Sunday 22 February 2009

you can please some of the people some of the time

Interesting to see the Gamezebo user response to the latest adventure game being sent out to the casual market.

It seems this is a love-it-or-hate-it kind of thing (I know the feeling!) Casual gamers expecting, say, constant Hidden Object gameplay are completely put off by the idea of having to do lots of reading (or listening, if voiceovers are enabled) and go so far as to complain that it's "not really a game", despite the game genre way predating theirs. Adventure/story fans, however, are squeeing all over the place.

Which all goes along with my argument that numerical game ratings are the absolute opposite of helpfulness when it comes to determining how good a game is. Being rated "complete crap" by fans of one style of game might lead someone with a DIFFERENT favorite style to pass over a game that they'd actually like.

2 comments:

Caro said...

I still think the Diner dash faithfuls will now open up to point and click adventure games. I'm sure a lot of them didn't even know they existed. Maybe this game would have been a win with everyone if every time you picked up an item sparkles exploded out of it.

SSH said...

Most of the bad comments about ECC seem to be from people who don't "get" adventures or have problems with the publisher-mandated DRM. The game itself seems to be well-liked by anyone who actually tries to play it for more than 10 minutes!