So, we’ve been generally getting pretty good reviews, for Sims 2 – mostly in the 8-9 range, with some mid 7’s thrown in for good measure. One notable outlier is Gamespot, whose 6.5 review came as a pretty substantial shock, to me. I tend to trust Gamespot more than say, IGN or any of the other review sites, largely because they’re more critical. If a game scores in the 9+ range, that’s almost a genuine guarantee of its quality. If something you expected to score an 8.5 scores a 6, you know something’s amiss…
…most of the time.
http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/strategy/thesims2/review.html?sid=6136709
I just don’t agree with a lot of the stuff the guy’s saying. Some of it’s flat out wrong, and other parts of it are so heavily biased towards comparisons with the PC game that when I first read it, I was really angry. I’m still pretty upset with what reads to me as a really snide, pervasively negative tone to the review, which trumps, in this case, *content* review. Sure, he can write whatever the heck he wants, and fundamentally, it doesn’t change *my* impression of the game (I believe it’s a *solid* 8.5), but IMO, the tonal bias and the innaccuracy of the review genuinely bother me.
Still, the big thing is that on the various forums that have messageboards (GameFAQs in particular), it was interesting to see the reaction, and the general shift in the tone of the posts. When the game first arrived, it was really clear to me that it suffered from being called “The Sims 2” – people expected a PC port, which at this point, the hardware simply isn’t capable of. Sure, the graphics aren’t up to the PC, which is due to schedule/resource vagaries, but fundamentally, the Sims is structured quite differently than most other games, and the level of customization and simulation that goes on behind the scenes really crushes the console hardware. So it’s frustrating to read relatively naive posts saying that it would have been “easy” to port the PC game, but had we tried to do that, the sacrifices that would have been necessary would have led to a merely hamstringed version of the PC game, which we all thought was a less satisfactory solution than the one we ended up with.
But, again, the issue is of message – the box says, “Sims 2,” and at this point, people have been trained to expect the same thing, when it’s named the same. To me, this was a colossal failure of marketing, because it became clear *very quickly* that people’s expectations weren’t being matched by the product we’re selling. To me, that’s a genuine shame, because I really enjoy playing our game. I think it’s an *excellent* reimagining of the PC game, given our limitations, it’s fun in its own right, and innovative in several ways, to boot. Sure, it’s not perfect – I could rattle off probably a hundred+ different things we should have done differently, but it’s not like last year’s game where those issues were fundamental, core, structural issues with the game design.
Anyway, metacritic’s still hovering at 80%, which is, realistically, pretty damn good. I’m still proud as hell of the game, and like I was getting to before, it’s nice to see the evolution of GameFAQ’s posts, from, “This sucks! This isn’t the Sims 2!!!” to, “How do I get past (some relatively late-stage obstacle)?”
One other addition – you wanna see how biased this guy is against the game, look at the screenshots that accompany the game, compared to the screenshots from the previews. The guy created a lot with nothing in it, put down a single floor pattern, and then took a bunch of screens from that, leading to a really drab, flat looking world. That’s *NOTHING* like what the game looks like in practice, and I’m frankly offended that this guy considers that a reasonable representation of the game.
Eh, I was surprised at the score as well. But not having played the game or even seen the last five months or so of development, the general gist of it didn’t surprise me. It surprised me that it was so negative, but the first impression was pretty much the same as we all had when they switched us to The Sims 2. It was a marketing move on the part of EA — sell it all as one consistent product line, without differentiating the different platforms — and it was a move that (IMO) didn’t work.
But didn’t work from a marketing standpoint. How the publisher wants to package and present the game doesn’t have a whole lot to do with what the game itself is like. And from what I’ve heard from you & Alex and others (again, haven’t played it), it did a good job of working within the constraints set by the company. I think with a company like EA, if the individual developers get too emotionally invested in how well the game does commercially, you’re just going to be disappointed and frustrated, because you have absolutely no control over that.
And if EA is going to refuse to acknowledge games as art, and instead put so much emphasis on a number, then at least it’s a metacritic rating. So the unfairly negative ones get averaged out.
Plus, everybody at Gamespot is a sexually-repressed bed-wetter.
Chuck