[FaceMask]

Quote: Originally Posted by CM Hooe

What's a reasonable alternative to the absolute scale, though? I'm not the reviewer, but to me the idea of applying some sort of bonus to the game's score or pulling punches in the text of the reviewer's opinion based on the game's budget, team size, or sympathy for the developer on a personal level strikes me as disingenuous. A reviewer's purpose is to assess the quality of a video game amidst other available options and make a recommendation to the consumer. No video game exists in a vacuum. If the reviewer feels this game doesn't begin to compare to other options, he's perfectly justified in saying as much. If the reviewer isn't honest with how he feels about the game or withholds that opinion, he's not serving the readers well at-best and deliberately misleading them at-worst. "Fair" simply is not an object in this scenario; other football video games are already out there in the wild and not going away. The onus is on the game developer to produce a quality game, not on media to give out a participation award to anyone who feels like making a game.

That's not the point I'm making here.

Let me be clear; a reviewer can trash a bad game from now until infinity and that's perfectly fine, and I'm not asking them to pull punches. That's not what this is about.

And while I agree that games don't exist in a vacuum, they do however exist on their own levels of development. So having said that, the problem here is, when you take a game made on a $500 budget by essentially one guy and even so much as inject into it a comparison to a game made on a multi-million dollar budget by a massive team of people, you've totally lost perspective. I'm not saying the game is any good, it may be crap, I haven't played it yet, but no matter what it is, no comparison to Madden as a way to point out its issues or shortcomings is valid given the enormously different scales. It's the same vein of concept as to why people tuned out of the Joe Montana stuff the minute they found out it was mobile. All the Versus Madden hype had to go out the window because those people understood scale and realized that even considering a mobile game a viable contender to Madden was unreasonable given the huge scale difference.