Topic: Wiiware is lowering our expectations

Lostwinds winter of the melodias has shown what can be done on Wiiware. To my opinin Nintendolife scores Wiiware games way too high. For example: an 8 for Max & The magic marker??? The game has a very bad framerate, freezes now and then, is short, there is a lot of repetition in the gameplay and the controls don't feel tight. Simply forgiving these things because is cheap and downloadable is wrong. All these points could and should have been inproved before bringing the game out. If this would have been a longer and full priced game on a disc, the same faults wouldn't have been forgiven this easily. Wiiware is lowering our expectations and our standards of what we consider a good game.

A review is a matter of one persons opinion and shouldn't be seen as to represent the population as a whole.

It was just an example. I do believe it is a trend to not expect too mutch from Wiiware games.

I expect a bit of fun for a minimal price, so I have pretty low expectations to begin with I suppose, but really you'd have to go on a case-by-case basis here since we've got a lot of reviewers on staff and therefore many likes and dislikes. I'm not a big platforming fan, so I probably would be less forgiving of flaws in a platforming game than someone else (if I had to score SMB3, I think something like a 6 would be generous because I think the difficulty is skewed too high and sucks the fun right out of it).

I'm happy to explain what I liked about a game if you've got an example of one of my reviews you think was scored too high.

@Sean Aaron

Cool response man, seriously you really win my respect (for what it's worth) by saying: I'm happy to explain what I liked about a game if you've got an example of one of my reviews you think was scored too high.

Scoring SMB3 a 6 is extremely low though, would you really give it a 6 if you had to review it, simply because you don't like it or find it difficult? I don't think that would do the game justice or is a honest reflection of how mutch quality the game has apart from you not liking it. To my opinion you should not score how mutch you like the game but score the game itself

Amen to that nintenden.

Wiiware has lowered some of my expectations, but games like Overturn, World of Goo, and many others keep my hopes up for the next big release.

I have to agree.

MEGAMAN 9!
MEGAMAN 10!
MEGAMAN 11?
I looooove wiiware
I dont care how bad some games are, there are great games on the service and will be more in the near future!
Great comment btw sean, youve earned my respect. (not that you didnt have it already )

WiiWare is more like a pile of shovelware with some awesome gems inside the rubble.

um, yeah.
Why not have lower expectations? They ARE Cheap games. For 10 bucks or less I don't expect as much so when some great games come out anyway, I'm very pleasantly suprised. Whats wrong with that?
Sure there are a few really cheap cash-ins but not any more than there are in disc releases. It's mostly clear that the developers aren't cutting corners to try and "trick" us or something.

Some of the games are shorter or simpler graphically and follow something of a different model, but it's for the same reasons: the budgets are smaller as are the developers making them, not to mention they have such a limited file size, it's astounding what some of them are able to do anyway. This makes for a very different type of approach to games and makes it a different type of animal to review them. It's like if you reviewed PC games and console games with the same expectations, they're just different kinds of things and it's ok to look at them differently.

I don't really understand entirely what your issue is with this. Is it making the games worse by reviewing them better? Are you being duped into buying games you don't like? Are you just generally dissatisfied with the DL content and it's size/price? (I believe xbox/ps3 have DL games with bigger files and higher prices if thats what you want).

I think price should definately factor into the rating/score of a game, and I feel the exact opposite of you, Master Barney. Wiiware games have raised my expectations and standards of a good game because the price points are so low and the quality of some of the games is quite high. Now I'm reluctant to buy any regular priced game knowing I can get great games for 1/10th to 1/5th the price of a regular game.

This, and World of Goo.

I do think that pricing has to be part of the consideration when giving a score. I paid $5 for Tomena Sanner and find it a lot of fun for the price (plus it fits nicely into my busy schedule). Same for Muscle March. If I had paid $20 each for the same games, I would have already sold them on eBay to recover as much of my money as possible. At $5, however, they are good satisfying fun for a few minutes here and there.

WiiWare has been great because my time for gaming is limited so I need games that I can play for short amounts of time. To put it into perspective, I downloaded NyxQuest a week ago (along with the other two games I mentioned) and played it yesterday for the second time--and then only because I was at home with a sick child and she took a nap after coming home from the doctor.

WiiWare offers smaller games for a lower price, as well as new sequels to retro franchises like Megaman, Castlevania, and Contra. While some Nintendo Life scores may seem generous, the reviewers really take the time to walk you through what was good and bad about each game. While I won't condemn IGN as a whole, there are one or two prolific reviewers there that barely tell you anything about the game at all--and they're professional reviewers. Read the reviews here carefully, check out other reviews on other sites, watch some gameplay videos, and if the game has a PC demo try it out. Also look at the impressions threads on these forums as some people may mention specific problems that the reviewers didn't mention despite their efforts to be thorough.

Does it really matter what this site, or any other, says about games?
I make up my own mind. It's all about personal preference.
If you factor in how much a game cost to the ratio of how fun it it is/how much game time you'll get out of it, why wouldn't the score be adjusted?
Example:
I buy a game for 50 USD, play it for 50 hours, enjoy it immensely.
You buy a game for 10 USD, play it for 10 hours, enjoy it immensely, as well.
Dollar for dollar you get the same amount from each game. One is store-bought, the other downloaded at a much cheaper price. Do you rate them differently because of where they came from and how much they cost?

Example 2 to put things in perspective:
I buy another game.
You buy another game.
Other people can't even afford food, let alone games. You invite those people over and ask their opinions, and they probably won't care about either, due to lack of focus from starvation.
My point: Ratings don't matter. Hunger does!

I could go on with other examples about dogs vs. cats, etc...

Well, Wiiware doesn't lower my expectations for full games on a disc. But you have to lower your expectations to enjoy most Wiiware games, since most of them simply are of very low quality. Just compare Wiiware games to vc games and the difference in quality is huge. Nothing on Wiiware, not even lostwinds, can compare itself to games like Mario RPG, A Link to the Past, Secret of Mana and Donkey Kong Country.

Excuse me for disagreeing, but really, how does a person who doesn't enjoy a game, is going to understand why other person would?
Be serious people reviews are the opinion of someone, a human; reviews will always be biased, at least untill someone develops a computer program to review games, and most probably everybody would disagree with those .

Wouldn't you rather have low expectations? If your expectations are lower, you enjoy more games.

WW and VC are really unfair comparisons. VC games, for one, are games hand picked from the "best of" from the old days. At the time they were also retail games with long term, full time development, especially the 1st party ones and the few you chose as examples. If you really go through the real library of thousands of games from those systems you'll easily find loads of games far worse than anything put out on WW, thats why they aren't on VC now; we want to forget they ever happened.
Now that we have VC, we can get the hand picked and mostly stellar games of our childhood. Some may disagree on a few titles, but they're all there for a reason.
WW is material made now for Wii hardware with (as evidenced here) much higher expectations despite the file size limitations and much smaller development teams and budgets.

As far as quality: Clearly, Nintendo wants lots of content so it's also relatively easy to get approved, so we see it all, even the horrible stinkers. But I couldn't disagree more about many of the titles. There is some truly amazing classic stuff on there even by retail and VC standards.
Swords and Soldiers, The Art Style games, The Bit Trip games, Blaster Master; heck all of the retro remakes (Contra, Bubble Bobble, Tetris, Castlvania, Mega Man, Gradius, Excitebike), Driift, the FF games, Flowerworks, LIT, World of Goo, plus a bunch of others that I won't even admit that I loved that fall under more like point and click adventures or Flash games that just weren't really possible in the old console days when 3-d and compression wasn't as good. I barely get retail games now when I know I can get either classics on VC or great new content on WW.
Sure my expectations are different for a 10$ game even if it was designed this year, but I like the design changes that reflect todays aesthetic even though I'm an old timer. WW games totally have me sold and saving lots of money that I can spend on good pricy tea to have with them.

@Ren

I find a nice Chai tea with cream and sugar or a Spearmint tea with sugar goes well with gaming.