The Negative Nancy
Who would have imagined that my opinions are basically the same as they were eight months ago? Definitely not Past Solomon when he made the goal to do Review Updates on a regular basis. To give myself some credit, I do have two updates. The first is basic: Rocket Fist has become a little stale. It’s still a good game, but my friends and I no longer clamor to play it.
The second update concerns the Mario + Rabbids: Donkey Kong Adventure DLC. I have just about completed all of the main story missions, and after that, I have a wealth of challenge missions to beat. The amount of content more than justifies the $20 price tag, and if you enjoyed the main game, DKA provides more of the good stuff. Although it’s a bit of a bummer that you’re stuck playing with Donkey Kong, Rabbid Peach, and Rabbid Kranky, they synergize well, and DK’s high mobility makes turns much more dynamic.
With that out of the way, we’ll conclude this with a comparison of my reviews compared to Metacritic’s aggregate scores. Metacritic records every review source’s scores and then produces an average along with some other statistics. Here are Nintendolife’s and Game Informer’s stats as examples:
Because I get a kick out of imagining being on Metacritic, mine would look something like this if Metacritic was designed by a knock-off company:
A brief glance at these numbers shows I’m not as “accurate” as Game Informer or as negative as Nintendolife. That said, according to my calculations, for the majority of my reviews, I have given a lower score than the Metacritic aggregate. My percentage of lower scores is a whopping 23% higher than Game Informer’s 34%. This number would only be inflated if I reduced the range for “%same” reviews. In this sense, I may not slam games with extremely bad ratings (ignoring ClusterPuck) like Nintendolife, but I still may be more critical overall.
These numbers are restricted to my thirty reviews, and this is a relatively low amount in the grand scheme of statistics (at least I’ll pretend it is). However, I do think it shows a trend for how I gauge games. I can be hyper-critical of minor faults, and the saltier I am while I play, the lower the score. I don’t like to admit I have an anger problem, so let’s just say I’m a very salty person. Hollow Knight is one such game that may reap my wrath in its eventual review. It’s a critically-acclaimed game, but I experienced too much frustration while playing it to score it as highly as other critics.
We’ll see how this data changes in another 10 reviews. Judging by the games on my queue, I imagine they will be roughly the same, much like my opinions regarding my currently-reviewed games.