Why scathing reviews hurt the community

Lately I've been having a nostalgic yearning to recapture the feeling I had when I first became familiar with the fangaming community. There was a certain novelty behind the idea that amateurs were making real, playable Mario games.

Of course, that was back around 2001 or 2002, and most of those games would suck if played today. Standards since then have changed drastically; Mario fangames are expected to include a load of features, hidden levels, tons of power-ups, and, most of all, a kickass engine. This makes for better games, but really hurts the experience. When a fangamer releases his first game and is told it's worthless because the jumping is too strong or the graphics clash or enemies use path movement, that serves as a pretty strong discouragment.

Essentially what I'm saying is that people should really be a lot less harsh when they review terrible games. I'm not saying that you should sugarcoat the game at all; that wouldn't help anybody. Giving a poor game a poor review lets the creator know what to change next time and lets potential downloaders know whether or not the game is worth their time. But most reviews for subpar games (usually when it's only the creator's first or second release) tend to tear them apart pretty badly without giving much real, concrete advice. The end result is that the creator of the game becomes discouraged and potentially stops making games altogether rather than improving on his or her skills.

So why does this hurt fangaming as a whole? Take a look at most of the Mario fangames available for download on the Internet (not so much at MFGG, which has some standards, but websites like Super Mario Portal). The really low-quality games are the reason why nobody takes fangaming seriously outside the fangaming community. Most people don't see the one or two games that are really, really good (Toad Strikes Back, Pocket Mario, Super Mario XP), they see the awful ones (99.9% of all fangames). When somebody becomes discouraged after making one or two terrible games, their contribution to the fangaming community has been entirely negative. However, if they are encouraged to improve their skills, they could someday make a game that fits into that fantastic .1%.

Imagine if TD had released Bowser Blast in 2006. Do you think he ever would've gotten as far as Toad Strikes Back? He and his game would've been blasted, and he would've been strongly discouraged from continuing to develop his talents.

The bottom line is, be a little less rough when you review sucky fangames. Don't just say "this game has terrible graphics," tell the creator what he or she can do to fix it.

It's also really discouraging when someone feels like their game is being attacked by the entire community. So what I do is avoid reviewing a game that isn't up to standard when there are already reviews written about it. Take, for example, Dodge the Shyguys. Damn near everybody reviewed it. Saying basically the same things in different ways.

Yeah, well this probably only happens in MFGG because of the elitist view of fangames in this community.

I mean, I've shown Mario Left the Cheese Out to people recently, and they thought it was amazing.

I still crave more creativity in fangames than anything, though. Not just a 'kickass engine'.

Yeah I agree. Some reviews were really harsh enough to piss off people.

One of my online friends (who rarely posts here) felt insulted by a review.Then again the review wasn't that harsh (from what I remembered atleast)

This post has been edited by Naoshi on Apr 23 2006, 06:39 PM

Just talking to people about this won't do anything, though. You'll have to seek cooperation with the site staff on changing the submission rules in regards to reviews.

I agree with what Jeff said, and I know when I reviewed bad games at least (like Paper Mario World), I tried to keep in the back of my mind that these are people's beggining attempts, and not insult or slam the author just because their game skills needed practice.

I think as we get ready to launch MFGG 2.0, we should re-evaluate the existing reviews, and cull out the ones that have nothing constructive to say, or spend more time talking about the author than the game.

.. I have an urge to post my first fangame.

I think people find the need to be rude and sarcastic when reviewing so they can show their buddies how funny they are when they give a scathing review.

No seriously, people are gonna do it anyway, I think the best course of action would be to review the reviewing guidelines and add stuff like:

"Reviews must be kept constructive and helpful at all times"
"Do not resort to sarcastic remarks or unpositive and unhelpful feedback if the game is lacking, provide good replies as to what the game needs to improve" etc etc etc

And the people running the moderation queue need to take more precautions when accepting reviews, and the current reviews probably need reviewing too...

...am I still site staff? I don't think I revoked that.

Summarized, people need to make constructive critisim in their reviews. I agree with that completely.

@Kritter: Ask RII about that, he can check :o

I don't remember - but it makes little difference as the site is offline until May.

But I agree, as I said above, that the reviews should be re-evaluated.

I don't remember quite that many such reviews on the site. If the review went into offensive detail, I would have taken it down.

But then again there are hundreds of reviews on the site already so obviously I don't remember them all right now.

Heh, heh, you don't know me very well, do you? ;P
If that was the case, MFGG would have been long dead by now, because it, along with me, was "blasted" to no end shortly after it opened, due to the false accusation that it was an MFGC rip-off.

On another note, I occasionally work on a sort-of secret fan gaming project, which I expect to be "blasted" a bit when I reveal it. But I don't care, heh. I just felt like paying homage to my "n00b" days, and to give myself something fun to work on during the times TSB gets slightly annoying to deal with. Not that this sort-of secret game is poorly constructed, of course, but it is certainly a step down from TSB.

That's also another important aspect of making games: having fun while doing so.

If I could rent out ad space in Times Square with the word "ENDORSE," I would.

Nobody seems to remember that the central point of producing a fangame is to have fun. If you're being paid to make a game, maybe you can set aside having your own fun a bit to produce a top-notch product, but fangaming is supposed to be a hobby.

well, something like this needs to have a little consensus, as a lot of decisions do. Reviews accepted are up to the discretion of the staff, but obviously some have slipped the radar, so the staff and members need to say which ones are bad and discuss etc etc etc i'm sure you get the point.

My problem is how so many people get their heads bitten off for using a built in movement engine, even if it does play better than some static engines might.

Everybody's gotta start somewhere.

I remember back when fan gaming existed of pretty much just me and Biebersoft, a static engine was unheard of except for in that amazing Games Factory tutorial "Zeb". I remember trying it myself to get Mario to do the B-button-run without messing up the jump back when fastloops didn't even exist, everyone who saw it thought it was great, but it really wasn't as playable as a plain old built in engine would have been.

Playability seems to take back burner these days, nobody seems to release something which is just good clean fun, it has to have 100 levels and 80 secret levels and Yoshi and everything, and often the actual playability is sacrificed in favour of just getting the character to do the moves accurately, though this is far more common in the Sonic community.

It's all demos demos demos as well, I try to finish most games before releasing them (except the occasional engine which I may show in a single forum but not release to the entire web), that way you can have full impact all at once, so many people put together a massive engine and release a demo and promise what they can't deliver. Ever play Chaomega? (That one actually used a built in platform engine but it was far more playable than most Sonic fan games, but it was never finished, all just demos). The Sonic fan gaming community is overrun with "OMFG LOOK SONIC RUNS UP WALLS AND THROUGH LOOPS" and completely void of "this is fun to play". Since Damiziel(or whatever)'s 360 thing came out everybody has been trying to claim it as their own without even mastering it or improving it, or making it playable (so Sonic runs up walls and through loops without a path movement, but the thing controls like a brick on ice!), it's all just competition.

There's also the whole "IM GONNA MAKE MY GAME BETTER THAN ALL YOURS" thing. I can't remember the last time I've seen somebody go "Wow this fan game is awesome!" without following it with something along the lines of "Mine will be even better when it comes out." Let's face it, no matter how amazing our engines are (I remember the response when I posted my engine with the cape and everything), efforts to steal the gold off of ThunderDragon for Toad Strikes Back just for the sake of it is childish and usually futile. Ok, we get it, you/I/we can make Mario do all the cool moves from the game. Now how about we try and make something playable and actually release something, and just have fun?

That's so true. Plus, games with these "incredible engines" are never finished.
Super Mario Epic 2 is the only game here that got incredible attention but wasn't really flashy at all. It ran on the damn generic TGF/MMF platform movement, but it was fun, and that's really all that mattered. I agree with you; people should focus more on the playability aspects of the game (level design, interesting objects to interact with, etc.) rather than the engine/graphics so much.
Actually, these same thoughts really hold true for professionally made games as well.

Another endorse.

I try to give my games a lot of cool Mario features, but not just for the sake of packing in as many features as possible. When I decide to include a new feature in my games, I don't do it for the sake of having a bunch of features--I do it for the sake of giving me more options for level design and gameplay. In fact, most of the time when I decide to add something new, I do it with design ideas already floating around in my head.

But yeah, games don't have to include a ton of features or a static engine to be fun. As DistantJ said, the built-in movement is smoother than a lot of static engines (though you still sorta need to be careful when using it).

When people pack in as many features as they can, the level design gets thrown off and some features that you like about the levels are underutilized. For instance, a game with 50 powerups isn't going to be good because it has 50 powerups. You'll probably only like a handful of them, but because there are 50, you'll never get to use the select few you like. So it's a quality vs. quantity thing.

Right now, if a fangame didn't have at least 10 power-ups/features/awesome it would be blasted and everyone would strongly urge for the person to stop fangaming - no. People should make fangames for fun. They shouldn't have to worry about "Is this going to be good enough?" and crap like that and just make the goddamn fangame. Fangames can have awesome graphics/realism/wtf but the most important thing is for it to be fun. If a game had graphics that sucked and everything looked distorted but the game was ok to play and even pretty fun then the person would likely be discouraged by the amount of people blasting him just because the graphics aren't up to date.

This post has been edited by SuperShroom on Apr 25 2006, 07:24 AM

Not to mention, some people just do it for the sake of being an ass.

The reason people release demos is to show off what they've done so far because they feel they've done an awesome job so far. It's like drawing this really awesome picture and forcing yourself to wait until you have a whole portfolio.

It's hard.