Board 8 > Should you be good at games if you want to review them?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Or at least competent, perhaps? Dunno if folks remember but the question came up when a Polygon journalist failed spectacularly at playing the new Doom - and here we have another, probably even more severe case!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=848Y1Uu5Htk

Watching this footage, I'd believe you if you said this man had never touched a video game in his life, but he's a games journalist paid to review games, and he's been doing it for darn near two decades. I'm definitely not saying that his opinion should be completely disregarded, but it seems a bit... questionable for someone so incompetent to speak with authority about something he fails to understand on a fundamental level.
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I made it 1 minute before losing my mind and shutting it off
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I don't know about "Good", but you should have at least basic human intelligence.
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I haven't watched the video but hasn't it been stated by multiple sources that Cuphead is very difficult

Not that that's an excuse for the question in general
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Overall, I don't think being good at games is necessary to review them (though having even a slight understanding of how they work is probably necessary).

That being said, reviewers should never fault a game for them not being good at it (which I have seen far too many times)
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i remember the doom thing and i stand by what i said back then: no, he doesn't have to be good at every single game genre to review games. obviously he shouldn't review FPS'es but he can still review, say, 2D platformers.
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Johnbobb posted...

Overall, I don't think being good at games is necessary to review them (though having even a slight understanding of how they work is probably necessary).

That being said, reviewers should never fault a game for them not being good at it (which I have seen far too many times)

Basically this. I wouldn't take any game review written by my gf seriously at all. Reviewers don't need to be even decent at games, but they do need to have some level of skill level above "mediocre".
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Johnbobb posted...

That being said, reviewers should never fault a game for them not being good at it (which I have seen far too many times)

i do agree with this. this is a big problem with game journalism - reviewers are more concerned with being topical and getting the review out as fast as possible than spending enough time with games to say something sensible about them. then they go "OMG THIS IS FRUSTRATINGLY DIFFICULT 2/10" when in reality they never even made it past level 1.

if gamergate would have made a point about this (rather than bullshit like "we should boycott sites for publishing game reviews we disagree with") i might have supported them!
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