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Post by Maxim on Oct 15, 2015 8:32:16 GMT
You can usually see it with either early access to the game for review, or articles on the developer. Thus it mostly affects UK-developed games.
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Post by lambrettadave on Oct 26, 2015 17:06:33 GMT
Are these hosted anywhere else?
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Post by Maxim on Oct 26, 2015 18:57:37 GMT
They're all on Sega Retro. I'm also slowly adding them to SMS Power! with full OCR of the text, which is taking a while, but means you can actually search and read the text comfortably.
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Post by lambrettadave on Nov 4, 2015 22:21:52 GMT
I have found them on sega retro now. I will check smspower in the near future too. :-)
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Post by Maxim on Nov 7, 2015 15:41:38 GMT
I'm reading through Mean Machines recently (reviews to be posted soon) and good grief, it's a terribly written magazine. The reviews are OK (a bit short) but the rest is really awful. Were the others any better? Sega Force seemed less bad.
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Post by lambrettadave on Nov 11, 2015 14:50:38 GMT
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Post by ShadowAngel on Nov 20, 2015 13:23:53 GMT
There were rumours that some reviews were erm.....influenced, and some people were politely persuaded to say nice things about games when the game maybe didnt deserve it, this may also have extended to saying not so nice things about games that would have been direct competition. Those rumors are true and it's not limited to gaming media. Basically every magazine/website that reviews something can be "influenced" by the copyright holders of the reviewed item. Like around 2010 there was a small controversy regarding bicycle magazines and them always praising all bikes, even those that get negative reviews or are called unsecure by "Stiftung Warentest" (a non-profit organization that basically tests everything) One Magazine got caught receiving 4.500€ for a positive review about a bike. And in the gaming world over the years there were several cases that prove that reviews are bought or at least "positively influenced" by the Developers/Publishers - Future Publishing and the Driv3r Controversy, Future got the exclusive review rights in the UK and subsequently gave the game 9/10 ratings, while later ratings ranged from 2/10 to 4/10 in other publications. On the message boards of Future users started an uproar which led to shills being installed on the forums to counter the critical users. - In 2012 Rich Stanton, who worked for Future Publishing, dished out enough dirt about how the reviews are controled by the Publishers - The whole Gamespot controversy about Kane & Lynch 2, the editor gave the game a bad review, Eidos went nuts, the editor was fired - There was a story that some staff members from IGN were invited to do Voice Over Work for Mass Effect 3, subsequently IGN was hyping Mass Effect 3 like it's the best game of all time - The same thing happened with editors of the official Playstation Magazine in the UK: Lucas Arts invited them to the Skywalker Ranch and subsequently they praised the extremely mediocre Phantom Menace game. - A german website once flatout said that they won't do reviews of EA Games anymore because EA was basically blackmailing them "Give us good reviews or you don't get any review copies anymore". - PC Joker in Germany was probably the first magazine to come out with that, the owner of it wrote in one issue about how Publishers influence and pay for reviews (Funnily enough it were the Joker magazines that gave Rise of the Robots on the PC and Amiga absurdely positive reviews) - JoWood tried to sue several magazines and websites (here in Germany it were PC Powerplay and 4 Players) for bad reviews about Gothic 3 (which was an unfinished, buggy mess of a game). Of course there lawsuit was laughed at it but subsequently JoWood boycotted all those magazines. - Talking about JoWood, several of their employees were caught writing positive "reviews" about Gothic 3 on Amazon in a failed attempt to counter all the 1 Star Reviews. Something that isn't new, everybody knows that there are paid shills active in Forums, Amazon, Metacritic and other sites. Companies like Babel Media until some years ago even openly promoted their "guerilla tactics" of infiltrating message boards or writing positive reviews about something. - Of course also during the GamerGate Controversy there were people talking about reviews and how they are influenced by publishers.
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Post by Maxim on Nov 20, 2015 14:48:18 GMT
Getting closer to Sega 8-bit, the issues I've read of S - which was, at first, very strongly linked to, but not officially endorsed or owned by, Virgin Mastertronic - have a remarkable amount of promotion of the Handle Controller. Pretty much no criticism, and lots of "it makes this game easier/more fun to play". Those of us who have tried it know this not to be true...
Later on, there's also a really large number of very positive reviews of Super Kick Off on the Master System from several UK magazines. I'm pretty sure it's not that good... but it was developed by a UK publisher that was placing a lot of ads for it in the following months.
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Post by Transatlantic Foe on Nov 21, 2015 9:05:28 GMT
Super Kick Off was an advanced football game for its time and that's what most of the reviews I saw praised it for.
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Post by ShadowAngel on Nov 22, 2015 14:50:06 GMT
Super Kick Off was an advanced football game for its time and that's what most of the reviews I saw praised it for. I guess the rating have more to do with "It's Football!", "It's from the UK!", "It's Kick Off!" (which was extremely popular over there back then) but even then, ratings up to 96% look extremely silly. Outside the UK from what i was able to gather, Super Kick Off got extremely mediocre ratings. Here in Germany across all magazines and all systems the game got ratings between 45% and 68% (with below 30% ratings for the horrible Game Boy version) and everybody wrote the same: A ton of options and settings but outdated game mechanics and hard to learn controls topped with an insane AI that is hard to beat. There's a reason why Kick Off was quickly killed by Sensible Soccer in 1992.
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