The quality of an endorsement
I love Pac Man Championship Edition on the XBox 360. It’s an amazingly crafted game with tons of polish and perfect level design. You should buy it.
But wait, should you listen to my endorsement? The fact is, I’m really, really good at Pac Man CE. My score puts me in the top 150 overall, and the top 10 weekly. Naturally, I play a lot more than I should — hours a day. I’m completely addicted.
So does my being good at the game make my endorsement less valuable? Well, if we take it to the logical extreme, let’s suppose that I was the #1 Pac Man CE player, and I told you, “You should play this game, I’m the world’s best at it!” Yes, of course you would find that endorsement a lot less valuable than an endorsement from a friend who is only so-so at it, but who loves it anyway.
But professional game reviewers tend to be really good at games — very often to the detriment of their review. No review I saw mentioned that God of War 2 had tough bosses even on normal mode. That’s because the reviewers didn’t find them tough at all.
But it’s not like I endorse every game I like, even if I’m good at it. I like SOE’s Everquest 2 a lot, but I won’t recommend it to people because SOE has made too many rookie game-balance mistakes — I have no faith in their ability to maintain the game. (And trust me, I know rookie MMO game balance mistakes. I made all of them when I rebalanced Asheron’s Call 2. And, like the SOE game balancers now, I didn’t even realize many of them were mistakes until years after the fact.) But even though I only endorse a game I truly want you to play, my idea of “you” the audience is naturally tempered by my own abilities.
In the end I much prefer demos, but I can’t afford to play all the demos that exist out there — I need to use reviews to narrow my search. Hmm, if only Rottentomatoes.com did casual games!