Should game reviews mark down games for being unoriginal?

[SteveSmith]

I stumbled across a review of Venom Strikes Back. It obviously occurred to me that it looked very similar to Exolon, a fact which most of the reviews concurred with, and two of the 3 marked it down for this (YS: 7/10, SU: 7/10, Crash 91%). Is this fair though? If you didn't have Exolon, why would you care? Surely if a game is good then it's good, and especially if it's actually better than its inspiration, it should get a fair review? Or would that lead to even more unoriginal games?

[Andre Leao]

Don't agree with Crash review. Not becaude the game not being original or being a a blatant copy of Exolon, just because the game is not that good...

[Nienn Heskil]

Ah yes, the baby years syndrome where it was just assumed that every game should be completely different from anything that came before it

kek

[AndyC]

I think there is some degree of fairness in it. If you have Exolon, you don't want this game. If you don't have Exolon, buy that instead.

Of course there's a line where something is similar, but not a straight rip off, then it's debatable. But I'd say it's a fair comment, maybe if there was more of that these days we wouldn't see so many indistinguishable games.

[HEXdidnt]

I can understand why it might be called out in a review if an 'original' game was fresh in everyone's minds - say, if it had been reviewed in the previous issue - but to mark a game down for that reason is ridiculous. Who's to say the game that became MASK 3 wasn't completed before Exolon, but sat in Gremlin's archives till they decided to slap the branding onto it?

Clones have always been a thing, and they still are. Consider how many games there were based around the trench run in Star Wars, and how variable they were in quality. Not to mention how many early platform games could be dismissed as 'Manic Miner clones', when that most hallowed game was, itself, a clone.

Never played Venom Strikes Back myself, but it could equally be marked down for being a toy/cartoon license slapped onto a mediocre Exolon clone that bears absolutely no relation to the toy/cartoon IP other than a few names.

But then, it should be marked up for the additions it makes to the template in the form of the weapon/'mask' mechanic... Exolon only offered extra ammo and an upgrade to a double-barrelled handgun.

[ketmar]

and Venom Strikes Back is not even too similar to Exolon (if we don't consider any run-n-gun game similar to Exolon). Venom has secret rooms, it has dexterity test in the cave (oomph!), and it can be completed without inifinite lives poke. for me, it is definitely better than Exolon! ;-)

[Lethargeek]

These two games aren't too similar to begin with, except both having a man walking left to right shooting things (and this was equally "unoriginal" for both of them). Venom is technically better, has much more variety in weapons, enemies and screens/areas but less action. Almost an adventure making you wanna see what lies behind the next portal. Exolon is just non-stop action through the sameish screens. Thus they feel differently, like a tank vs a paratrooper behind the enemy lines. While these are both great games, i always liked Venom a bit more because how it felt.

[HEXdidnt]

These two games aren't too similar to begin with, except both having a man walking left to right shooting things (and this was equally "unoriginal" for both of them).

Yeah, and by that token, should we also dismiss Metroid as being a MASK 3 clone?

Then again, I don't think many games journalists - back in the day, but especially these days - get accused of knowing what they're talking about.

[equinox]

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, allegedly... and sometimes the "clones" are actually better: Repton, Riptoff and Earth Shaker all compare very favourably (at least puzzle-wise) with their daddy Boulder Dash, for example.

So I don't think a game should necessarily be punished for borrowing ideas: but, looking at it in reverse, I do think that games should be actively praised for originality. Thinking of good new ideas is hard work. It would be a bit sad if we'd only had the Pac-Man and Galaxians rip-offs, and no Deus Ex Machina or Skool Daze.

[ketmar]

by the way, what game Crash is talking about?! "…which is set against a horizontally scrolling lunar landscape…", "Scrolling is smooth…", "…just a horizontally scrolling shoot em up…" MASK III is a flip-screen game! did they had some version we've never seen? or did they simple never played the game, and wrote those reviews based on screenshots and some info provided by Gremlin PR people?

[Lethargeek]

by the way, what game Crash is talking about?! "…which is set against a horizontally scrolling lunar landscape…", "Scrolling is smooth…", "…just a horizontally scrolling shoot em up…" MASK III is a flip-screen game! did they had some version we've never seen? or did they simple never played the game, and wrote those reviews based on screenshots and some info provided by Gremlin PR people?

or somebody just reused a review for the c64 version
(btw the gameplay looks almost comical in this one)

[Timmy]

What is the point of reviews if they aren't supposed to give a rating which compare similar looking games?

And Venom does indeed look like Exolon, with its colourful shoot em up, and tough.

Yes, Venom does have thinking parts to it. Unfortunately it's buried down somewhere deep, and they made it really hard to uncover it.

The thinking part of Venom is a lot better than the thinking parts of Exolon. But Exolon is all about immediacy, and gratuitous violence, so I'm not surprised SU rate Exolon higher. (SU is all about action games and they always* rate those higher.)

But back to the original question, I think it's important to mark higher when a game was original. Because if we didn't do that, then what we are saying is that we want the same old games. That's not a nice position to be in.

And it's not like at the end of the Spectrum era, we still ended up with lots of unoriginal licensed games anyway. So it's nice that originality was marked higher.

EDIT: Just in case, I remember both games, but Exolon still stood out because of its explosions. Venom was a nice game but the thinking part stood out as being boring.

[Vampyre]

Another thing to bear in mind is reviewer apathy. Crash especially, as they had three reviewers for each game for much of its lifetime, so each reviewer was probably inspecting at least a dozen games per month. Probably 20+ during the Speccy's peak years. Even as someone who still adores videogaming thirty-odd years later, that must have wore a bit thin eventually.

[Wall_Axe]

just wanted to say the first mask game was pretty cool.
8 way scrolling, the graphics were clear. It was cool driving a car around and shooting. Especially when you owned that car in toy form.

[ketmar]

or somebody just reused a review for the c64 version :lol:
(btw the gameplay looks almost comical in this one)

oh… i didn't even knew that there was C64 version. looked it on YT, and… meh. the only great thing there (i think) is dying animation, where Matt separated body parts bouncing around. something i'd like to see in ZX version too. ;-)

[blucey]

I stumbled across a review of Venom Strikes Back. It obviously occurred to me that it looked very similar to Exolon, a fact which most of the reviews concurred with, and two of the 3 marked it down for this (YS: 7/10, SU: 7/10, Crash 91%). Is this fair though? If you didn't have Exolon, why would you care? Surely if a game is good then it's good, and especially if it's actually better than its inspiration, it should get a fair review? Or would that lead to even more unoriginal games?

Well for a start VSB was better than Exolon. And Exolon itself wasn't exactly original.

Head Over Heels was a blatant rip off of all those Ultimate games but everyone scored that highly. I don't think originality matters at all in this industry.

[Andre Leao]

by the way, what game Crash is talking about?! "…which is set against a horizontally scrolling lunar landscape…", "Scrolling is smooth…", "…just a horizontally scrolling shoot em up…" MASK III is a flip-screen game! did they had some version we've never seen? or did they simple never played the game, and wrote those reviews based on screenshots and some info provided by Gremlin PR people?

Always prefered YS reviews, with their nonsense humour and always more accurate.

[equinox]

Always prefered YS reviews, with their nonsense humour and always more accurate.

Yes and no. Sometimes, reading the sillier YS reviews, I imagine that the software houses can't have been pleased to see "their" game's column inches being filled with gibberish instead of justification for the final score...

I do enjoy nonsensical screenshot captions though, where Jon North [edit: I mean Jon Pillar, don't I? lol] would make up a little story to explain what was going on in the picture.

[HEXdidnt]

Another thing to bear in mind is reviewer apathy. Crash especially, as they had three reviewers for each game for much of its lifetime, so each reviewer was probably inspecting at least a dozen games per month. Probably 20+ during the Speccy's peak years. Even as someone who still adores videogaming thirty-odd years later, that must have wore a bit thin eventually.

Based on the production cycle of the monthlies I worked on, I don't think asking reviewers to play on average less than two games per day is asking a lot. Even at the busiest time, it'd be the equivalent of three or four per day, at most. Given that many Speccy games can be completed (if you know what you're doing or, in the case of reviewers, have been given the cheats) in less that 30 minutes, it's pretty much the definition of a first world problem.

Since I've not worked on that sort of magazine, specifically, I'll give them the benefit of some doubt (eg. late arrival of a game, plus publisher's insistence that it get reviewed in the issue currently in progress; journalists' commitments to other magazines from the same stable) but Crash spreading the load between three reviewers per game would further reduce the workload.

[AndyC]

Head Over Heels was a blatant rip off of all those Ultimate games but everyone scored that highly. I don't think originality matters at all in this industry.

It wasn't though. It massively refines the concept over the ultimate titles. It adds a sense of a believable world, rather than just a random collection of screen arrangements. It offers multiple levels of completion (just escape, escape and liberate some planets, escape and liberate all planets). The different characters and abilities, plus the option to combine them at points, just adds lots more depth to the overall experience.

[HEXdidnt]

It wasn't though. It massively refines the concept over the ultimate titles... just adds lots more depth to the overall experience.

I don't think anyone would argue that, but it doesn't change the fact that Head Over Heels is an isometric platform adventure in the style of Ultimate and therefore not 'original', as such. No-one ever said that standing on the shoulders of giants can't produce results that far exceed those of the predecessors, but at what point do improvements start to outweigh the basic level of unoriginality to the point where it should no longer be a cause for marking it down?

Sometimes, reading the sillier YS reviews, I imagine that the software houses can't have been pleased to see "their" game's column inches being filled with gibberish instead of justification for the final score...

Looking back at some of those, I have to wonder if those were instances of a good review having been bought by the publisher, so the journalist felt they needn't bother actually lending any credence to the score by lavishing the game with (potentially false) praise.

[AndyC]

I don't think anyone would argue that, but it doesn't change the fact that Head Over Heels is an isometric platform adventure in the style of Ultimate and therefore not 'original', as such. No-one ever said that standing on the shoulders of giants can't produce results that far exceed those of the predecessors, but at what point do improvements start to outweigh the basic level of unoriginality to the point where it should no longer be a cause for marking it down?

I guess that's my point. I don't really see an issue with marking a game down because it's just a cheap clone of another, already more popular title. If you're not even trying to bring something new to the table, then you should expect as much. However I wouldn't mark something down for copying the basic structure, if it then at least tries to take the concept further or adds some sort of novel spin on things. E.g. Bionic Commando was not that far from other platformers of the time, but the grappling mechanic stood out as something different at least.

[stupidget]

Where do you draw the line with regards to a 'clone'? Is Match Point a clone of Pong? Is OutRun a clone of Pole Position? Is every single fantasy text adventure simply a clone of Colossal Cave Adventure? You could say that ALL games are pretty much a clone of some other game with the rare exception of the likes of Deus Ex Machine, I of the Mask and a few others.

[worcestersource]

I’d say that Head Over Heels innovated massively on the concept given the two protagonists. It was far more puzzle based. Also, making the controls directional rather than rotational completely changed the game format for me. I just couldn’t get on with Alien 8.

[equinox]

Where do you draw the line with regards to a 'clone'? Is Match Point a clone of Pong? Is OutRun a clone of Pole Position? Is every single fantasy text adventure simply a clone of Colossal Cave Adventure? You could say that ALL games are pretty much a clone of some other game with the rare exception of the likes of Deus Ex Machine, I of the Mask and a few others.

A clone is (IMO) a game that deliberately tries to copy several aspects of another, especially the "look and feel". You might do this if the game doesn't exist on your system and you want a version of it. Very obvious with things like Tetris, or Giana Sisters from Mario Brothers, or Acornsoft Snapper from Pac-Man.

Match Point looks nothing like Pong, and is more derived from the physical sport of tennis.

The isometric style of HoH is a lot like Ultimate's isometric style and clearly influenced by it to some degree: somebody must have seen the Ultimate games and thought, "Oh, I could implement that kind of 3D effect." However, that is only the graphics engine: the plot and characters are a bit different and it does add significant new elements like the two-character interactions. I would not call it a clone.