Slashman wrote:I was mostly talking about player reviews.
No offense - those are even worse, in my opinion
Without professional accountability (which a journalist is *supposed* to be bound by - of course, that's not always the reality of it...) you get a lot more knee-jerk, superficial snap judgements.
Slashman wrote:If both common Steam reviews and professional reviews are overwhelmingly negative, including some of the more trustworthy gaming sites, then it's a pretty safe bet that steering clear is a good idea.
Yup, true enough, usually. In fact, sad as it may be, when initial responses are predominantly negative, it's usually the case, but when the initial popular response is positive, I find it's more likely to be inaccurate over time - people tend to get initially dazzled, but it's whether a game can survive the honeymoon period that really means something (imo). I'm not into buying a game, getting 2 weeks of intense fun out of it, but only to then put in on a shelf (virtual, in these days of digital distribution) to gather dust - that's not a good buy, in my books.
Slashman wrote:I'm not getting on the 'diamond in the rough' roller-coaster. If I have to wait for a year and a half of patching to get a stable and finished game, then that's worth a 75% off sale price to me.
Hahahah - I'm 100% with you on that! It's also why so many of the games on my (now metaphorical - I'm in the process of moving. Countries, if all goes well!
) shelf are of the budget re-release sort (by no means the majority, but a substantial portion.) And I'd rather wait for an evolved and finished game (or operating system, for that matter!) before I commit to an installation. I didn't do this in the case of a particular game that sees more than its fair share of hate thrown at it, so it will remain nameless, and so I ended up playing it for a few days, giving up, coming back once 2.0 was released, playing for a week or so, putting it down, and so forth - played a little longer every time (which was a good sign, at least
) Generally, though, I have the patience/discipline to wait for any relevant dust to settle. (I was only able to adopt this attitude after I had quit reviewing professionally, of course - early adoption is not optional in that business!)