By John Walker on April 19th, 2011.
There’s are some extremely strange bits and pieces flying around about Valve and Portal 2 today, all over the place, and perhaps best summed up by the cavalcade of nonsense being posted on Metacritic by confused disgruntled gamers (and presumably quite a few trolls). The main contentions:
1) Portal 2 is 4 hours long
2) There’s Day 1 DLC
3) It’s a console port
4) The Potato Sack ARG didn’t change anything.
Let’s have a think.
By Alec Meer on March 29th, 2011.
And there was much rejoicing. Following a web-wide waggling of worried eyebrows (of which I was just one of a great many), Metacritic has done the decent thing and removed its ratings of individual developers.
Mr 8%? It’s okay. It’s over now. You’re free.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec Meer on March 28th, 2011.
If it exists, it must have a number stuck to it: this is the Metacritic way. Its voracious maw of review aggregation has now expanded to include individual developers – which means actual people are now being given a personal numerical rating. This is an average number (out of 100) based on the various reviews of games they’ve worked on. I must confess I find this concept mildly sinister, but maybe I’d feel differently if I was able to go around telling people I was worth 91%.
So, who of the many alumni of PC gaming has been treated favourably by this new system? And who’s fallen foul of it? Who is empirically proven to be the better man: Warren Spector or Ken Levine? Richard Garriott or Derek Smart? John Carmack, John Romero or American McGee? And Portal’s Erik Wolpaw or Portal’s Chet Faliszek? And which poor bastard was deemed to be worth just 8%?
Read the rest of this entry »
