Football Manager 2009 (also somehow known as Worldwide Soccer Manager 2009) is the latest in the line of football management sims. The series has been hailed by fans of the beautiful game of being the best in its genre.
Thus, it seems perplexing to think that IGN, one of the most popular gaming review sites, to give it a meager 2.0 (out of 10) score.
RockPaperShotgun has responded to the review, where it points out that “it’s more productive to observe quite how much your preconceptions of a game can affect the experience you have when you play it”. I do agree with this. You perceive your world according to how bias you are, based on your experiences.
And it seems to show that IGN does not care about the quality of a review; it’s better to keep churning them out. So is IGN committed to providing responsible reviews?
I laughed when I saw this:
A 0.5 metacritic score on the game’s sound? Is this reviewer for real? Complaining that Football Manager 2009 has no sound is like penalizing The Sims 2 for not speaking in English. I do not disagree that FM2009’s audio is probably very very bad, or minimal, and the 0.5 score seem fitting. However, it has no bearing on its gameplay whatsoever. It just goes to show that scores are worthless in a review. Why they still persist is probably because of two things. First, game reviewers do not the the proper knowledge on how to properly articulate their thoughts on the game material into meaningful words. Or second, game reviewers know that people who read their reviews are generally lazy idiots who gets turned off the moment they see more than 2 sentenced in the whole site, preferring the page to be littered by irritating flash banners and colourful images. Personally, I think it’s both.
It’s very difficult to find good reviews of games these days, when all sites care about are churning out content to keep the visitors coming so that they can get more ad revenue. IGN has finally joined my list of websites with crap content.
Now, when is Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw going to release another review in his Zero Punctuation series?
Tags: football manager 2009, IGN, review
OMG.. what a lopsided and insipid review! Spore was a game that I thought was terrible initially due to the humongous amount of negative comments online until I saw a pretty fair review by ars technica (http://arstechnica.com/reviews/games/spore-review.ars). This is the type of review I seem to favour more.. at least, it says not so good in a respectable way. =p
I think it’s more ignorant than unfair.And yeah, I love critical reviews too.
I guess reviews now seem to be proportional to its hype, which is why I’m not very convinced about all the major gaming sites. However, reviews are ultimately still very subjective and opinionated.
If you’re looking for another cool review of Spore, I love this one by Yahtzee: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/218-Spore. That’s pretty cool too! You should check out his other videos too, aka. Zero Punctuation.
Hey Mart.. that’s an evil one! I just can’t stop laughing! =p
Ironically, FM09 got a 9.1 review score on IGN UK at the same time. And now, IGN says “We missed the mark” and pulled the original review off the net!
LoL.
Seems like the FM games are targeted towards the European and Asian regions, who understand such glorified Excel games.