Sad news this week, as Consolevania releases what is apparently its final episode. It’s been a bit hit and miss over the years, but the last episode managed to capture a lot of what was good about the series – heartfelt discussion about games, and a bit of informed parody (keep watching until the end of the credits). In case you’ve never seen the show before, it’s a mixture of reviews and sketches about games and stuff. There’s an awful lot of that sort of content being generated on the internet (*cough*) but Consolevania was a lot wittier and more intelligent than its peers; series 2 was particularly brilliant, as per this clip:

As sad as it was to hear that the show was ending, Rab’s diatribe about the review treadmill really struck a chord with me. When you make a career out of evaluating games, it’s very easy for play to become a mechanical routine, and this can really damage your sense of fun. I don’t think this problem is confined to professionals, though. Anyone who plays games for some ‘higher purpose’ – even if they’re just posting reviews on a forum, or writing a term paper about class conflict in Frogger – can learn to struggle on through a game they dislike, just because they feel they ought to. Once you become used to this frame of mind, it’s easy to just sink back into it whenever you play anything, and then every game you play just becomes a joyless series of criticisms.

It’s very tempting at this point to make sneering links to my favourite terrible gaming websites, but that’s pretty much the exact problem. Like Rab, I’ve been thinking back over some of the things I’ve said about games in recent years and I feel like I’ve been incredibly negative about things I’ve liked – I have a long list of complaints about Fable II, but ultimately its flaws are no greater than one of my old-time favourites like The Chaos Engine. This kind of attitude – expecting everything to be perfect and then spewing bile whenever an author’s work doesn’t match your own personal vision, whether it’s a game or a review of a game – is really childish and depressing. I guess we’ll see how well I manage to avoid it when I write up my Lionhead review blowout over the coming weeks.

Anyway, instead of sneering at someone else’s work, I’ll just link to someone else who has. Without grumbling about the technical style of the review, I want to highlight the tone of Pocket Gamer’s review of Dinosaur King for the DS. I read this recently – for a ‘higher purpose’, of course – and was struck by the reviewer’s complete lack of respect for the game. It’s pretty clear that the he doesn’t expect anyone to read his review – as a Japanese-only game aimed at young children, it has a very limited audience in the UK – and so he just goes off on a series of tangental rants, ragging on the simple combat system and generic storyline and repeatedly pointing out that it’s not as good as Pokémon. But so what?! It’s a kid’s game – of course the combat system is simple! Would he blast Love & Berry for not having online multiplayer?

This reminded me of another story I heard recently, about Stuart Campbell giving Socket: Time Dominator 0% in Sega Zone, years ago. He later explained it thusly:

“In its own right it wasn’t the worst game in the world by any means, but it was so completely ripped off from Sonic, yet so inferior, that there was literally no point in ever buying it rather than a proper Sonic game. Therefore, in the sense that reviews are a buyer’s guide, it deserved 0%.”

It’s a hugely arrogant thing to say, and pretty illogical if you ask me – he of all people should understand that people generally buy more than one game in their life, and there’s a good chance that any Mega Drive owner looking for a cute platform game probably already have the Sonic games in mind. That said, the review was written over a decade ago, so I’m not exactly fuming with rage about it. The important thing is that a lot of reviewers – including myself, on occasion – still seem to think along these lines, and I think it’s a really bad attitude that doesn’t help anybody.