Comment on Perfectly Functional

mohab@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

• mnbryant@beehaw.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I think the view can be described as two axes: doesn’t work <-> works well, and is not fun <-> is fun. “It’s functional” is hardly a ringing endorsement, so let’s put it just above zero on the “works” axis.

  It’s still “not fun” on the “fun” axis, so you’d expect the overall review to be negative as an average of “neutral” and “bad”. Yet, for some reason, OP is finding that these reviews weigh “it works” so heavily that the score is positive, not neutral or negative.

  If anything, I would expect most people to weigh “fun” more strongly than “it works” (where “fun” means engaging, not necessarily “happy”)

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  • mohab@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    IDK what OP meant, but you’re making one too many baseless assumptions.

    1. The review OP mentioned did not explicitly bring up fun:

    After spending paragraphs describing Wolverine’s combat as lacking weight, challenge, and eventually leaving him so disengaged that he lowered enemy health just to end fights faster, GameSpot’s Tamoor Hussain does clarify: “It may be hard to believe but all of that doesn’t mean the combat is bad. It is perfectly functional.”

    1. For all we know, “perfectly functional” could mean “After lowering lowering enemies’ health, the game was actually kinda fun!” I don’t think we have any strong reason to assume “perfectly functional” was used in a literal sense here.

    2. We don’t know how experienced the reviewer is with the genre. As someone who almost exclusively plays 3D linear action games or adjacent genres, I can tell you their description fits what I would describe as a mediocre game, which I can confidently say are the meant and potatoes of the genre and one of the main reason it does not typically sell well. Then again, we don’t know what their background is.

    3. There’s a lot more to action games than weight and challenge. A game could lack both and still end up mediocre.

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