Stop me if you've heard this one before. A cross-gen game or sequel comes out and the criticism usually is that "It isn't a big improvement over last gen / it's predecessor". It happens A LOT. I'm here to tell you today that that is usually bull crap, though. It is a lazy throwaway criticism that amateurs and hacks toss at games they don't care to actually review. Anyway, today's game for Eric Vs. 365 is the PS2 original Rumble Roses, which I'll connect back to my opening statement I swear! Read more and watch gameplay after the jump.
I've played a bunch of games lately where that criticism above kept popping up, but it isn't true whatsoever. People said Earth Defense Force 2017 looked and played like a PS2 game and blah blah blah. I'm sorry, kiddos, but I've played EDF 1 and 2 and EDF 2017 is a major step up. People say that Dead or Alive 6 isn't an improvement over DOA5 - yeah, no, it looks quite a bit better and plays very well.
People also say that Rumble Roses XX was just a port and wasn't any better than the original Rumble Roses - Nope, XX is way better. It looks much nicer, has smoother gameplay, has more stuff to do, and lots more. It's surprising, actually, considering that this is sort of a trashy throwaway franchise, but Konami threw actual effort at it back in the day. You'd never guess that from reading reviews, though. And then players, who don't actually care about any of this stuff because they aren't playing EDF or DOA or Rumble Roses anyway, just parrot that fake criticism as fact and everyone moves on with their lives. That sucks. I'm tired of it.
The further away I get from being an actual reviewer, the more I see how shitty most other reviewers really are. And I don't mean the typical gamer "I don't agree with this review of my favorite game so, therefore, reviews are bad". No. I'm talking from the perspective of someone who got paid to review stuff for 15-years and now looking back I'm surprised by how crappy most people are at it. So many people just don't care about what they're doing. They like getting free games. They like the attention. They also, apparently, hate the actual job of reviewing so they crank out nonsense with a bunch of key "reviewer-ish" words thrown in so readers think they know what they're talking about.
This is kind of why I wasn't in any hurry to go get another job writing for another website after Aboot let me go. I got tired of how broken reviews were becoming and I got really tired of "gamers" in general and didn't want to participate any more. I wanted to break away and do my own thing that I thought was the right way. Well, we see how that turned out - nobody cared.
