Atari Tries To Supress Bad Reviews, Claims Piracy 275
im_thatoneguy sends in an account up at Shacknews about Atari's actions to get early reviews of its upcoming game Alone In the Dark pulled from Web sites in Europe. Atari sued the German site 4Players, alleging piracy, and also cancelled an advertising deal on the site, after a pre-release review gave the game only 68%. 4Players posted a commentary (translation) alleging that Atari is doing this bcause the review is unfavorable. Shacknews reports that Atari has also demanded that both Gamer.no and GameReactor remove early reviews — both reviews gave the game a score of 3/10. Kotaku editorializes: "[Does Atari] fear that, because these outlets may have received copies of the game 'early' (i.e. from pirated copies), that they're somehow reviewing incomplete code, which could affect their opinion of the game? Maybe. Pessimists could, however, be forgiven for thinking it's a convenient excuse for Atari to attack negative reviews of the only game they're releasing in 2008 that has any chance of making them some money."
Just take it (Score:5, Interesting)
So I guess no one has learned from the wise ways of Penny Arcade's ad campaign [wired.com].
On another note, if you get a bad review, you should take it. Crying like a baby only emphasizes the ratings. You may get sales from a small fraction of people who play it to verify that it sucks, but sooner or later all the review sites will say the game sucks and it will only make the situation worse. The whole "bad publicity is good publicity" paradigm is long dead in this age of gamers.
When will they learn? (Score:5, Interesting)
Better start learning German (Score:5, Interesting)
This is surprising. Maybe I'll have to start learning German if I want to get honest game reviews now. I have a feeling the North American game reviewers will probably be a lot more accommodating to Atari's threats.
I recall the same thing happened with Anarchy online. They released the game for sale but then told reviewers to hold off on their reviews because the game wasn't actually 'final'. Sure enough, reviewers didn't do their job and waited around till the Anarchy folks actually felt their game was 'ready'. This all boils down to game companies not wanting to be accountable for their lousy work. Really if you're going to be spending millions and millions of dollars on a game, you should at the very least make sure it's actually worth playing.
Does Atari Still Exist? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, you'd think that they'd use the opportunity to get people involved and improve their releases rather that trying to shut the door on their customers.
Re:Hmm.... (Score:1, Interesting)
If the reviews are based on a pirated copy of the game, and the released versions game play is different then Atari has every right in the world to not only sue these guys, but put them out of business.
That's bullshit. It's Atari's and the developers fault for allowing such a leak like that to happen in the first place. If they can't keep tighter wraps on their content, why should the people who are previewing it get in trouble?
Re:Hmm.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The German site also claims to have their version legally bought, which means that they could immediately charge Atari for making unfounded claims against them (based on the laws of coersion/intimidation and also the laws against threatening with legal action).
Re:68% is unfavourable? (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree, it's absurd. They use only the upper range of the spectrum, except when a game is incredibly bad. Also, you can't be so precise with something so subjective; that's why I think magazines should use the old "star" rating. Some examples, in my opinion:
0 star = abysmal: Big Rigs, Action 52, ET, Extreme PaintBrawl.
1 star = crappy: First Samurai, Gods, Hook, James Bond Jr, Sword of Sodan.
2 stars = weak: Daikatana, Power Rangers, Outlander, 3 Ninjas Kick Back.
3 stars = good: Mickey Mania, Cool Spot, Final Fight, Prey, Elite Force.
4 stars = excellent: Castle of Illusion, Streets of Rage, Road Rash, Socket, Tempest 2000, Halo, Out Run 2006.
5 stars = the absolute best: Strider, Zelda LttP, Final Fantasy VI, NiGHTS, Half Life 2, Ikaruga, Shenmue, Super Metroid.
Re:68% is unfavourable? (Score:3, Interesting)
- Worth watching for people who don't hate the genre
- Worth watching for people who like the genre
- Not worth watching
I find reviews of films useless in the decision process for watching a film. I am only able to isolate the third category through rotten tomatoes/imdb (obscenely low scores = category three). The only genre I intensely dislike is slasher films and action films, so they are easy to weed out via the promotional material.Re:This clear up one thing for me... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's Atari in name only. Infogrames renamed themselves Atari to try to "reinvent" after people wised up to the fact that everyone was used to mediocrity out of them.
I've seen the game... (Score:3, Interesting)
I can also see where the game is annoying - sometimes you go quite long distances without healing items so you might end up in a battle where you die if anything hurts you just a little bit - and if you don't want to do the battle twenty times over you have to either replay the previous part of the game or skip to the next scene.
Also, it feels badly tested; for example, if during a cutscene the camera is away from your body and passes by items on the ground the game will offer you to pick them up. Also, sometimes the game doesn't make much sense; for example, during the car escape scene there are cars parked in the middle of the street with no fleeing people around that might explain them. Getting to the car is convoluted in itself.
The game does have potential for being unintentionally funny, though. In one cutscene a homing smoking crack in the floor races towards the player. Once, the (heavily injured) player stood on a burning item when the cutscene was triggered; when the camera came back to the player he was already lying on the ground, burning. The game's deadpan delivery of this made the scene exceptionally funny.
Overall, it's a nice game but definitely not great. I can understand why Atari doesn't get rave reviews although I do think 3/10 is a bit low. I'd place it more around a 6.
Re:Hmm.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hmm.... (Score:1, Interesting)
I can legally describe my gaming experience to anyone, even if the game I played was pirated.
This might be proof that someone pirated the game, and that may be actionable, but the review isn't.
Re:Pirated == different? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not sure if you had a different version than I did, but my copy of Sim City came with a pamphlet of codes composed of pairs of blocks with different corners of the blocks shaded, listed next to cities and their populations - the game gave you some combination of codes and populations and asked for the city name (or something like that).
The best part was, it was printed in black on red paper so you couldn't photocopy it. My grandmother and I took the time to hand-copy the thing, line by line, onto graph paper; I never looked back.
(I was 9 and my grandfather worked for IBM. It wasn't called "Piracy" back then, though, it was called "sharing with your grandson.")
Re:Hmm.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Has there been a court ruling on whether EULAs are enforceable or not?
AFAIK in Germany yes and they were ruled not enforceable.
However, it was mentioned above that the review was done on a copy leaked by a retailer (no idea how much earlier that was but at least one retailer here habitually breaks release dates by 1-2 days).
Re:I don't remember Bubsy3D being reviewed in Edge (Score:3, Interesting)
Unforntunately, you've just mixed a feeling with a page containing actual data. I copied the full table into a spreadsheet (copy the page source rather than the page itself, works a lot better) and found the mean score given by Edge is about 6.5, the median score is 7, and the variance is a little over 2.
Yeah, there are some 10s and a 1 in there, but the 10s are quite predictable (all had piles of reviewer-lubricating cash behind their promotion) and the one is, well, a special case.
Re:Pirated == different? (Score:3, Interesting)
In the Settlers games, the forrester guys wouldn't plant new trees for you to chop down if you played a pirated copy. Took me a while to figure out that it was, in fact, impossible to finish a single game like that. Evil but ingenious as there was no warning whatsoever.
The old one was better (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember playing it on my 3DO and loved it.. maybe i was the only one