Originally Posted By nytimesguy (22 JUL 2006 3:56pm)
One thing to note is that people who specialize in reviewing a specific genre are often extremely good at those games.  I play all sorts of games, and I don't play any of them as well as reviewers.  A reviewer will say, "this FPS was of moderate difficulty and I finished it in 10 hours" and I will die over and over and take 20 hours to finish.  A reviewer will say, "this strategy game lacks the necessary depth and can be easily beaten with a few basic techniques" and I won't be able to win a single battle.  A reviewer will say, "the puzzles in this adventure game are brain-dead simple" and I'll need a walkthrough for the entire thing.

So usually, in my experience, most reviewers have less trouble with games than I do.  So I take everything with a grain of salt.

But even though reviewers breeze through things I can't get by, I have also on occassions had no problem with something that a critic ranted about.  We all have particular skills, particular approaches and particular ways of looking at the world that will work with some challenges and not with others.

In terms of adventure games, some things I think should always be mentioned, like pixel hunting, because one can say objectively if a game has a lot of pixel hunting, even if people disagree about whether that's a bad thing.  Whether puzzles are logical is trickier, because some puzzles that strike me as illogical make perfect sense to other people.  Saying how difficult a game is is utterly impossible.  As for the theory that puzzle difficulty can be quantified, I would say, not if it's a good game.  If it's a bad game full of unoriginal puzzles then yes, you could give it a difficulty rating, but if the game asks you to think outside of the box, well, how do you measure the difficulty of thinking outside of the box?  I don't think acamedicians have "think outside the box" tests.  Even if they did, my box is not your box.

As for all critics seeming to overlook obvious flaws in a game, that's criticism.  I've seen dreadful movies I thought were terribly written and directed that received universally glowing reviews.  It's annoying, but it's just a part of life, like death, taxes and pixel hunting, that you have to learn to deal with.

Originally Posted By nytimesguy (22 JUL 2006 3:56pm)
Whether puzzles are logical is trickier, because some puzzles that strike me as illogical make perfect sense to other people.  Saying how difficult a game is is utterly impossible.  As for the theory that puzzle difficulty can be quantified, I would say, not if it's a good game.  

If it's a bad game full of unoriginal puzzles then yes, you could give it a difficulty rating,

but if the game asks you to think outside of the box, well, how do you measure the difficulty of thinking outside of the box?