Why I think Metacritic shouldn’t be used as a yard stick

The popularity of Metacritic has grown over the last couple of years as a yard stick to measure the quality of one product to another. The premise is fine, after all what better way to judge the quality of a product then average of the scores from all the reviews for it? However, the problem I have is that the sources for the reviews are not consistent from product to product and because of this, Metacritic scores can be heavily skewed depending on which review sources are included.

This is because not every reviewer works on the same relative scale so while one may perceive 5/10 as average, another may think 7/10. Therefore, comparing two products against each on Metacritic scores alone can be grossly unfair if the review sources for each product are different.

I am not completely dismissing Metacritic as it is still a great source for the consumer to get a rough idea of a product’s quality and also provides a list of review sources to read through, but when an industry starts using it as a target (e.g this must get at least 80% Metacritic), then it can easily become more of ‘Who are we going to get to review this’ rather then focusing on increasing the quality or concentrating on the target audience.

Films and their adverts

I watched Beowolf over the weekend and normally, it isn’t the type of film I watch but this time it was different; the film was going to be shown in 3D. The experience of film was fantastic in 3D, it really did add life to an uninspiring storyline (sorry, but I REALLY didn’t feel anything from the film) and all films should be like this. When that happens, then it gives a much better reason for people to go to cinemas rather then waiting for the DVD rental.

Something else that bugged me that day was that all the alcohol adverts shown before the film were rated PG or U which seemed ludicrous as  people under 18 should not be the target audience. Added to the fact that they were shown to the audience of a 12A film just seemed to make the whole thing look like they were encouraging underage drinking.

Ah well, rant over.

Where the **** is the Delete key?!

As you can probably guess, I have now got my MacBook . Apart from some minor annoyances such as the lack of a delete key (Alt+Backspace) and a ‘#’ key (Alt+3), my overall experience with the OS has been great. Installing and removing applications is simple and straightforward, Expose is fantastic and everything is GUI driven. I haven’t needed to open the terminal window once to do anything yet. Compare that to what I had to do in Ubuntu to get certain aspects running (e.g. playing videos over a network share with skipping), this is a dream to use.

I am still on the hunt for MacOSX versions of the common software that I used and I haven’t yet tried development on Parallels/Windows with it yet but I can’t imagine it being much different.

Just for a bit of gun, here is a video of Mac killed my inner child YouTube video.

How not to pitch a game

I came across this YouTube video while looking for this one and was rather intrigued to what the poster had to say given the effort that went into his video description. After watching the video, I have to say that was an extremely boring pitch that had no direction. The game design idea was not communicated at all throughout the presentation and any game mechanic that was mentioned either has been done before or in progress (to be honest, it just sounds like Fable 1/2).

Stupid Hard drives

Yep, my brand new HDD failed after 1 month of light use, taking 70gig worth of data with it . I am trying to recover the data using a HDD enclosure with no luck. Considering to take the data as a loss and replace the drive via warranty since the data is replaceable.

Work is becoming interesting now, we had some interns that started on Monday it gave me flashbacks on when I started but on the other point of view. i.e. Spending a day trying to setup the damn PC for the project .

My own work is going well, currently refractoring part of the codebase without breaking the game and looking at all the side effects such as memory budgets and executable size. It has given a good general overview of how the system works and flaws in system to watch out for.

Still, it makes an interesting change of pace compared to what I use to do as an Integrator and I am not complaining .