“GTA4″ reviews start rolling in

The early reviews of Grand Theft Auto IV are trickling in, and all indications are that not only did Rockstar hit a home run, they knocked the freakin’ ball into orbit.

Metacritic so far has the Xbox 360 version scoring a perfect 100 based on 13 reviews. If that holds, it will finally knock BioShock (which “only” scored a 96) to second place. I’m not quite sure how Metacritic is getting the perfect 100 since two reviews gave GTA4 a 98 and one came through with a mere 95. It proabably has to do with Marc Doyle’s weighted system that has the views of more influential outlets count for more.

I will say that the circumstances surrounding the reviews are certainly odd. Typically, embargoed reviews are lifted all at the same time. Such was the case with Halo 3, the game that probably most parallels GTA4 in terms of hype and gamer reaction.

But Rockstar seems to have assigned staggered embargo times for various outlets. IGN was the first out of the gate with its “exclusive review” earlier this weekend. Kotaku told readers it would post its review at 9am Pacific on Sunday, and stuck to that (posting an hour later, even) despite that IGN’s piece was already out. Tonight I see GameSpy, but not GameSpot, has a review out, and The New York Times has its review.

Variety’s Ben Fritz calls the ethics of the whole enterprise into question. While I’ll leave that topic to in-person discussions over a mug or two of beer, I will echo his sentiment that if someone else is already running with news you have agreed to hold until a later time, then any embargo is effectively broken and you should be clear to run your story. In most cases this does require a phone call to be placed to the source of the news, first to ask about the circumstances of the early report, and second as a courtesy to inform them that you now plan to run your story. The only situation I can envision in which you might hold back is if the terms of the embargo you agreed to explicitly stated that other outlets may be running reviews earlier than you, but you must hold yours until the agreed-upon time anyway. 

The other major implication of all these positive reviews is that I may be compelled to go to my local GameStop tomorrow at midnight to procure my copy. I am seriously contemplating buying it, coming home, and playing it for 7 hours or so until I have to get back to the office. Grand Theft Auto? More like Grand Theft Good Night’s Rest. 

Why Metacritic is the Roger Ebert of video games

Yesterday I posted my recent article about Metacritic, the entertainment scoring Web site. It’s just so interesting how it very quickly evolved into such an important metric for the video game industry, far more so than it has for movies and music.

A major reason for that has to be that the game review business has no equivalent to a Roger Ebert. There’s no single authoritative name — or handful of names — that people turn to when they want to see how a game rates.

This is due to the nature of the medium. It’s possible for one guy, be he Roger Ebert or Gene Shalit or whoever, to watch several movies a week and then tape a half hour show or write a couple thousand words on them. A movie is watched in two hours yet many games can take 20 hours or more to complete. That makes it tough to comprehensively review even just one game a week, whereas you could (theoretically) review 10 movies in that time.

Also, a movie reviewer isn’t as beholden to the subject matter of the movie to render a competent opinion. Ebert can review “The Natural”, “Saving Private Ryan”, “300″ and “The Fast and the Furious” and the same critical techniques generally apply. It would be weird if Ebert was known as the “war movie reviewer” while Leonard Maltin was the “sports movie guy” and Gene Shalit was the “comedy movie guy”.

But you kind of have to have that specialization that with games. Yes, there’s always the standard of “Is this fun?” but you can’t take what makes a good first-person shooter and use that to judge a role-playing game, or judge a driving title based on mechanics found in a football simulation. The experiences are just too different. In that way, video games seem more like real-world sports where commentators focus narrowly on baseball or football but rarely are able to have encyclopedic knowledge of every sport. Game reviewers definitely gravitate towards their couple of favorite genres in a way movie reviewers don’t.

The sheer number of gamesreleased, and the variety of platforms, also comes into play. An Xbox 360 experience is going to be different from a Wii experience, which is in turn different from a PSP experience. It’s as if Ebert not only had to review movies but also TV shows and comic books.

I think that naturally led to gaming sites and magazinestaking the role that individual reviewers have played in the movie industry. Readers end up feeling that GameSpy, or GameSpot, or EGM, or whatever, generally has reviews that match most closely with their experiences. Yes, some of the more devoted readers may latch on to individual reviewers. For instance, GameSpy’s Sal “Sluggo” Accardo is one of the top “Guitar Hero” players in the world and he used to be a professional musician. Therefore, I always seek out his reviews on music-themed games. But in general you say, “Oh, this game got 4 stars from GameSpy“.

A final thought is simply that it somehow became an established part of game reviewing to use a fine-grained scale such as 10 points, 20 points or even 100 points. That compares to the 4- or 5-star scales, or letter grades assigned by most movie reviewers. I’m not sure how that evolved, but I’m guessing it might be an outgrowth of gamers’ tendency to break down criticism of titles into categories such as “graphics”, “sound”, “story”, “multiplayer”, etc and then adding up the various sub-scores to reach a final number.

In the end, the urge for the quick take from an authoritative source is still present and powerful. Sometimes you just want a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” take on a movie without delving into details of the cinematography or whatever. It can be the same for games, and Metacritic steps into that role with a nutshell number that delivers that instant gratification.

A look at Metacritic

In addition to frequent blather, I am hopefully also going to use this site to showcase a bit of my work at Reuters and to expand on it in a totally these-views-do-not-represent-Reuters-and-are-solely-those-of-the-author kind of manner.

Here’s an easy way to kick things off. 

My Gameworld column last week focused on Metacritic and how its scores have become so influentual in the U.S. video game industry.  It’s certainly a topic that has been covered before, much to the surprise and delight of the site’s original founding trio. The peg for my story, however, was EA’s recent analyst day. It was fascinating to hear the CEO and other executives of the industry’s biggest comapny obsess over how their products scored on Metacritic.

I intend to follow this up with some additional thoughts on why Metacritic has emerged as such a force. But that will have to wait until tomorrow, as I have 6 hours, 49 minutes and counting until I have to get up.

By Scott Hillis

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – John Riccitiello, head of Electronic Arts, is showing a chart to Wall Street analysts and he is not happy.

This chart, Riccitiello grouses, shows the one metric that has most frustrated him since he took over the world’s largest video game publisher nearly a year ago.

It doesn’t show the company’s falling operating profit or sliding market share. Instead, it shows the average score for EA’s video games on Metacritic.org, a Web site that distills a pool of reviews for a given game down to a single number.