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Entry tags:	reviews, videogames

AV Club gives C grade to Uncharted 3; fanboys go ballistic
Scott Jones of the AV Club gave a mixed review of Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, a hotly anticipated game for PlayStation 3. Jones praised the storyline and dialogue but criticized the gameplay mechanics:

[T]he story still zips and characters are still conflicted, but targeting is as twitchy as ever, bad guys still require three or four shotgun blasts to the head before they’re deterred, and the game’s star, Nathan Drake, still has no clue whatsoever about how to crouch. Two years after Thieves, Uncharted’s gameplay mechanics and conventions are no longer dated; they’re borderline archaic.

His final grade for the game was a C.

In the comments section, things started out innocuously enough. There was a minor kerfuffle over whether the game's protagonist was a serial killer. A couple of people speculated about what would happen when the review showed up on Metacritic. "Frankly," said one, "if I had the power to fuck with metacritic like this, I don't think I'd be able to resist giving an F to every single triple-A title. It's like having nuclear launch codes for internet fanboys."

And the internet fanboys did not disappoint. You see, elsewhere on the internet, game critics were creaming themselves about how wonderful Uncharted 3 was. Every single other review on Metacritic was positive; Jones's review was the only mixed one. When the Uncharted fanboys saw the AV Club review, they realized that one bad review was not a threat to their beloved game franchise, and moved on with their lives.

--

Just kidding. They registered for the AV Club so they could comment about how Scott Jones is WRONG WRONG WRONG. The sarcastic hipster types who populate the AV Club comments section were only too happy to bait them.

Some highlights:

Let me tell you how much I don't care about this review! (p. 2)
"Another worthless 'review' by Scott Jones. This guy is a troll and a pure idiot and it's unfortunate this this reviewer and website get attention, hits and web traffic that it doesn't deserve." (p. 2)
A surprisingly thoughtful thread on grade inflation in game reviews (p. 2)
An AV Club staff writer responds to a stupid comment with an allusion to Shakespeare. Unsurprisingly, the commenter doesn't get it. (p. 2)
"It just sounds like DRand is pissed off that this review doesn't spend 6 paragraphs blabbering on about how amazingly well the light bounces off Nathan Drake's immaculately modeled crotch bulge." (p. 2)
I am better than everyone else here because I am a second year med student. (p. 2)
People make fun of IGN's sycophantic reviews and grade inflation (p. 2)
"You are not the Roger Ebert of computer games" (p. 3)
Some asshole named Eric D. Molino doesn't understand formatting or threads (pp. 3-4)
Everyone likes a good Commie joke (p. 4)
I know the gameplay is good, because I watched a walkthrough! (p. 4)
"I could pull a bunch of hard facts out of my ass to prove this guy is an idiot, but I'll just state my opinion." (p. 4)
Microsoft or Activision must have paid Jones to give this game a bad review! (p. 5)
"Sony is going to sell millions of PS3s with this game and you losers will still be in you're moms basement... HAHAHAHAHAHA" (p. 5)
"Are you insane? And by 'insane,' I mean clinically, non-ironically, eat-your-own-shit-and-strangle-kittens batshit nuts." (p. 6)

Here's the best part: the angry comments were posted on October 30 and 31, but Uncharted 3 wasn't released until November 1 (November 2 in Europe). That's right: these valiant fanboys were defending the besmirched honor of a game they'd never played. Except for this guy. Maybe.

EDIT: I just realized that my links to "highlights" aren't working. That's just the AV Club comments system being difficult -- I can't link to anything past page 1. I've put in some page numbers to help out a little.

Also: Eurogamer, which published an 8/10 review of Uncharted 3, has also been overrun with angry fanboys lately. 8/10!

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	chikane 2011-11-04 11:50 pm UTC (link)
	And yes, I see the point on RPG Reviews. Some of them really seem to be missing the point by miles sometimes. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	janegray 2011-11-05 01:29 pm UTC (link)
	As much as I've grown to dislike Penny Arcade over the dickwolves mess, I feel they have really hit the nail on the head when it comes to the additude of most reviewers towards RPGs: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/09/06 (Reply to this)(Parent)

ekaterinv
2011-11-05 11:19 pm UTC (link)

Lately their big thing seems to be "it's not dark and gritty enough!" about JRPGs. And of course they always bitch about "linearity" in any RPG that has a strong story, and "more of the same" if any character even vaguely resembles any other character who has ever existed. But they go orgasmic over shooters in which the main character is Unshaven Snarky Muscley Thirty-something White Dude with a Past #172.

Honestly I think a huge amount of the disrespect for RPGs, particularly Japanese ones, is that they're seen as something girls like.

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	mcity 2011-11-06 02:21 am UTC (link)
	>if any character even vaguely resembles any other character who has ever existed. >in which the main character is Unshaven Snarky Muscley Thirty-something White Dude with a Past #172. Um. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	ekaterinv 2011-11-06 03:25 am UTC (link)
	Shooters. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	chikane 2011-11-06 08:35 am UTC (link)
	To display the hypocrisy of an argument, it is good to sho0w why it is hypocritic. In this case, if people keep complaining about the sameness of RPG characters, yet praise shooters (who also have the exact same "issue", if not stronger than RPGs do) then hypocrisy is pretty blatantly there. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

mcity
2011-11-06 02:24 pm UTC (link)

It's kind of hard to say RPGs don't have an overabundance of androgynous prettyboys. I do note, however, that Cloud Strife has become the posterboy for such, when the androgyny didn't set in until Advent Children. In FFVII proper, he was pretty masculine.

That said, more shooters feature Generic Military Protagonists than Snarky Unshaven Guy. Gears Of War, for instance, seems to have deliberately gone with the 80s/90s hypertrophic tough guy in grim-n-gritty backs-to-the-wall all-hope-is-lost universe where assault rifles have chainsaws on them. Very few people seemed to realize it wasn't exactly being played seriously.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

chikane
2011-11-06 02:54 pm UTC (link)

hypertrophic tough guy Snarky Unshaven Guy.

I think this really is the issue here. To me, these types sound pretty similar, actually. You'll say they're very different, and I'll believe that you see it that way, even though I can't imagine them to be noticeably different.

The same difference claim can be said for various types of these supposed "androgynous prettyboys" (whatever that even means: I wasn't aware that not being hypermasculine/having more than a buzzcut for hair was being androgynous, for example), too, though. People who dislike RPGs just don't tend to bother.

And then turn around and claim that similar types of guys in shooters are totally different.

It's all in how you look at it. You can always make up additional categories for the stuff you like, and pretend no categories exist for the stuff you don't.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

mcity
2011-11-06 03:46 pm UTC (link)

I said "abundance", by which I meant "common". I don't speculate on how prevalent they are. For example, I don't think of Chrono from Chrono Trigger as androgynous or a pretty boy, though he does have anime hair. In fact, "anime hair" is a lot more common than "androgynous prettyboy" in JRPGs, and even then notable exceptions spring readily to mind.

The last two first-person games I played featured a bearded, mute particle physicist, a mute woman of indeterminate race, and two adorable robots who like to hug each other. If you want to include Team Fortress 2, that leads to a main cast of nine very diverse sociopaths.

Incidentally, the Uncharted series is action-adventure, not just a shooter. I shoot things in Ratchet and Clank, and Naughty Dog's previous "Jak 2", and that's not a "shooter" either.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

janegray
2011-11-07 12:26 pm UTC (link)

Dude, Team fortress 2 is nothing like any other shooter ever. You can't use an as an example of diversity in shooters.

I'm a huge fan of the game and love it to bits, but TF2 is to shooters what The Naked Gun is to police movies. Indeed, TF2 is often mocked by the average shooter fans, who insist that "it's not a game, it's a hat-wearing simulator!"

In any case, while I'd argue that androgynous boys in RPGs aren't particularly common (there are a lot of beautiful young man, sure, but I wouldn't call most of them "androgynous", they look clearly male. As

ekaterinv pointed out, some people will claim that any slender man with long hair and no beard is effeminate), that's not the point.

The point is that character archetypes and stereotypes are just as common (or even more so) in shooters than they are in RPGs. Therefore it's highly hypocritical of reviewers to scorn one genre for that trait that is shared by another genre they praise to high heavens.

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	tofuknight 2011-11-09 06:21 pm UTC (link)
	I said "abundance", by which I meant "common". I don't speculate on how prevalent they are. You do realize that "common" = judgement of how prevalent something is, right? (Reply to this)(Parent)

ekaterinv
2011-11-07 07:44 am UTC (link)

It's kind of hard to say RPGs don't have an overabundance of androgynous prettyboys

RPGs don't have an overabundance of androgynous prettyboys. There, I said it. Not hard at all, because I don't think it's true in the least. Just because RPG characters tend to be actual characters, rather than grunting bags of muscles, doesn't make them "androgynous prettyboys". There's a whole lot of gender policing packed into that stereotype.

I can't think of anyone who could count as an "androgynous prettyboy" in any western RPG I've ever played, anyway. Some people like to scream "ZOMG NOT A REAL MAN" whenever they see a male elf, but those people don't count.

And I wasn't dissing shooters. I was dissing game reviewers, and calling them hypocrites who are biased against RPGs. Which, by and large, they are.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

	chikane 2011-11-06 08:36 am UTC (link)
	I think you're on to something with the last part. Girly is badbad for gamers, after all :/ I remember when adventures were being called girly for not being violent enough. My mother is still complaining about a lack of good adventures ^^ (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	janegray 2011-11-07 12:44 pm UTC (link)
	If it's any consolation, Broken Sword 5 is going to come out next year. BW4 was sadly lacking, but the first 3 games are some of the greatest adventures ever (imho), so I'm cautiously optimistic for the fifth game (after all, the fourth Monkey Island game was also the worst in the series, but the fifth game was pretty great). (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	chikane 2011-11-09 08:47 am UTC (link)
	THAT is nice to know, thank you. My mother absolutely loved that series. Will be passed on. ~~I am so out of the loop~~ (Reply to this)(Parent)

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