Since NFS: Prostreet has made an appearance (complete with cheap two-bit whores and shiny ricer wagons), I thought I’d dig out this old NFS: Carbon review I wrote a while ago and add some pictures with smart-ass captions.

Hit the jump to find it on the pages.

And so another week ends, and I catch my breath. My God, work is busy.

Please, please, please let these few weeks pass quickly. 

An opinion piece by Kotaku on why Video Game Review systems are broken.

I love the title so far. Will prepare my bile duct for tonight.

So, Mr. Wilson has made four points. If I may, I’d like to comment:

1. There is essentially no perfect game, which makes rating redundant. I agree that there is no perfect game. Just like there is no perfect woman, or no perfect painting, or no perfect pizza. The reason is (dun dun DUUUNNN) it’s all subjective! It’s not that hard a concept to grasp. You can not give a score out of 100 for the Mona Lisa. An art historian will give it something in the high nineties while some emo kid will rail about the conformity of it all and give it two tears out of five, or something. You can, however, say that a circle or a square is perfect because it is constrained by simple, defined rules. Art and entertainment such a movies and games are not constrained by such rules - that is the beauty of it all.
2. The public place too much emphasis on numbers. Yes, we do place too much emphasis on numbers. Look at Metacritic. Look at Rotten Tomatoes. We feel the need to quantify things so that our feeble minds can comprehend. Scores are a quick, easy and dirty way to transfer one’s opinion. People jump straight to the score and look at the rating, and know what to expect. When they see 4, they will be singling out the bad comments. When they see 9, they will be focusing on its good points. We’re too quick to judge on a game because of the initial low score, and as a result we don’t give certain games credit that they’re due.
3. We are looking at the wrong aspects of game quality because we are forking over hard cash for it. Yup. We are spending time playing games so we can enjoy them, and so we can take time out from the dreary, meaningless reality that we call "life". Instead of improving our social skills or engaging in sexual intercourse, we’d rather move pixels from one point to another point on a monitor and have fun doing it. As a result, we’re looking at games at all the wrong angles. How much gameplay can I get out of it? Will it take long for me to learn? Is the stuff in the collector’s editions worthwhile? And in the meantime, hardly anyone cares about the story or the detail behind the graphics. As long as it shines, ripples, ruffles or blinks properly, then people will be wowed.
4. In the end, we need reviews, so why fight it? We do need reviews, but we shouldn’t just lie down and take it. We need to fight for more subjective, meaningful reviews without such a heavy reliance on score. Take underrated games, for instance. Freedom Fighters. Operation Flashpoint. Outcast. They were all excellent games in their own right, but just didn’t get the kudos they deserved and quickly got lost in an avalanche of effective PR and in the shadows of big boy publishers.
   But that’s just how the cookie crumbles. Many publications depend on advertising as a primary source of income, which are funded by advertisements, which often come from game publishers who provide the games for review. It wouldn’t be uncommon for some quiet, mutual understanding to cross the deal table as editors discuss what reviews to cover in the coming month.

Is it really such a big deal, though? In the end, it’s just appealing to the lowest common denominator. Not everyone wants to spend their time reading long, flowing reviews about the finer points of a certain game (which is unfortunate, because that’s how I do mine ). They just want to know whether or not a certain game is worth plonking down cash for, because you can’t trust everything you read on a game’s cover.

But can we trust everything we read in a game review?