The Penny Arcade guys are raw. They wear their biases on their sleeve and pretty much have no qualms about shitting on someone’s year or two or more of hard work if it deserves it. That said, I hope to never earn the kind of wrath that they have for Lair:

Playing Lair is horrifying, like having a talking cyst erupt out of your genitals.

Wow. So other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show?

Guess what, Mr. Minter? You have probably been coddled by your fans for years who clutch their Commodores close to their chests, but here in the real world not everyone is going to like your games. If you throw a hissy fit every time someone doesn’t “get” what you are trying to do, we are going to see less corporate buy-in for experimental projects. Even folks at the big bad EA can produce gems that people instantly write off. Do you know how often that happens here?

I haven’t played Space Giraffe yet, but from what I read from the reviews, having enemies that you can’t see tends to not be a great design decision. I see a lot of fanboy backlash that these folks just don’t “get” it and that you have to put a lot of time in and “have your brain adapt” to the game. What this usually means is that you have to get used to serious usability issues that the designer didn’t care to iron out or didn’t find it neccessary to change.

A lot of people don’t want to have to put in serious work to play a game. Shocking.

Where I do agree with the fanboy swarm is that reviewers should be cognizant of the genre that they are reviewing if they are doing an in-depth review. I don’t want to know whether a hard-core Tempest nut finds Space Giraffe fun, I want to know if normal people find it fun. The answer appears to be: no, not really. That’s what I want to see from reviews. If you are going to get down into the minutiae of why the game isn’t that fun, then you better damn well have a good grasp of the concepts of the genre. But for fanboys of Minter’s to piss and moan that the game got a poor review… you were already going to buy the game anyway, so why do you need a review? Face it, game reviews ARE a buyer’s guide. Game criticism is alive and well on th Internet. You can usually find it because they don’t give a numeric score. Jane Eyre? 3/5. Lots of depth, but drags on…

XBLA has demos. You can play and find out for yourself. I will. If it really isn’t a 2/10, then people are going to see that and the reviewer will look like an ass. Don’t swing the needle of asshattery to your side by being a crybaby about it. But if this is a variation on “Oh, the first ten hours are pretty dull, but it really picks up steam after THAT”, then count me out.

I mostly post links for my own pleasure – that I can go back and view them later. This is a case where I simply don’t want to lose the link.