That's why you read the review, and not just look at the score.  Scores are meaningless in the big picture, they are just a quick reference. 

i agree with the OP 100%.  excellent post.  i hope many will ponder on this, and come to their senses.

You're right on the money.

What makes it worse is that alot of people haven't figured out that the gaming sites are actually a pure racket.

Gaming sites make money by selling banner ads,  they only make money from showing us them.  They make no money from us directly.  Their paychecks are written by the big companies.  It's not in their best interests to make those companies unhappy.

Further,  it's the site with the early preview/review that gets the most hits,  and therefore the most money.  The companies aren't required to give everyone equal access.  So if they're unhappy,  you don't get preview and review copies.

As such,  the companies can,  and do,  dictate what will be written.  It's in the site's best interests to make sure the company is happy with the previews/reviews.

So it isn't in the site's best interest to tell us the truth.

As such,  every preview will be "The greatest game ever!",  every review is "This is the greatest thing ever!",  no game from a big company has any real bugs,  nor any real faults.

The very best example is Bethseda.  Oblivion was the greatest game ever,  faultless.  Then Fallout 3 was announced.  Many fans were concerned Bethseda would make it into an Shooter,  and they did.  The fans complained.  Gamespot posted that they "Wished fallout fans would die",  Penny Arcade did a huge article on how Fallout fans were so wrong,  so did PCG,  Gamespot,  and 1up.  Then the Fallout previews hit,  and suddenly,  the flawless Oblivion had a laundry list of faults "Fallout 3 fixes!".  Never mind their reviews that claimed Oblivion was flawless,  not it had faults.  Then,  of course,  Fallout 3 releases and it's..."flawless",  of course.  The story's actually even more convuluted than that,  you wouldn't believe me if I told you.

Suffice it to say,  Gaming Journalism is very very dead.  Gaming sites are just mouthpieces for the big companies,  designed to look like free press.  Personally,  I'm *really* tempted to enlist some people and gather documentation to present to the Government arguing either payola or fradulent advertising by pretending to be Journalism.

It's just way out of hand today.

Quoting in agreement.

Lets throw in console games too - see how that works out - see if we can expand the group we're discussing any.

Console games need to be ready, finished products when they get pressed and sent to stores.  People are not going to accept a $60 purchase for their console that doesn't work as advertised on the box.  Make a purchase, rush home, stuff the game into the PS3 or XBox360, it doesn't run, and a call to the company results in "oh, yeah .. well .. it doesn't work as intended, sorry.  Wait a few weeks and keep trying, it should work fine later."

Yet, PC gamers get this experience (yay for us!).  The few friends of mine that have both a PC for gaming and gaming consoles almost always get cross-platform games for the console solely because they're more polished (to them) and work out of the box.  My old way to get them to consider the PC version, DLC, doesn't even work anymore now that DLC on consoles is the norm.

Toss in the fact that you can rent console games before you purchase them, if you so desire, and a game purchase on a console can be pretty much a "sure thing" that you'll enjoy it before you plunk down your hard-earned cash.  PC game demos help this greatly, but if a game doesn't have one people are outa' luck.

So .. shucks .. I was hoping it would work out that PC gamers aren't the only group that seems to be forced to choke on significant purchases and suffer with them.  We're the only group of rubes that puts up with it

I am not a fanboy nor blinded. I am just finally grateful to see a game that requites goddamn cracks from illegal sites to play.

I don't know, at least Elemental let me play things without need of such dangerous (who knows if that 'release group' would put some nice virus and worms inside of crack files) workaround.

I hope you don't call me fanboy/blinded only because I like computer games that do not need so many extra steps, just to play.

You missed my point. I never meant to say Elemental is completely solid (no such program exists). What do I mind is like this review (http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/battlefieldbadcompany2/index.html?tag=result%3Btitle%3B0) to a game which was completely unplayable for ATI folks, extremely bad optimization (do not even dare arguing about 'bad performance' in front of me unless you tried BFBC2), and so many unpolished things, bugs like....

-completely broken server browser.

-completely broken heli control.

-some of weapons, badges not working at all.

-many of things in option not working at all (such as localization sound)

-so many glitches including destroying stuffs that should not be destroyed (thus completely breaking hosting server itself in progress)

And they gave it 9.0

If this garbage deserved 9.0, Elemental should be AT LEAST 9.5 or even 10 based on amount of bugs and glitches alone.

And, oh, did I mention, including laughably bad performance (the game cannot use more than 60% of graphic card performance), most of them are STILL NOT FIXED YET?

You guys are really selective at criticizing someone.

The difference in the comparison is that the bank pays alot more for say their financial software compared to the $50 for a computer game.  Plus they can create a contract when purchasing for what requirements they need and how it must perform.  Then the dev is on the hook for get them exactly what they need.  But that's when you pay like $100k plus annual maintenance fees for support and updates.

For games, we pay the $50 and get the game that they created.  We can complain all we want but they are not obligated to fix anything whether it's bugs or design flaws.  There's no agreement that everyone that bought the game must be satisfied.  Luckily Stardock wants to fix the problems and hopefully make the game as good as its potential.

You write as if gaming journalism was ever alive.  When I was much, much younger and more naive than I am today, I used to subscribe to PC Gamer.  One issue had a review for a game by Sierra called "Outpost"; they gave it one of their highest scores ever, basically saying they thought it would be an instant classic.  It was priced accordingly too -- I shelled out more for it in 1994 dollars than I did in 2010 dollars to buy Elemental (and back then that was like a month's worth of pay for me).  In reality ... well, take every problem Elemental has (mediocre gameplay, missing features, bugs) and ratchet it up to 11, and you'll start to get a feeling for what Sierra produced.

That was the last video game review I believed, and the last time I looked at the gaming press as anything but shills for the big publishers.

Nah, I just think we're on a forum for Elemental ... so people want to discuss Elemental, and the reviews of Elemental, not some other game and the review of it.  We can sit here all day and fight about if we think every silly review of any other thing in existence is right or not, it doesn't change anything about Elemental.

I personally couldn't care less about BFBC2 and never played it (nor would I).  The fact that I don't care doesn't change Elemental at all, nor does it invalidate my opinions of it.  Maybe the reviewer for BFBC2 didn't have any problems with it.  Maybe they got hit in the head with a brick and weren't of sound mind ... maybe it is a huge conspiracy by "Big Game", "Big Tobacco", OPEC, game reviewers, Cthulhu and Martha Stewart (if she is, in fact, not Cthulhu -- haven't seen them both in the same place at the same time, have you? Aha!).  Does it matter?  Really?  Really?

... or are you just railing against the fact that something you like didn't get as high of a review as you want it to?  Does that even matter? 

wnmnkh, You said it was "very solid" and "perfectly acceptable". I wasn't criticizing you at all, I was mearly disagreeing with your appraisal because up to 30% of people didn't get to play it with only one crash. I found it difficult to imagine Elemental's release being described as "solid".

I also agree with you about other major games. BFBC2, for example, was buggy and I had problems with that game myself. The difference was that I don't think Bad Company had as many hiccups as Elemental's launch did (was it 30%). Furthermore, their singleplayer campaign was pretty solid which is likely why they got such a high score (ignoring EA bribing the reviewers). I could go into detail on what Elemental is missing with you privately but I'm sure the reviews cover it quite thoroughly and I don't think they are being unfair.

Lastly, I just don't think it's fair or healthy to compare apples to oranges when discussing game scores as Elemental is not Bad Company, they're not even in the same genre. Regardless if they both have their own launch problems, it's not really excusable, to me, to say that a bad launch is "acceptable" or "normal".

Well...

PCG's always had a history of problematic reviews.  Way back in the day,  they reviewed Ascendancy,  a pretty bad Master of Orion clone.  Gave it great marks,  couple months later,  it came out that PCG's reviewer was Ascendancy's strategy guide author.  No wonder they gave it great marks.

Thing was,  15 years ago,  Computer Gaming World held to a high standard under Johnny Wilson.  They only reviewed complete retail copies,  and they did not care what the advertisers said.  A few advertisers refused to contract with them,  and CGW did not care.  That all changed after he left though.

I also bought Outpost on release though,  and Battlecruiser 3000AD,  so I know your pain.  No one,  and I mean no one,  has any idea what a bad release is unless they bought BC 3000AD on release.  It had a 1 page manual for a sim that demanded a 200 page one,  didn't even tell you what the keys did,  and had so many bugs you couldn't even finish the first mission.  It was quite literally an Alpha build.

Sadly though,  I look back through that paragraph,  and I just found a few of my complaints about Elemental :(  Nowhere near enough information provided to the player.

That's not entirely true anymore,  it's started with consoles now.  More than a few of this generation's games have shipped with bugs and Day 0 patches.  Soon it'll get worse,  it'll follow the same trend PC Gaming did.

Videogames on the other hand are: Developer A (with publisher creates a game and then offers it to the market where Gamer C (or any other Gamer) will then decide if he wants to buy it or not. Developer A works in B in hopes of reaching X money.

What videogames are not is: Gamer A approaches developer B (with publisher C) an makes an order: "I want a game with Z, X, and Y. I'll pay H and it'll be developed in exclusive for me.". Even if developers/publishers obviously pay attention to what gamers want, the situation is quite different to that of developing software for a Bank, Town Halls or the BBC.

So yes, I agree that we should be talking about gaming software more than just software. But unlike a Bank who pays for a concrete piece of software for some price and to be developed in certain time limits, we as gamers get the privilege of having games developed for free (they don't cost us anything) and then the ability to wait if it interests us (demo, reviews...) and finally buy it (the moment in which the game actually costs us money) if we decide that it's worthy of our money.

imho

Compare off-the-shelf bank software and off-the-shelf computer game software, holding all else equal so the comparison is apples&apples -- would that bank accept said software if was in the 'release now and fix later' condition that many computer games companies do today?

We (the general we, not you and I) get what we deserve.  We allow computer game companies to get away with it, so they do it.

Bank programs calculate payrolls or maintain account portfolios.  Objectives of the software are clearly defined and specific.  The needs of the customer is straightfoward.  A program that generates a sense of fun, to a broad range of tastes, that is something else.

Puccini's Madama Butterflies' opening debut was a disaster.  The audience heckled it throughout the show.  In the sunrise scene in the second act, when the cock crowed, the audience started making pig and other barnyard animal sounds.  In the third act, when Pinkerton and M. Butterflies' son ran onto the stage, someone from the audience yelled "it's Toscanini's!"  At the end of the show the opera director came out onto the stage and chided the audience for their rude behavior.

Today, it's hard to imagine that kind of reception.  Given how polite and restrained opera audiences are now--even really bad operas (i.e. The Bonesetters Daughter) are generously applauded and get good reviews--back in Pucchini's day it sounds like the whole scene was a lot livelier.  Anyway, whenever I read the notes, a lot of great operas still played today, a century or more later, had pretty humbling receptions, I guess that is what you get for trying to be different.

They're not straight forward and often individualized for each company. You'd be amazed how different the "same" software is from one corporation to another. Somethingas common as say PeopleSoft can vary quite a bit from one place to another. We can have a show of hands though of people who think that if they paid 100 dollars instead of 50 during pre-order if they think the game would have been in a better condition at release. Before hands shoot up, you have to keep in mind, Brad has claimed that if they released in Feb., it wouldn't have made a difference as they didn't consider this product unfinished and were blind to the problems. The problem here isn't that they didn't get huge amounts of moneys from corporations and had to settle for a mere 50 bucks from each customer.

Something I want to clarify -- I'm not 'accusing' SD of doing this with Elemental.  Brad has said he thought the game was release-ready, so he didn't 'release early with the intention to fix later'.  What he intended was 'enhance later', not 'fix later'.

I was making a general point, and expanding upon something Wintersong said.

If you all want to see a shining example of a "polished game", check out Mafia 2. It's got more polish then a crate of Turtle Wax. Seriously, every company in the business should strive to make games as polished and detailed as it is.

Speaking as a software designer/developer for custom business software, you're still comparing apples to walnuts. Business software and game software are fundamentally different. They have different goals, different performance profiles, different design methadologies, and most importantly they have different criteria for what makes them good. It doesn't matter if they're both off the shelf or not, they're simply not the same and can't be compared.

If you're looking at Elemental, figuring out if it's a "good" game means looking at things like performance (in terms of client graphics speed and snappiness of the UI), strategic depth, AI skill, how well the UI conveys information, replayability, and fun.

If you're looking at the software I write (most recent tool is for inspectors to manage environmental incidents wirelessly in the field), figuring out if it's "good" means looking at performance (in terms of server and wireless network utilization), security, how well the UI conveys information, ease of use, and stability.

Only one thing in that list overlaps. Nobody cares if an accounting package gets 60fps while zoomed in. Nobody cares if it's fun to use. People do care that it follows whatever business rules you tell it to follow properly and that it does so in an effecient (server side) and secure manner.

Gamers on the other hand want things that are new and exciting, and sometimes that means unfinished. Whatever unfinished really means for games, because stuff like Starcraft was certainly release worthy when it came out and they still spent years patching and improving it. But it's easy to install a patch for a game. It's NOT easy for corporate IT to update mission critical software (if they're doing it right, this is actually a huge deal that involves massive amounts of testing, backups, and migration planning). I mean hell, I update Elemental by clicking a few buttons. It took us a YEAR at work to complete an Oracle client upgrade.

I'd be pretty surprised if you released your product before it achieved your concept of 'finished', with the intent of finishing it later.  Any by 'finished' I'm not talking about bells&whistles but the kind of problems we see in some computer games -- instability, missing promised features, lack of basic balancing and polishing, etc.

I think that's part of it, though.

If a game has balance issues but no major issues, is it "finished"? If it still needs tweaking - it still needs some work - so is it "finished" or just "good enough to be released"?

So I think it depends on how you defined a finished game:

-One that runs well for the vast majority on release but still might need tweaks/balancing/rarer bugs squashed

or

-One that's got all bugs out, well polished, strong AI, and considered perfectly balanced by the community as a whole

Personally, I don't think I've played too many "finished" games - just ones that were "good enough" to where the developer felt like they can stop working on it without the peasants storming the gates.

Except we've had other people around here saying stuff like "Starcraft 2 was put out before it was finished", which is nonsense for any reasonable definition of "finished". The fact that balance changes are happening now doesn't mean the game was put out early, it means that balance is a hard thing to get right (particularly with a moving target like MP where players are always figuring new tricks out). Some games certainly are released half-baked, but it's not as common as people think. Most games are released as something you can call version 1.0, and aren't really any better or worse then the commercial software equivalent of a 1.0 program (which tends to be why so many people in corporate IT really don't like the first release of anything, hell I can still crash and find bugs in MS Office and that's on version 12).

Games have the added problem of being meant to be written quickly, and hitting a deadline to make a release date or the christmas rush. Since a games sales are usually extremely front loaded (most games sell more in their first week then for the rest of their lifetime), the pressure is to meet that deadline and get the best they can do out by that deadline. Missing it translates into lost money, and you'd be surprised how many games aren't that profitable.

They're simply too different to compare. Stick to comparing games to other games and the comparisons are better.

While a Bank pays for X and expects X to be delivered (yes, that means they wouldn't accept 'release now and fix later' but only because they paid for X and by law that's what they should get), with the off-the-shelf software you are not forced to buy and then judge. If you want an antivirus, you just don't buy a Norton License and then see if it's what you need. You check different options (Norton, AVG, Panda, etc), what they offer... and then buy the one you want/need/can_afford. If you bought, without doing some research, Norton's License Type A and then discover that if doesn't have Feature B that you needed, it becomes your fault. If you buy Norton's License Type K and it doesn't have Feature H that was advertised as part of the License Type K you purchased, the blame is of Norton and he must comply. But in both cases of purchasing the License, you had the opportunity to do some research, inform yourself about it.

The common sense and responsible attitude of a good consumer is to make informed purchases, be it food, cars, games or clothes. Then laws must protect is from fraud but not of being fools. That we can decide to waive that common sense to preorder or to buy "in trust", doesn't free us from our responsability of making informed purchases. And in videogames case, it's ubereasy to get informed.

We allow computer game companies to get away with it? Yep, I do at least for a very few and I see no reason not to do it considering the masses. But mankind allows worse things in the world which are not optional, unlike videogames (compulsory videogames? Where?) so in any case doesn't seem so important.

Yeah, Mafia 2. was a good example....it's funny actually, because imo Mafia 1. was a better game. [Mafia 2. = you spend 60%+ gameplay time on driving. ...but again...maybe it's intended?]