For one thing, the company CEO predicting that his game will be a sleeper hit is an oxymoron because sleeper hits are hits that nobody saw coming.
What's more, when he makes these claims it makes me think of Capcom claiming Dragon's Dogma is good enough to sell 10+ million - that's to say it seems like he's overhyping a respectable game to the point where it couldn't possibly live up to expectations. Potential fans are disappointed, and people who wouldn't buy it anyway won't take Sleeping Dogs seriously after you have claimed to condense some of the best elements of NFS, Mass Effect, and Arkham City into one game.
The Orange Box let me catch up on the Half Life series (except for 1 of course), and I definitely spread the good word to any uninitiated PC gamers I meet these days. Really great stuff here recapping all that the series did for gaming in general.
The logic here seems kind of sloppy. The issue here is to argue the legitimacy of a very small minority of games that want to express their message through extreme violence or sex (yes there's a bias against sex, but that's another argument), but instead those games are supposed to represent the creativity of the whole medium? That's a huge blanket statement, as actual games censorship only exists beyond certain boundaries that don't have a whole lot to do with creativity anymore. And of course publishers don't want creative expression - they're the gaming equivalent of Hollywood, and why should we expect any big risks from either one? But it's equally silly to think that the 'looming' AO rating is what's doing the creative stifling. It's money that does that, plain and simple. Put simply, games aren't mature enough for the industry to put forth a mature title that's deserving of an AO rating, such as Shame, Man Bites Dog, or a handful of other movies have shown the NC-17 rating to be legitimate for artistic purposes. And yeah, do you really expect less from Iran?
Who takes Metacritic user scores seriously anyway? That site is so high profile all that counts is the links to professional reviews posted, and a general source for lots of critics' opinions, whether or not opinions are mixed among professional reviewers, that sort of thing. Metacritic has never been the God's honest truth, and no one should take the average Metascore for a final evaluation of a game. If you look at MW3's 90 score it should be a top game of the year, but if you hate recycled ideas and gameplay it wouldn't matter how polished that Porsche of an engine is. Instead it's best to compare ideas and compare strengths and weaknesses when you read reviews instead of taking a number as a final grade. And as for its user scores, that games with a bit of DRM are given 2-4 averages on PC should have stripped MC user scores of whatever credibility they used to have - they're all emotional kneejerk reaction and no real evaluation. Look at game sites where users post reviews because they played the game and want to talk about it, not because they're fanboys, or worse, industry workers with ulterior motives, who want to taint the only average most people look at with either a 1 or 10. Sadly, these days this describes most of the user scores. It's a sad bastardization of what's supposed to be a voice of the people, this is why a complete democracy never works. Because too many people are REALLY STUPID.
Ha, thanks for acknowledging Blizz's ridiculous hype. Someone had to do it. Blizzcon is too much hype for too little substance and, if you're not a rabid WoW fan, you probably won't get much out of it considering how few single player games they actually release. Vague details aren't worth the trouble.
It sounds an awful lot like this is just a standard PR response to unusually negative sentiments by gamers, and not much honest opinion is going to enter the picture in this sort of thing. It was an inferior, rushed game - I heard in an interview that the composer commented on the "rush job" somewhere - and somehow GameSpot never asked Mike about the sharp decline in quality and polish. But mum's the word while EA still gives him the paycheck. Not that it was a bad game, it just didn't have half the personality, charm, or depth of DA:O. Just that no one in an official capacity can admit to that. I still had fun, though, and if Bioware learns from their mistake and takes time with the next game, I'll be ecstatic. It's never too late to bounce back, Bioware!
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