As for the reviews themselves, of the very few that I've been able to stomach since they started to get really bad, I found that he tends to go to one extreme or another. He either finds some tiny, nitpicky little thing, that may actually be a legitimate grievance with a given game, but then he blows it all out of proportion, or else he will make these big, sweeping generalizations about the game which tell the reader absolutely nothing of real value, yet are excellent for the purposes of trolling. Typically, it's both of those things, with an underlying layer of simple, pure asshattery. But my main problem with his reviews isn't so much the reviews themselves, because they are what they are, but that there seem to be so many people who take them seriously. If you read many of the comments of any given review of his, you'll see things like "Too bad, I was thinking of trying that game, but now I won't" or "Glad I read this review, I dodged a bullet there" or "Thanks for saving me $60, Jim" and so on and so forth, and I find that utterly depressing since his reviews tend to be much worse than merely useless. As I've said elsewhere, it's gotten to the point where if I look at a review and see that Jim has given a game a horribly low score, that's a pretty reliable indicator that the game in question is actually going to be at least decent, perhaps even great.
And about the scores, the numbers are absolutely pointless. The only reason they bother to use them at all is so that they'll get included in Metacritic and such. Case in point: Jim actually gave Heavy Rain a 7 out of 10, believe it or not. (Seriously, I was surprised because I had forgotten that he'd given it such a high score when I went back later after writing the above post and looked at the review again.) And given how Destructoid claims to want to use "the whole scale" rather than the so-called "7-10 scale" that they claim most other sites use, a 7/10 from Destructoid should, you'd think, be equivalent to above 9/10 from any other site, i.e. (0.7 * 3) + 7 = 9.1 out of 10, assuming that 7 is the absolute worst and 10 is the best on the "7-10 scale". Of course, the assumption of the "7-10 scale" is ludicrous to begin with, since the sites they claim use it have often given scores well below that anyway. And yet, despite all of that, look at how much Sterling has bashed Heavy Rain, both before and after the review, as you pointed out. The meaningless score doesn't in any way reflect how Sterling actually felt about the game, given all of the other evidence.
I'm just hoping that he'll continue to get worse and worse, which definitely seems to be the course he's currently on, and that eventually (hopefully sooner rather than later) he'll reach a sort of critical mass of suckage such that even his most ardent of supporters will finally see through his bullshit, and the site will finally get off of its collective ass and do something about him. Well, actually, I'd prefer that he'd stop being so horrible altogether and go back to what he was before, but if I can't have the latter, I'll take the former.
As an aside, I was kind of shocked to learn a few days ago that Anthony Burch left the site (http://www.destructoid.com/see-you-around-destructoid-172126.phtml) almost two months ago (shows you how long it's been since I bothered paying attention to the site). Given that he was one of the two most problematic writers on the site (the other being Sterling, of course), I can't say that I'm sad to see him gone. Though, to be fair to Burch, he didn't hold a candle to Sterling (or even Robert Summa) when it came to sucking. Oh, and speaking of Summa, Sterling has long since passed that particular threshold of suckage, in my book. Summa used to be the impossibly high bar of sucking that I thought nobody else could possibly top, but Sterling has managed to easily vault over it with miles to spare.
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Re: Completely agree with you 100%
Date: 2010-06-13 09:55 am (UTC)From:As for the reviews themselves, of the very few that I've been able to stomach since they started to get really bad, I found that he tends to go to one extreme or another. He either finds some tiny, nitpicky little thing, that may actually be a legitimate grievance with a given game, but then he blows it all out of proportion, or else he will make these big, sweeping generalizations about the game which tell the reader absolutely nothing of real value, yet are excellent for the purposes of trolling. Typically, it's both of those things, with an underlying layer of simple, pure asshattery. But my main problem with his reviews isn't so much the reviews themselves, because they are what they are, but that there seem to be so many people who take them seriously. If you read many of the comments of any given review of his, you'll see things like "Too bad, I was thinking of trying that game, but now I won't" or "Glad I read this review, I dodged a bullet there" or "Thanks for saving me $60, Jim" and so on and so forth, and I find that utterly depressing since his reviews tend to be much worse than merely useless. As I've said elsewhere, it's gotten to the point where if I look at a review and see that Jim has given a game a horribly low score, that's a pretty reliable indicator that the game in question is actually going to be at least decent, perhaps even great.
And about the scores, the numbers are absolutely pointless. The only reason they bother to use them at all is so that they'll get included in Metacritic and such. Case in point: Jim actually gave Heavy Rain a 7 out of 10, believe it or not. (Seriously, I was surprised because I had forgotten that he'd given it such a high score when I went back later after writing the above post and looked at the review again.) And given how Destructoid claims to want to use "the whole scale" rather than the so-called "7-10 scale" that they claim most other sites use, a 7/10 from Destructoid should, you'd think, be equivalent to above 9/10 from any other site, i.e. (0.7 * 3) + 7 = 9.1 out of 10, assuming that 7 is the absolute worst and 10 is the best on the "7-10 scale". Of course, the assumption of the "7-10 scale" is ludicrous to begin with, since the sites they claim use it have often given scores well below that anyway. And yet, despite all of that, look at how much Sterling has bashed Heavy Rain, both before and after the review, as you pointed out. The meaningless score doesn't in any way reflect how Sterling actually felt about the game, given all of the other evidence.
I'm just hoping that he'll continue to get worse and worse, which definitely seems to be the course he's currently on, and that eventually (hopefully sooner rather than later) he'll reach a sort of critical mass of suckage such that even his most ardent of supporters will finally see through his bullshit, and the site will finally get off of its collective ass and do something about him. Well, actually, I'd prefer that he'd stop being so horrible altogether and go back to what he was before, but if I can't have the latter, I'll take the former.
As an aside, I was kind of shocked to learn a few days ago that Anthony Burch left the site (http://www.destructoid.com/see-you-around-destructoid-172126.phtml) almost two months ago (shows you how long it's been since I bothered paying attention to the site). Given that he was one of the two most problematic writers on the site (the other being Sterling, of course), I can't say that I'm sad to see him gone. Though, to be fair to Burch, he didn't hold a candle to Sterling (or even Robert Summa) when it came to sucking. Oh, and speaking of Summa, Sterling has long since passed that particular threshold of suckage, in my book. Summa used to be the impossibly high bar of sucking that I thought nobody else could possibly top, but Sterling has managed to easily vault over it with miles to spare.