Anyone see VGC's review for Wasp?

[Greg2600]

I don't agree with his Robotron grade either. The 5200 version deserves it, that one is ridiculous to have to use TWO of the worst joysticks of all-time, at the same time. His main complaint was that there was slowdown, which I've never seen on the 7800 one, and needing two controllers, although I play it with one fine. That was one of his earliest reviews, and he's gotten more more thorough over time. Like I said, often he goes back and re-reviews the old ones. I personally enjoy his site, but I do put faith his reviews of games from the past two generations of games. The old ones I just play for myself on an emulator. As Groovy Bee stated, WASP was not simply a homebrew, and honestly is it the first well known 7800 homebrew game that is not a port of something? Written in C. VGC doesn't take the game's background into account all that much, which I think is a mistake. I agree with bashing a game on original hardware because the hardware stinks, but needling a game like Pole Position II because it's too much like the original and lousy compared to the NES racing games is unfair. It was developed off a 1983 arcade game.

Edited April 24, 2010 by Greg2600

[DickNixonArisen]

Well, I like his writing style and the wide focus of the site can't be topped but he's more focused on hyperbole and humor than fairness. For example, he uses the ET logo to denote a horrible game where there are dozens of worse games on the atari

[DracIsBack]

As for this and other 7800 games, homebrew or not, well....you have to want to like the 7800 to like it. It's not the NES or the SMS, both of which are superior in almost every way.

 

In your personal, subjective opinion!

Edited April 24, 2010 by DracIsBack

[akator]

GroovyBee is obviously mature enough to realize that it's a video game review, people. Please keep things in perspective.

 

Now, if VGC wrote a bunch of personally offensive and unfounded things about a game author, such as claiming that the programmer smells bad and steals candy from small children, that would be unreasonable.

 

Was the review fair? Sure, because anyone is capable of starting their own video game review site and writing their own reviews. If VGC is that annoying and wrong, start your own website and make the world right.

 

When someone creates something, and releases it to the world, it is expected that it will be compared to other things. Did baby make a birthday card for Mommy? It will be compared to other things hanging on the fridge. Did junior write a book review? It will be compared to other student work and graded. That's the way the world works. Anyone afraid of that should live in the mountains and hide in a shack -- exactly like I do

[ZylonBane]

When someone creates something, and releases it to the world, it is expected that it will be compared to other things.

Exactly. And we're comparing VGC to game review sites that don't suck. Bam!

[gambler172]

Hi Guys

This was the first time,i saw this site.This idiots seem not to like the 7800 .

WASP is great,i like it........... Sure it is not KUNG FU MASTER,but 72 of 100 is fair.

greetings Walter

[Greg2600]

As for this and other 7800 games, homebrew or not, well....you have to want to like the 7800 to like it. It's not the NES or the SMS, both of which are superior in almost every way.

 

In your personal, subjective opinion!

What? No, I am infallible.

[Christophero Sly]

It's just one man's opinion. No need to get bent out of shape when VGC doesn't share yours. I often disagree with VGC, but I'd wager that for over 90% of his reviews, my opinion is within a letter grade of his. With the exception of a few zealous individuals, I suspect this is the case for everyone else here as well. If you don't agree with VGC on Wasp, or Robotron, or F-Zero , or whatever, so what? Big deal. Opinions vary. I guarantee that I disagree more with the reviews found on IGN, Gamespot, etc. than I do with VGC.

 

What about the opposite instance where VGC gives high marks to a game you dislike? I don't ever recall anyone here getting upset in a case like that. I wonder why? Probably because when you're essentially indifferent to a game to begin with, and not emotionally invested, you see a difference of opinion for just that--a difference of opinion, and you recognize how obviously unnecessary it is to react to someone's else's opinions about a videogame as though it was some sort of personal assault on your own little world.

[jaybird3rd]

I can't comment on the merits of the VGC review, never having played Wasp!. From reading the other reviews on his site, it seems that his own personal preferences play an important role in how he rates individual games, to the point where excellent titles get a lower score than they might deserve simply because he doesn't like them. So, what else is new? In this respect, he isn't any different from other critics, all of whom are in the business of offering their subjective (and, one hopes, informed) opinions about the things they are reviewing. The job of the readers is to consider each critic's opinions and the factors that influence his or her decisions; if they feel that the decision is unfair, they simply move on to another critic that they deem to be more fair. In other words, if you don't like what VGC has to say, don't go to his site and don't pay any attention to his reviews. If enough people feel the same way you do, he'll eventually realize that he has no audience and he won't do any more reviews.

 

I do want to take issue with two opinions that have been expressed here, and which I consider to be greatly mistaken. One is the idea that universally positive reviews of homebrew games are an expression of support for the homebrew community (with the implication that a negative or a mixed review is some sort of disservice to the community on the part of the reviewer), and the other is the idea that the implementation technology or development history of a game should be a factor in a reviewer's evaluation of the game. Let me say first of all that none of these comments pertain directly to GroovyBee, to Wasp!, or to VGC; they are more general observations about the homebrew community as a whole.

 

Honest opinions by plain-spoken critics, whether they be reviewers who have their own websites like VGC, or ordinary users on message boards and forums like AtariAge, are an important normative influence. They warn the marketplace against the duds that occasionally make it out, and they also serve as an expression of what the marketplace does or does not regard as a "quality product." This serves two important purposes: it helps to protect purchasers from wasting their money on bad product, and it also helps to keep bad products from entering the market in the first place. This is the same role that critics serve in any other market; what makes homebrew games different is that, historically, the market for them has been very small, and the product has been created primarily as a "labor of love" rather than as a source of profit. However, given how fashionable classic gaming has become to wider audiences who are buying into it out of a sense of nostalgia, and given other developments, I think that both of these assumptions need to be revised.

 

Just because something is created as a "labor of love" does not necessarily mean that it will be good; if you doubt this, a quick exploration of the world of independent music should be enough to convince you. To be sure, there's some great creative work being done there, but for every struggling musician of genuine talent, there are at least ten bad musicians who persist in "following their dreams" because nobody close to them has the heart to tell them that they have no talent. A harsh critic early in their careers might have redirected them into more appropriate fields of endeavor before they wasted any more of their time and effort, and this is the same function that critics can perform for homebrew developers. This is true whether the developer has actually finished a game that just doesn't work, whether the developer is stumbling along without a clue of what he's doing, or whether the person is just someone with a bad game idea who is looking for someone else to do all the hard work for them (and we all know we've seen plenty of those come and go over the years).

 

This analogy isn't perfect because it has always been a lot more difficult to develop a homebrew game than it has been to dash off a simple love song, but that is no longer the case. With emulation technology, and with simplified development tools like batari BASIC, homebrew game development doesn't have to be a "labor of love" anymore. Any opportunist can create and publish their own homebrew game with only a few hours of programming effort, a stack of old donor cartridges from eBay, an EPROM burner, and a cheap soldering iron. Over-zealous and undiscriminating collectors will then proceed to scoop it up, some of them not even playing the game (preferring instead to "preserve" it by keeping it "sealed"), and some of them rationalizing their purchase by convincing themselves that the game isn't as bad as it really is, or by making excuses for the developers: "I'm sure they tried hard, and I want to support homebrew developers, so I'm not going to say anything bad about it because I know that would be bad for the community."

 

Meanwhile, these modern equivalents of Mythicon and Apollo can easily rake in hundreds of dollars or more on every bad game they make, and the only thing stopping them are honest critics who aren't afraid to offer strong opinions the minute their games hit the market. I think, for example, of Nathan Strum's very harsh reviews of N.E.R.D.S. and The Last Ninja. Those were execrable games, created solely to cash in on the classic gaming fad, and I'm sure he took a lot of heat from people who "support the community" and only wanted to hear positive things said about new homebrew games. Nevertheless, he steered many buyers away from these games before they wasted their hard-earned money, and I'm sure he and other critics also helped to drive away the developers of those games: to the best of my knowledge, they haven't done another game since.

 

Every creative work has to be considered in its proper context. An informed movie reviewer does not penalize a movie from 1939 because its special effects cannot compare with those of a movie from 2010; instead, he looks at what was possible in 1939 and at what other movies from that era were able to accomplish, and he compares the movie in question against those. Likewise, a video game reviewer must consider the platform on which a game was implemented, and must rate the game against the capabilities of the platform and against other games on the same platform. To be sure, this should be only one consideration--if a game is lousy, it's just lousy, regardless of whether it was the best that could have been done on the platform or not--but it should be a consideration nonetheless. However, this consideration applies only to the end product, not to the process that created it or to the technologies that were used in its implementation.

 

If you don't like Karateka on the 7800 because the graphics are choppy and the controls are non-intuitive, you wouldn't like it any better if someone was to tell you, "Karateka was developed in Forth and not in assembly language, and this was probably the best they could do given the inefficiencies of Forth." If players decide that they don't enjoy E.T. for the 2600 because they find the gameplay clunky and cumbersome, you won't change their minds by saying, "but Howard Scott Warshaw only had six weeks to implement it, and this was the best that could have been done on such a short development schedule, so you should really cut the game some slack." Warshaw himself has stressed that the only thing that matters to the player is whether or not the game itself is fun, and that none of these other considerations should apply in ranking a game.

 

For that reason, I don't think a video game reviewer should consider at all what language the game was written in, or whether it was the first game on a given platform to implement a certain feature, or whether it pushed the limits of the technology farther than any other game on the platform. These characteristics might make for interesting background information, but as far as the actual ranking of the game, they should be considered by the reviewer only to the extent that they contribute to the gameplay experience, positively or negatively. If a game is better because it was written in Forth, that fact should be noted by the reviewer; if being written in Forth makes the game worse, it shouldn't get any extra points for novelty just because it was developed with unusual tools.

[Emehr]

The best thing anybody can do is try a homebrew using the appropriate emulator and see for themselves if a game's for them. I saw somebody post on VGC's forums that they were about to buy Wasp until they read the VGC review. I was thinking "are you kidding me? How about trying it on an emulator first instead of taking one person's opinion on it?". Relying on one source to decide what games to buy is foolish. The beauty of the homebrew community for the 2600 and 7800 is most developers release a binary for people to try. That's how I (and I'm sure many others) have built my homebrew collection. If I like what I play in an emulator, I buy the homebrew.

 

In addition, the best service any reviewer can do is state up front what their interests are in gaming. Like, "Hey, my name is Billy Cornelius. I prefer mini-games, racing games, and sports games." That would help a lot in how to gauge each review and if a second opinion is in order.

 

I tried a couple levels of Wasp on my CC2 and, while the game isn't really for me, I gotta say I think it would be great for children. It has nice challenge without being frustratingly hard and the graphics are nice. Personally I would prefer a bit more variety. Nonetheless, if this is a taste of things to come (and I've seen his latest graphics demo, too) I'm looking forward to GroovyBee's next offerings!

[GroovyBee]

Nonetheless, if this is a taste of things to come (and I've seen his latest graphics demo, too) I'm looking forward to GroovyBee's next offerings!

 

I have released several WIPs and another full game called Worm! since I did Wasp! over a year ago you know. Are you lot hiding under rocks or something .

[Crazy Climber]

I have not played WASP but I too think F is a little harsh, VGC does not hold back the F gradings though, if he does not like a game, it gets an F.

[AtariLeaf]

I just tried the rom and its ok. I certainly wouldn't give it an F but a solid C for sure.

[Mayhem]

Wasp isn't meant to be an industry stunning game, but yeah, it's worth more than an F...

[Jess Ragan]

I think there should be a handicap for homebrewer game reviews, but not a massive one. I wouldn't expect a game designed in, say, Batari BASIC to compete with most official releases. Yet at the same time there have been at least a dozen homebrew games on the Atari 2600 alone that are as good or better than games made by the pros. So it's a hard line to walk. I generally give homebrews a point extra (out of a possible ten) because I know from experience that development environments aren't always as accommodating as you would like.

 

As for the Video Game Critic, he can be a little out there sometimes. At least he revised his JoJo's Bizarre Adventure review to sound less homophobic. Before it was an endless rant about how gay the characters were, but now he's focused more on the gameplay, while using less derogatory terms like "flamboyant" to describe the cast. One thing I don't like about the guy is that while he covers all the strengths and weaknesses of a given game, it's done in a very plain and unprofessional way. There's no subtlety to his humor and there's no spark of life to his prose. The reviews have all the flavor of saltines. You could probably live off saltines for a while if it was absolutely necessary, but it would be a rather drab and unenviable existence.

[Christophero Sly]

One thing I don't like about the guy is that while he covers all the strengths and weaknesses of a given game, it's done in a very plain and unprofessional way. There's no subtlety to his humor and there's no spark of life to his prose. The reviews have all the flavor of saltines. You could probably live off saltines for a while if it was absolutely necessary, but it would be a rather drab and unenviable existence.

They're just videogame reviews. He's not writing articles for the Paris Review.

[Jess Ragan]

Video game reviews don't have to be dull just because they're video game reviews.

[accousticguitar]

I like his writing style but I don't always agree with his grades. I mean, c'mon, Miniature Golf should be an A.

[HammR25]

Why is it ok to say Combat 1990 is horrid but not Wasp!? I don't care for Wasp! but I'm still glad I bought a copy. At the time I bought the game I did it to support a homebrewer that was showing off some new stuff. I always saw Wasp! more as proof of concept for Mark's C library so I kept my mouth shut that I didn't like the game. It's pretty simple and not my cup of tea but I figured other people might like it. I could definitely see it being a great kids game.

 

As for selling my copy of the game, I'm not interested. I'd only sell it if someone wanted it and had no other way of getting it. If someone wanted to buy it I'd rather they supported the programmer instead of getting it second hand.

[VectorGamer]

I have not played WASP but I too think F is a little harsh, VGC does not hold back the F gradings though, if he does not like a game, it gets an F.

 

??? ???

 

You're disputing VGC's grade over a game that you've never played?

[GroovyBee]

You're disputing VGC's grade over a game that you've never played?

 

Well the OP thought the game stank before they played it too. The power of the interwebs .

[Crazy Climber]

I have not played WASP but I too think F is a little harsh, VGC does not hold back the F gradings though, if he does not like a game, it gets an F.

 

??? ???

 

You're disputing VGC's grade over a game that you've never played?

Yeah I am, mainly just because it is a homebrew. Even if the game totally sucks ass giving it an F is just a little harsh in my opinion. Could have gave it a D.

[GaryH917]

I personally would buy any homebrew game that is made for the Atari 5200, 7800. No need to read reviews which are normally one-sided opinions. If I dont like it, then its still a part of my collection. If I play it alot, then I get my money's worth out of it. Most of these games are made only to reach the hands of 25-100 people. Not a mass release. So, most people never get a chance to play the game. If I support a programmers work, then he/she will release another game and so on... These guys are doing this for the love of a system, not any financial benefits. Keep up the great work guys...

[VectorGamer]

I have not played WASP but I too think F is a little harsh, VGC does not hold back the F gradings though, if he does not like a game, it gets an F.

 

??? ???

 

You're disputing VGC's grade over a game that you've never played?

Yeah I am, mainly just because it is a homebrew. Even if the game totally sucks ass giving it an F is just a little harsh in my opinion. Could have gave it a D.

 

To me home brews are fair game for "A" or an "F" (see N.E.R.D.S.).

 

If someone knows the link to that NERDS review please post. I remember it being a fair review of someone that was just trying to make a quick buck...the video of the game play is damaging and reason why not to just buy a home brew "because it is what it is."

 

And, you're probably right about WASP being a D because if you look at NERDS you probably wouldn't be able to say that the two are of equal grade.

[Trebor]

IMHO, Wasp! is a B [No pun intended] at best and a C- a worst. Personally, I'm not crazy about the game, but think it is a fun way to kill some time and can appeal to a variety of gamers and age groups. For my taste, it is a C+, and most certainly worthy and should be a part of your 7800 game collection.

 

As far as VGC's ratings, he must have some 'interesting' or 'unique' way of viewing games on the 7800. The C- of Robotron is almost as ridiculous as the F for Wasp!...LOL...he thinks Xenophobe is worthy of an 'F' grade too.

 

Nonetheless, VGC's reviewer is certainly entitled to his opinion. Mark, I wouldn't even give it a second thought. I can easily see someone not giving VGC's page a second look...I give his opinion on certain games an F-.

 

-Trebor