What do you mean it doesn't fit in the drive like this?

You’ve heard it all before, I’m sure, but the DRM battle still rages on, and Rockstar bring it to a whole new level of illogical thought process. There is plenty of past material to talk about on the subject, but rather than dig into the past(yet) I decided to start with the draconian drama du jour.

Quick aside, I’m sick of the word “draconian,” but it worked too well with that alliteration, don’t expect to see it again this article.

GTA4 is attached to our old friend SecuRom. If you’re hopelessly out of the loop on that, SecuRom is a spyware tool commonly used by game companies to prevent people from using their product. It usually installs irremovable components at the kernel level of your operating system, renders legitimate hardware and software unusable, and sends unspecified information back to Sony and possibly the game publisher. They say it’s used to prevent piracy, but so far, the only people that have been stopped from playing are people that bought the software.

Spyware really is the only thing you can call this stuff. That said, the first anti-virus company that adds DRM schemes like this to it’s definitions will have a lifetime customer in me.

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In any sort of entertainment industry, reviews are necessary or the consumers are going to war with no ammo. Without reviews, you basically have to trust the words of the people making the games, and every single one of them is going to say “This is the best game EVER.”

Unfortunately, this is about what we get from game journalists anyway.

This is hardly a fresh new opinion. People have been complaining about integrity in reviews for as long as there have been reviews. As such, there are going to be a lot of points you’ve probably heard before, often, and a lot more eloquently, so I’ll get those out of the way first.

Most gaming websites and magazine are in the semi-unique position of being in the business of criticizing games, while simultaneously asking their makers for money via advertising. It’s hard to take “10/10 game of the CENTURY” seriously when it’s wedged between 2 fullscreen ads for the game and hidden under a pop-up of the main character.

Don’t ask how they crammed 2 fullscreen ads on one screen.

Then, of course, the ever ubiquitous numerical score. Not necessarily bad on their own right, but until someone can tell me the difference between an 8.5 and an 8.8 I really don’t care. Ideally, the stupid things could just be abolished, but for those that simply must discretely quantify their objective opinions, use a smaller scale. Everyone basically uses a 5 point scale anyway.

1-6: Crap
7: Semi-Playable
8: Good
9: Great
10: Peerless

Really, anything under a 5 is an outlier anyway. I’m personally partial to the simple “Buy, rent, or avoid” scale.

That’s what you’ve all heard before, but there are even more deeply rooted problems with reviews that haven’t been driven into the ground yet.

Don’t spend half of your text on summarizing the plot. This one is a big pet peeve of mine. So many reviews read like a high school book report that the author is trying to pad to reach the minimum word requirement. This is especially bad on the internet. If I’m thinking about a game purchase, I’m probably going to read a ton of reviews in rapid succession, I don’t need to know that it’s about a grizzled space marine shooting aliens every single time. Spend some time talking about the game instead.

Let me know who you are and why I should listen to you. Back in the day, Nintendo Power used to have each reviewer rank their favorite genre’s. This was extremely helpful. If someone who liked sports games and shooters said an RPG was boring, you could take it with a grain of salt. A game I spent a lot of time researching recently was Fallout 3. I despised Oblivion and it’s prequel Morrowind, so I didn’t have high hopes for Fallout, but I love the series. For every glowing review I found, I made a point to dig up that reviewers opinion on Oblivion because it let me know what to expect from their opinion in general. This was a lot harder than it should have been.

It turns out I really liked Fallout despite being bored by Bethesda’s previous games.

There is a lot that can be done to improve game reviews, but in this day and age it’s becoming easier and easier to know what to expect from a game simply by the oceans of video and demos and other media that there’s really no excuse to be surprised anymore.