Saturday, February 22, 2020

Eric Vs. 365 - Day 237 - Godzilla: Save the Earth

Godzilla: Save the Earth is such a "middle" game. It looks worse than Destroy All Monsters Melee, but has a bigger roster. It doesn't have as big of a roster as Unleashed, though. So choosing which of the Pipeworks trilogy of Godzilla games to play always comes down to - Do you want better graphics or a huge roster of monsters? Save the Earth sort of gets lost in the middle. Read more and watch gameplay right here.

All the Pipeworks Godzilla games play pretty much the same, so there isn't much to say. A bunch of big ass monsters kick and punch and atomic breath each other to death for our amusement. That's it. It's super fun, as long as you love Godzilla and kaiju in general. It's weird to me that the games got progressively worse reviews as they released, considering they all play the same but each one had a bigger roster and more stuff to do, but reviewers in general are pretty dumb when it comes to this sort of thing. 

And now I have a theme for this blog - Assigning reviews to people who aren't fans of stuff is freaking dumb. I think the underlying logic behind giving licensed games to non-fans or casual reviewers is that a good game is good regardless and a bad game is bad regardless, but that is extremely flawed. An "OK" game can be greatly elevated by a license. A bad game is still bad, but fans can enjoy it. And, of course, a good game can become great with the proper treatment of a license attached to it. 


The thing is, if a licensed game is clearly targeted at fans of the license, why does it have to try to appeal to the mainstream audience? If it's a 9/10 for fans, does it really matter that it's a 6/10 for everyone else? Those other people aren't going to be interested in it anyway. I suppose the problem is that we have generations of consumers that only care about scores and don't care about the text of a review, so sites (and magazines back in the day) are scared to death to actually try targeted reviews and targeted content because little Billy might get confused. So the licensed game that fans would love gets a 5/10 or a 6/10 and is quickly forgotten, even by fans who would like it, because everyone only looks at scores. 

We're all freaking idiots.