A shooter was released today called Brink. I personally had never heard of it and it looks pretty uninteresting to me, but it's causing quite the shitstorm on the interwebs. The controversy stems from a Joystiq review of the game that gave it 2/5. The review is actually pretty well-written and its comments on the game actually do make it sound pretty infuriating. But someone on the internet did some "research" and apparently found out by looking at the author's XBox Live gamertag that he, apparently, only spent a few hours playing the game. This was enough for that journalist to call out the other journalist for, basically, not giving the game a fair shake.
Joystiq has countered, through both Justin McElroy's twitter account and a re-edited version of their original review, that both the gamer tag was incorrect and that Griffin McElroy played through the game for 12 hours. But what this proves is a skewed value system within the reviewing community, where games have to be assessed on their mechanics and their "features," and that those features only become apparent by waving your dick around and playing a game for a really, really long time (and subsequently bragging about it).
It was clear that Griffin played through the game – the things he described in this multiplayer-focused game could really only be discovered by playing it for at least a few hours, clearly – but from a fundamental, conceptual level (a level that far too few reviews actually focus on, and this one, surprisingly, did), a game's worth can be determined far sooner than the end credits screen. Assessing a game doesn't require that you explore absolutely every nook and cranny of it, as the game's worth should be based on more than completionism. It's also pretty clear that this "investigation" was only started because of Brink's low score ("Wanna know one reason game scores are inflated? Give a 2/5 to an anticipated game and then try to have a productive morning." – @justinmcelroy) – had McElroy simply given the game an average score, the witch hunt would almost certainly have never begun in the first place. Once again, this highlights my extreme distaste for review scores, especially with videogames, as they're not really assessed on a 100 point (or even 10 point) scale – the bottom half of the scale is almost never used (even when it, you know, probably should be) and the pressure to deliver an average score above 60 so as to not "unfairly" punish a game is as reprehensible as the forced averages of a university class.
With all this being said, sorry everyone: I'm not reviewing Brink. Like, ever.