Distant Worlds Reviews

[HsojVvad]

What is Metacritic?

[lenin]

Good balanced reply here...

http://flashofsteel.com/index.php/2010/ ... ent-231373

Good, honest criticism and comment. I, too, love this game. It has the potential to be really great. At present, it is merely very, very good and the best game I've played in this genre for many years. Star Empires IV was good, but once you get the hang of the macromanagement here, you won't miss it. Good for you Matrix and the devs.

[Justascratch]

I feel redeemed for purchasing on day one of the release. 8/8 has restored my faith in my own ability to select a game I will enjoy!

OK OK this seemed more humorous in my head than it does on the screen.

[lenin]

It's definately a mindscratcher, but in a pleasant way, and full of suprises...

[taltamir]

ORIGINAL: Davor

What is Metacritic?

metacritic is a website that calculates an aggregate score of reviews...

so if a game was reviewed by gamespot, gamershell, and gamespy (lets presume only these 3), and it got 100%, 60%, and 4/5 stars, then metacritic takes each score, converts it to percent, and then averages them together (as well as provide a link to each review with a quote from the review and the score)... so that game would have a score of 80% total.

AFAIK it is free

new games have a "not enough reviews to provide a score" until at least 5 reviews are in AFAIK... but being listed will encourage reviewers to review it.

[HsojVvad]

Thanks taltamir for the explanation.

[taltamir]

PS... you can check it out for yourself at metacritic.com
it also does more then just games.

it is also highly inaccurate about what is good, because as yahtze from zero punctuation says, every other game critic seems to have a pickaxe lodged in his skull...
they seem to have an imaginary "hardcore gamer" (14 year old male, no attention span, who thinks uber graphics in a 2000watt quad slixfire system means the game is awesome, more conservative graphics means it sucks, thinks a good story is boring, loves padded game-play length, etc) in their mind and they rate games based on how they THINK said "hardcore gamer" demographic will react to a game... they don't have much respect to the intelligence of said demographic, at all. Also they tend to rate games based on how much advertisement money they pour into the site.

[JaguarUSF]

ORIGINAL: taltamir

they rate games based on how they THINK said "hardcore gamer" demographic will react to a game

Which is why I rate games on whether I like them, thus the 8/8 score. Whatever, whatever, I can do what I want!

I did think the TMA podcast review was good...they were positive, and most of the issues the mention have been fixed or will be fixed (I imagine) soon.

[taltamir]

ORIGINAL: JaguarUSF

ORIGINAL: taltamir

they rate games based on how they THINK said "hardcore gamer" demographic will react to a game

Which is why I rate games on whether I like them, thus the 8/8 score. Whatever, whatever, I can do what I want!

excellent. I will read more of your reviews then

[taltamir]

well... seems like wikipedia deleted the Distant Worlds page.
they didn't consider the out of 8 review "professional" enough and the info from bigger review sites was "more of a press release then a review"... therefore by their rules it makes the wikipedia page "blatant advertising" and subject to "speedy deletion"... I hate wikipedia sometimes. Shame about the loss of the site...
hopefull someone like gamespot will write a review because until they do wikipedia will not allow a page for distant worlds.

[JaguarUSF]

ORIGINAL: taltamir
they didn't consider the out of 8 review "professional" enough

Can't say I don't disagree with that assessment [:D]

[taltamir]

ORIGINAL: JaguarUSF

ORIGINAL: taltamir
they didn't consider the out of 8 review "professional" enough

Can't say I don't disagree with that assessment [:D]

regardless, that is no justification to delete the article.

[Wade1000]

Yeah. I thought Wikiedia was trying to be the people's repository of everything that is and was in products and such in every minor detail. I suppose I was wrong on that thought now. I think Wikipedia would be better if they were like that.

[taltamir]

ORIGINAL: Wade1000

Yeah. I thought Wikiedia was trying to be the people's repository of everything that is and was in products and such in every minor detail. I suppose I was wrong on that thought now. I think Wikipedia would be better if they were like that.

it started more then a year ago when they ran into funding issues... suddenly they started deleting tons of stuff under the "not sufficiently relevant to warrant a page" clause and other such deletion reasons... nowadays there are tons of things that i have to Google for because Wikipedia refuses to have a page on it because its not sufficiently "relevant" (their term)

[JonathanStrange]

The Three Moves Ahead podcast was fairly interesting - but mostly, I think, useful as an introduction to Distant Worlds. There was discussion of the game's contribution to the genre; especially its ambitious automation. Yet ultimately it's fairly lightweight, I don't see it as a being particularly positive or negative. There was some enthusiasm for Distant Worlds, but the podcast wasn't a examination of DWs strengths and weakness. How could it be when one of the three apparently had never played it, another had apparently just skimmed DW, and only the last (Tom Chick) had much experience with the game. And he doesn't much care for it if his QT3 and Fidgit comments are an indication.

[HsojVvad]

I guess it was my attention span, I couldn't listen to the pod cast. I tried, but ended up tuning them out. I didn't even know what they were talking about. Went too long about nothing. I guess you have to be use to them. They were talking about something else for like 2 or 3 minutes before DW was even mentioned.

[JonathanStrange]

Heh. I know what you mean (you have to get used to them). But it was all fairly basic, very basic stuff. (Podcasts usually convey very little info despite going on forever, usually you could summarize it all in a paragraph.)

[taltamir]

what podcast? i didn't see any links to podcasts here

[HsojVvad]

ORIGINAL: taltamir

what podcast? i didn't see any links to podcasts here

http://flashofsteel.com/index.php/2010/ ... ent-231373

It is easy to miss if you don't know what you were looking for. Here I will just post the link for you.

[echn111]

Never heard of "matrix games" and not overly impressed so far. First impressions: How come they haven't bothered to advertise this game anywhere? Why isn't the buy button more obvious? And why force you to fill out all your credit card details even though you want to pay by paypal? Why force customers to create a another login to post on forums? But since I'm not too familar with it, perhaps I wouldn't rush to judgement and consider this a review.

But I do know of "Out of Eight" as a review site and have just bought this game solely based on the reputation of of their reviewer and their site over the last few years. Although I don't always agree with a lot of what they say, their overall track record is good enough that if they say 8/8, I'll give it a try. And it's probably the only review site I would do that with.

Sure it's less commercial and focused on slower paced "non-instant gratification" games than many of the more commercial ones (e.g. gamespot, ign etc.). The big review sites "sometimes" put decent reviewers for the big games from the big publishers, but this type of low-publicity game would normally go to the traditional reviewer for that type of commercial site - you know the type: in their twenties, grew up on consoles and PC FPS's, favour instant gratification and their reviews reflect this, low social skills and not very confident nor experienced outside their comfort zone so if they run into something here that isn't given a lot of publicity it gets marked down etc.)

Anyway, maybe the game sucks, but given the "Out of Eight" reviewer's track record I doubt it.

ORIGINAL: taltamir

ORIGINAL: JaguarUSF

ORIGINAL: taltamir
they didn't consider the out of 8 review "professional" enough

Can't say I don't disagree with that assessment [:D]

I would disagree with you Jaguar by saying you have no clue what you're talking about. Feel free to listen to the advice of the young reviewers on the big sites and consider them to be the real "professionals" if you wish, but you're simply deluding yourself.