After an hour, I still couldn’t pick you out from the other babies. Wrinkled, wet, head shaped weird, crying… I’d seen it before.
I’m thinking this whole baby nonsense has run its course. There’s plenty of adults around that can drive cars, climb trees, and feed themselves. I can’t really see what a baby that can do none of these things brings to the table.
Other parents are telling me to give you some time, you’ll grow into something unique and special. But frankly, I’m not buying it. It’s been an hour and I’m bored with you already.
You’re just the same as every other damn baby out there.
15 thoughts on “1 Hour Review of: Your Life”
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I take it you are at odds with Jef’s review.
I could care less what he thinks about it, to be honest. I’ve done extensive articles about games, like Warhammer, that I’d never even played at the time 🙂
Now that I think about it, it takes real guts to be a blogger on a pro blog like Massively and come right out and say that you find new games in the genre you cover to not even be worth your time to play. It would be refreshing if other pro-bloggers would join him and admit that 99% of the games so breathlessly covered by Massively, Ten Ton Hammer, MMORPG.com et al are absolute crap, as determined by an hour of play.
I don’t usually read Massively so I can’t form much of an opinion on the general tone of their articles. I think that one article did a fair job of covering a broad a range of reactions to the game given the amount of time they spent reviewing it.
What gets me is the uproar in the comments section from the RIFT faithful. Look, people, Jef was forthcoming about exactly how much time he spent playing, and what his opinion is. He’s not tasked with being the main RIFT reviewer, and this wasn’t a “review”. Not everyone has the same taste in things – MMOs in particular – and his is basically a warning shot to the Darkfall crowd that RIFT isn’t going to bring you back to WoW circa 2004.
As I just posted at length in a thread over at Kill Ten Rats, I’ve both pre-ordered Rift and paid six months sub in advance AND I agree with Jef Reahard.
He saw the tutorial zones. The tutorial zones are dreadful. I’m surprised he even lasted an hour – I barely managed it.
I’m sure if it had been his job to review the game he’d have persisted and had he done so he might have changed his opinion, as I did. But he was playing it out of curiosity in his own time, so why would he bother? Those tutorials are going to stop a lot of potential players much sooner than an hour in.
The only real problem I found with the tutorial was the fact that you could not skip any quest. This makes it annoying if you have to run through the tutorial multiple times. However, after doing it a couple of times, I’ve found that it really didn’t take that long which makes it tolerable.
It’s strange, everything that I found annoying and wanted to give feedback about was really not that bad when I had to do it again and actually understood what was going on.
I like Tobold’s take on the situation.
That’s pretty much the same issue I had with the quests as a whole. Even if you did every quest and did a fair amount of rifting, as I did in Beta 3, you still don’t quite have enough to hit 20. In Beta 2, I finally got 20 during a Realm of the Fae run. In Beta 3, I hung out in front of Iron Tomb killing trash mobs for the last couple of bubbles.
The good news is that just standing around farming trash mobs is an okay way to level.
I’m still baffled as to how many times people see the word “review” when the word used is “impression.”
Brains lie, people assume stuff on a site is reviews and that’s all they see. It’s why having someone else edit your writing is better than self-editing since your fill often auto-corrects errors in what you’ve written without you noticing.
If I picked up a console game and found myself bored after 10 minutes of play, I’d put the game back in the case and return it to the store. If I played through a game for an hour and found myself bored, I would consider that game to be a flat out failure. I’ve walked out of movies after 30-40 minutes – movies that I’d paid for, bought popcorn for, and brought friends/dates to.
I’ve got about a dozen games installed on my gaming PC right now. In addition, I have shortcuts to the alphas or betas of another dozen games on my desktop. When I have free time to spend on a game, I don’t want to find myself wishing I was playing a different game. I don’t want to find myself wondering if my time could be better spent doing anything else. I want to enjoy my time in whatever game it is I’m playing at that moment.
Seriously, there is absolutely nothing wrong with spending an hour with a new title and making a determination. Whether you agree with that determination or not is one thing – but an hour is PLENTY of time to draw conclusions about any title. Either it hooks you or it doesn’t. You either want to spend more time playing or you don’t. You either can’t get enough or really that’s enough thank you.
For a full review? No, an hour’s not enough. For an impression of an unreleased title? Absolutely an hour is more than enough time to draw a conclusion.
I agree with Kendricke. Whatever your personal impression of Rifts is, one hour is probably enough time to develop an impression of the game. Both WoW and STO hooked me with in a few minutes to a half hour of play. Neither LOTRO nor AoC were as engaging, and I struggled to enjoy them past that first hour or so, without really succeeding.