mega man games fucking sucked. All the X games I played were like that, especially X6 X7
>>12115630oi don't be shittin on me meganman footie lad
>>12115749>nintoddler
>>12115689>American magazines would have stuff you disagreed with from time to timeReminds me when Nintendo Power tried to change its review page to a Siskel/Ebert kind of thing but it was so unpopular people would write in letters saying how much it sucked and why should they even care what these two chucklefucks said, especially when the magazine's attempt at seeming unbiased was to include a disclaimer saying their opinions weren't endorsed by Nintendo Power or NoA (wink wink).
>>12115753the nostalgia blind audience not this specific onethe games are incredibly generic and dont offer anything that isnt done better in other action platformers
>>12115759got a scan?
>>12115269Bubsy 1 got good scores from magazine OP posted.
>>12115694They weren't game magazines, they were lads magazines parodying a video game magazine.
>>12115429Hating Mega Man X1 is the most objectively incorrect thing you can do.
>>12115269GameFan unironically. Great for previews, nice layouts and art, but critically very fanboyish in reviews.
>>12115736>review of x>omg is that legends!?being born after 9/11 should warrant a death sentence
>>12116479anon you cant advocate for the death of 30% of people currently alive
>>12116479>being born after 9/11 should warrant a death sentenceThis but with everybody who was born after the 70's
>>12116479God no, I don't want to fuck women my age.
>>12116705fuckin watch me
>>12115429MMX stomps the shit out of R-Type 3 or ZAMN, and I'm saying this as someone who dislikes most Mega Man games.
>>12115749>>12115765>no examplesAlmost like you know you'd be torn another asshole if you mentioned any.
>>12115429That's funny he uses ZAMN to dab on MMX lol. But yeah all the complaining about tedium and unfairness sounds a lot like the pathetic little shitstains begging for every Steam game to be nerfed.
>>12116993>MMX stomps the shit out of R-Type 3False, I like X more but R-Type 3 is excellent>ZAMNTrue, that game is overrated
>>12117085>True, that game is overratedHow so, it's barely rated at all. It just has a little cult following of people who played it in the 90s.
>>12115269Anything British, I might surmise. Which ones were shittalking Playstation before they suddenly decided that they actually liked it?>>12116126Didn't a lot of magazines give Bubsy 1 undeserved good scores before Bubsy 2 proved that Bubsy just wasn't that good?
>>12115459You FUCKING cunt.
>>12117540you show em anon
>>12115746Game that was literally not finished.
>>12115269>Who was the worst review source of 90s gaming?why worst why not best? y u such a negative nancyfor me the best was C&VGhere is somthing good to watch to cheer you the fuck up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZHVRZ5E4FQ
>>12115746Lol imagine if this game was made JUST to pander to brit mags!
>>12115269Game Informer. it was obviously just advertisement for the industry.
>>12116126They also gave great 2d rpgs a bad score just because it wasn't Final Fantasy VII
>>121178853D good2D badsimple as, m8
>>12117910>Literally spergin over a SGI station proof of concept tech demo not even running on n64.>Models don't even have textures.>SotN BAD BECAUSE 2D, SHUT UP MATE.
>>12115269Oh boy I love relitigating old game mag reviews. Will do an effort post later.
>>12117869would be funny but it wasn't released in europe for whatever reason
>>12115278Mega Man was bad though. Tonnes of problems in its controls, level design and general gameplay.
>>12115269Most american mags were awful. EGM were notorious for not playing games they reviewed - one person would play, while the other 3 guys would just watch and base their review on the other person playing.This was extremely obvious with reviews like Gimick on the NES where most of the panel just said "this is a kiddy game and it's too easy".
>>12115429I agree with all the words in that review. It is tedious. It's a mess. The controls and level design suck.But the score is too low. It's a 6 or 7 at best.
>>12115626Edge's reviews were the best we've ever had in the industry.They would actually use the full 10 point scale.They understood that 5 = average.They understood that a 6/10 game wasn't bad and that a 7/10 was good. etc
>>12117885I remember being surprised most magazines gave Breath of Fire 3 glowing reviews except for the official Playstation one that said the graphics could have been done on a Super Nintendo, and were "barely animated". Then again, almost every magazine slammed on the music. They just didn't like jazz.
>>12118041I thought it was a quality mag, although I started reading it in the mid 2000s. I'm sure I would be surprised by how unserious the tone was in these. Generally speaking, however, they always pointed me in the right direction.
>>12118041>>12118192My favorite EGM bad EGM review is Megaman Legends because one guy just hates everything about this kiddy game for kids and he is going to let you know it.
>>12118204>one guy just hates everything about this kiddy game for kids and he is going to let you know it.The bong review from Playstation Plus is basically this except cranked up to 11
>>12118204Now that I'm thinking about it, it is crazy how everyone called beat'em ups button mashers and I believed them. It's actually a quantum leap to start thinking about games in terms of what's happening mechanically, and for some hardcore kinds of games these reviews never made that leap back then either.I think it was GamePro who had rotating staff who would come on just to review games within their genre of expertise, then there was a couple main guys who picked up most of the popular stuff.
>>12115753Do these people actually speak English? What language is this?
1990s British videogame reviews have filtered many people over the years. Most of those journalists will have moved onto to different industries. Even today reviewing videogames is considered "infra dig" (below dignity), which it has never been able to grow out of unlike reviewing TV (which considered infra dig in the 1960s). They were right to predict that videogames still wouldn't be taken seriously in the future, and most everyone here actually agrees with that (or otherwise you'd be posting on /v/ instead of /vr/). Just look at how many paid off reviews there are.
>>12115419Based navigatr enjoyer
>>12118926True but the mags in the 80s and early 90s were still staffed by people who were into the subject.Marketing departments destoy anything they come into contact with. See the internet.
>>12118926Fun fact Clive Sinclair started out as a jounalist for technical electronics mags. The rot really was fullblown by the mid 90s though.
>>12118292based and hungover truth pilledBollocks is a great and underused word.
>>12115429Larry Bundy Jr. is always making fun of these. Safe to say they were by far the worst back then.
>>12115419>FFVII is overrated, FFVI and Wild Arms are better>Uses cheats to show endings>Lara Croft should have breast cancer>Donkey Kong Country is the best game from the 1990's>Bubsy is actually goodI think he was just ahead of his time.
>>12118926>it's ok that they were retarded faggots because...
>>12118991Guru Larry is a known nonce
>>12117085R-Type 3 has high production values but its actual gameplay is unfair bullshit. I'd like it much better if its gameplay wasn't so bullshit.>>12117081If there's any game I'd call tedious, it'd be ZAMN. MMX may have some pushback, but ZAMN involves tons of unfun running around while grating music plays in the background.
>>12117869Nah it was mostly for the latin american market (which was big in the 90s)
>>12121259What a soulful cover
>>12121259>>12121263It feels like FIFA destroyed the latin american gaming community like crack destroyed black neighborhoods
>>12121334I always hated FIFA, shit gameplay, soulless presentation.For me it was the Konami games.
>>12115269Nintendo power.Owned by NintendoWritten by NintendoPublished by NintendoAnother rave review for a Nintendo product!
>>12121163Bongs fucking love Zombies Ate My Neighbors, it was huge there
>>12121348Sensible soccer.I have all the FIFAs in a box somewhere as with all sportball and golf games theyw ere take away for free at charity stores for a decade but PES or sensible soccer were the keynotes of the genre, not one I care for much, or madden, nhl, nba or tiger woods etc. Still all the most common games you would find for free along with PES insanely popular in their era along with football manager games which started as far back as the 80s. Bizzarely enough there are some people who are cracy into them and collecting and playing them. I guess it is an each to their own memberberries thing.
>>12121163Well, try R-Type final I'm about half way though it omm the P|S2 and it is a blast.
>>12117950Alright.>Nintendo PowerNP didn't even score games early on. Their prerogative was to sell games so I guess they didn't want to risk discouraging someone with a bad review. Eventually they did add reviews, the "power meter" which I'm 99.999% sure were taken straight from NoA's internal product evaluations. They had 4 categories (Graphics & Sound, Play Control, Challenge and Theme & Fun) scored on a 5 point scale and then averaged across several evaluators. The scores sort of regress to the mean and nothing really scores too high or too low. If you're looking for "shilling" you need to look in other parts of the mag. George and Rob, was a short lived attempt to add more commentary and personality to their reviews. The commentary was sort of inane and Rob probably had the most flattering caricature in history (he was a balding fat guy and his caricature was a square jawed blonde gigachad). G&R were replaced with a simple list of the positives and negatives for each game. This scoring system stayed around until the 100th issue where they revealed a new one on a 10 point scale but I wasn't really paying attention then.
>>12122564>EGMEGM famously ripped off Famitsu's 4 man review team where even reviewer provides their thoughts on a game and a score on a 10 point scale. I actually really like this approach as you can either try identifying with the reviewer who matches your taste or simply go with the total scores. It's always fun when there's a game that has a wide delta among the reviewers. Most of the reviewers used their real names but Sushi-X was a "character" and I remember he loved fighting games and hated the Game Boy. They would make small alterations to this formula, including adding a 5th reviewer who would review B-titles or giving one reviewer being given much more space to write their thoughts over the others. Professional game reviewers get a bad rap around here but I read a LOT of these and very few of their scores seem out of line. EGM in particular got in trouble with publishers a few times (they loved bragging about this) >GameProAh, GamePro! This mag was famous for it's review scores which featured a face in various stages of excitement with a perfect score showing the head EXPLODING! Anyway, GamePro was much more...publisher friendly than a lot of mags. Lots of perfect scores and the in-house style of the reviews themselves kind of read like ad copy. All the reviewers use pseudonyms too which makes it feel less legit.>Game Players/UGPThis magazine probably had the best written reviews and one of the few where each reviewer feels like they had an individual voice. They had a fairly complex scoring system where each category(graphics, sound, replay value etc) was rated then weighted then divided by 19 or something to get a %. The main downfall is they had had some horrendous taste. They were also one of the first mags to get really down on 16-bit or 2D games in general. Maybe not as bad as some of those britbong mags but they got really dismissive towards some great stuff.
>>12122568And finally...>GamefanGamefan ran an import game business so you can imagine the tone of their reviews. Their format was similar to EGM but they reviewed far less games per issue and as you could imagine from a group trying to sell games, the scores tend to be very high. I have one issue from late 1994 where nothing scores below an 80. You could argue with the small # of reviews, they only want to cover the best stuff but they'll really rave about some dogshit anime fighter because they're selling it for 100 bucks in the back of the mag. Don't let this discourage you though. GF is a great read. It's a ton of fun watching Nick Rox sperg out over the color of shadows in Street Fighter Alpha or whatever.
>>12115269Nintendo Power...the game company OWNED the magazine
>>12118041>one person would play, while the other 3 guys would just watch and base their review on the other person playing.Do you have a single piece of evidence to back up this claim?
>>12123478His evidence is he watched a lot of YouTube grifters a decade ago
>>12115665Yeah, pretty much. It's a strange thing to say. You can say that of all of the Megaman games, including the NES ones. They're generally all reasonable-tough, the levels are fairly short, and you can just bash your head on a level until you get it or go to another level, get a new weapon/power up and then try that one level again
>>12115429Jealousy that Capcom made a game that appeals to Americans but not one that appeals to Brits. What would you even do with a game called RoboBloke?
>>12115429>Why am I Mr. Pink?
>>12123437Nintendo Power surprisingly had no problem with being critical, at least early on. I think they did soften up and become the corporate mouthpiece you'd expect it to be in its final decade or so. I remember them giving one of the Mario Parties like a 5 or 6 or something. Completely reasonable score but it shocked me to see the magazine made by Nintendo give anything with Mario on it a score that low. They'd really lay the fuck into any 3rd party games that sucked too. Sometimes some genuinely shit games would slip by with a good review but that didn't happen often.
>>12123850Stand out for me is Pokemon Red/Blue. Even aware of the huge marketing push and at a time when their RPG fans were starving, they still said "7/10, it alright, for little babies, real rpg fans might want to look elsewhere"
>>12123437Nintendo Power was based. Articles written by nobody that showed off the games features, opinions relegated to a few sentences in a small section of the magazine.Britslop was the worst, they were doing the reviews written by "funny" redditor format decades before it became the standard on internet gaming sites.
>>12123912>Nintendo Power was based.
>>12122139>Nintendo power.>Owned by Nintendo>Written by Nintendo>Published by Nintendo>Another rave review for a Nintendo product!And there it is. The unpalatable truth.
>>12115429roight then. megaman x. shite graphics, shite levels, music is rubbish, n' it's too bloody difficult yeah? too many cheap deffs. wot I fink? save yer dosh, go on down to the compu'ah shoppe and pick up chuckie egg for 5 quid. absolutely mint.
>>12117910And of those two, which one is fondly remembered?
>>12115269most the mags were given kickbacks/bribes or were outright owned by the big console companies
>>12115278British game mags im general were fucking terrible.
>>12115665Considering i was able to beat it when I was 8 i would say its a pretty easy game.
Something is deeply corrupt in BritainThe Shut Up And Sit Down guys were video-game "reviewers", then moved onto board games and one of them is married to THAT Zoe QuinnIt's corrupt all the way down
>>12118926>if you think there's anything wrong with objectively incorrect "reviews" crying about colours in games>then you were le filtered
>>12118926Never have I seen such massive cope before
>>12115269Yeah GamePro was definitely the worst of the bunch that I’d read. Their reviews didn’t seem very nuanced, or at least not that I remember. I always wrote off the reviews that used the 5.0 scale as being less superior than the 10.0 scale and would automatically convert the 5.0 scale for proper reference kek. I guess because GameSpot used a metric that included rounded values to the tenth I always considered theirs to be the most reliable metric for review. I should take the time to go back and read some GamePro reviews to see if they actually *are* worthless by comparison.
>>12125639All I really remember is their stupid face emojis that they would use for their reviews. Not one single review or article actually sticks out to me since I guess these are deeply buried long forgotten memories for me at this point. Did I enjoy them as a kid? Sure I probably enjoyed reading through them but they are in the past for a reason. I'd probably cringe if I looked through some of them today. I don't think I even have any leftover as I lost all of mine.I think its worth pointing out that reviewers probably always sucked. Even if the industry was in a better place back then that doesn't mean reviewers were ever good.
A fun one from Britain, from the first issue of Crash, with a review of a game that completely misrepresents it in a really bizarre way.
>>12126103A reader complained, and basically got told "well you can't expect us to play each game for more than a couple minutes".
>>12118907It's the Dalit caste English saar - I mean, mate.
>>12118292This man knew megabollocks will become known in history as a series of shit games. Not a single saving grace.
>>12126107Sounds like an excuse to me
>>12124287'Ate me graffics'Ate me gameplay'Ate me reploids(Not a racist. Just dont like em)Luv me zomibes 'ate me neighbours.
>>12115269Nintendo Power
