The Rybicki Maneuver

Brother None

Brother None

This ghoul has seen it all
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Getting that itch in his fingers again, NMA's Brother None wrote an article entitled The Rybicki Maneuver: When to praise and when to criticize: a how-to guide:<blockquote>Morrowind just laid the groundworks for Oblivion or Oblivion loses out to Morrowind on the basis of being more action-orientated? It can't be both, so what causes the difference in opinion between these two pieces?

And there we arrive at the central point of this article; the Rybicki Maneuver. In short the maneuver means that as long as your opinion on the product actually matters towards the game's sales, don't be too critical. The moment criticism doesn't matter anymore or, even better, criticism can be used to say "they won't do this again", do a 180 and suddenly claim the flaws you didn't mention in your review should be obvious to anyone.</blockquote>Read and discuss.

Link: The Rybicki Maneuver: When to praise and when to criticize: a how-to guide.
 
Nice article. It reminds me of when I was going through my friend's old XBox magazines and laughing at all the exciting previews of games that sucked. Especially ones that hyped features that didn't even end up in the game.
 
Nice article indeed! I always wondered how previews seem to salivate over games, no matter how obvious flaws they may have. It's very strange that a year later, suddenly the animations are clunky, lipsync is wonky, AI sucks, etc. when it was all praise in the reviews.

I think it's safe to say that technology hasn't made *that* much of a leap the last 12 months to warrant a beatdown of Oblivion. I'd guess that the critics of a game will quickly find themselves last in line for previewing the next game in the line, or having a hard time getting review copies of games.

Which again leads to the question, what's the point of reviews if what they try to do is just please the developer and publisher? :|
 
The 8 articles/publications linked to at the bottom are all worth reading, if you have the odd 4 hours to waste.

I don't think any media outlet spends as much time criticizing itself as the gaming media. Very typical. Very telling.
 
Excellent article, and, in general, I very much agree with the points you're making.

However, there's one thing that stuck out at me involving your quotes from various places. It involves the quotes from GGL:
And, thankfully, the horrid level scaling of Oblivion has been more or less phased out. - GGL on Fallout 3 (ref)

For all the excellence within this game, there are some flaws. Firstly there is the annoying and unpredictable issue of crashing. Both of my test machines experienced random crashes to desktop. (...) The other issue is more understandable and can be largely forgiven. The NPC interaction suffers from some rather illogical and disjointed verbal exchanges. - GGL on Oblivion (ref)
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Not only do both quotes seem to be negative statements about Oblivion (although they do seem to be trying hard to gloss over the issues in what I assume to be their review of Oblivion), but they're talking about completely different issues. I suppose if you were just going for a general negative/positive contrast I understand it, but most the other quotes involved them directly contradicting themselves on the same issues. I dunno, I just thought that part was a little bit weaker than the rest.

Oh, and also one other thing: while of course you'd expect some degree of consistency from articles from the same magazine/site/whatever, I can still understand how differences would come about if the previews aren't being written by the same people who did the review. Not that I find that a particularly strong case against your argument; considering how universally glowing the reviews were, it does seem odd that only those with almost exclusively positive things to say were picked to do the review at pretty much every single place.

Anyways, just a couple thoughts. Fantastic job though.
 
As mentioned before the quotes, they either show contradictions or no mention of the flaws noted later.

In the Fallout 3 preview, GGL calls the level scaling "horrid."

In the Oblivion review, GGL specifically says there are only two flaws, and doesn't mention the level scaling anywhere.

It's kind of hard to show "it doesn't mention this" in quotes, y'know.
 
Brother None said:
As mentioned before the quotes, they either show contradictions or no mention of the flaws noted later.

In the Fallout 3 preview, GGL calls the level scaling "horrid."

In the Oblivion review, GGL specifically says there are only two flaws, and doesn't mention the level scaling anywhere.

It's kind of hard to show "it doesn't mention this" in quotes, y'know.
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Yeah, sorry. Didn't expect you to reply quite so quickly. I edited it up a little, as I realized a little more the point you were making with those two quotes.
 
Good article!

Reminds me of tv-spots for detergent. Every new one washes whiter than white although the old one was supposed to do that already... :roll:
 
Kyuu said:
Oh, and also one other thing: while of course you'd expect some degree of consistency from articles from the same magazine/site/whatever, I can still understand how differences would come about if the previews aren't being written by the same people who did the review.
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Like I said in the article; that'd imply one journalist is a lot better at his job than the other (hell, it'd imply all the Oblivion reviewers are better at their jobs than Fallout 3 previewers, huh?)

Besides, the tone of the previews is that these flaws in Oblivion should be obvious. They name such things as level scaling or mushy faces in passing, in a way of "I don't need to explain this further," because it should be so obvious to everyone. If it's so obvious, why wasn't it in the reviews?
 
ChrisM said:
Good article!

Reminds me of tv-spots for detergent. Every new one washes whiter than white although the old one was supposed to do that already... :roll:
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Heh good point
 
Well done, Brother None! I've read the Chris Buffa's article as well, it explains the whole videogame journalism problematic in general. Gotta read the rest, but it'll take some time for sure...

Now, I use the smilies sparse, keep them for special occasions ya know. You've earned this one :clap:
 
GameDaily said:
Writers sound exactly the same

Despite years of writing under our belts, none of us have been able to successfully break from the pack and establish a signature style. Actually, allow me to rephrase that. Plenty of writers have attempted to sound different, but they end up failing miserably.

The issue isn't beyond fixing and it's not too big a deal. Most newspapers sound exactly the same and for good reason. We shouldn't be dressing up the news since it's our job to report the facts in a clear and concise manner. But when it comes to features, there's plenty of room for individual voices to shine.

Journalists also suffer from a lack of toughness. It's not uncommon for a writer to bash a really terrible game, but don't expect them to criticize God of War developer David Jaffe for being a pompous loudmouth. And don't even think about seeing an editorial piece calling Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi a one hit wonder. Instead, websites are far more interested in what he thinks of the Nintendo Wii, and would rather discuss his lack of interest in developing for the machine. But Keita Takahashi is a one hit wonder.

Who cares what he thinks?

See, the criticism is easy.
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Wow, I felt so good reading that
 
Good article :) . It shows why I don't buy gaming magazines any more.

ChrisM said:
Good article!

Reminds me of tv-spots for detergent. Every new one washes whiter than white although the old one was supposed to do that already... :roll:
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Exactly :) !
Which is pretty sad, because gaming journalists should be critics, not advertisers...
 
Could it be that the game critics at the time of writing a review are under the influence of things such as advertisement, first impressions of the game, game packaging and aspects of the game which indeed are positive?

When I first played Oblivion (which I installed only to judge the team which was to be responsible for the Holy Game) I was amazed by the World. The atmosphere got me. And when I first got out of the stockades and saw the sky, the grass, water and everything, I opened my mouth. At that stage I would be able to give the game a very positive feedback/review.

However as the time passed, hours rather than days actually, I realized the unbearable boredom of the game - pathetic level scaling which made every quest a piece of cake (where the transportation to the location was the hardest part, simply because it took the longest, even with fast movement using map), small variety of creatures, worse than horrible conversations with NPC (they all were basically the same NPC with a bit different voice :? ) and other things, which made Oblivion unplayable for me after 5-8 hours of gameplay.

Could it be that the reviewers were either in a hurry, or simply drawing from their first experience and produced the review based on those first, almost magical moments?

I play fallout for almost 9 years now. Though I've been going through the periods of booms and recessions of interest, I still often go back to the game and play it classically - start new game, create new character, etc
Besides that I countless times decide to try something in F2, so I skip the game to that stage (load particular map from a menu, use trainer to make the character useable for the purpose).

My point is, it never got boring. And that is the difference between Fallout and Oblivion - 9 years vs. 5 hours

And no matter how "stunned" the first impressions might be (and the chances are the graphics are the main force of Oblivion's world), we should see deeper than this and no one should write reviews like that, though everyone does.
Review should be in-depth evaluation, not a presentation of the first impressions, and that's where many reviews fail.

What did I try to say with all this text?
Fallout 3 will be different, and it's up to us to make up our decision whether we like it or not, even at this early stage with almost no info available. We should extract the facts from the articles and filter out the crap. After all, are we the die hard Fallout fans or are the reviewers?
 
Great stuff. Too bad there isnt a general gaming website out there with enough integrity to approach things similar to this article. I would read that.
 
Kharn, why do you post your post about your editorials in the third person?

Does anyone check the submitted news e-mail? I sent you guys scans of the GFW write up on the FO3 demo.
 
Killzig said:
Does anyone check the submitted news e-mail? I sent you guys scans of the GFW write up on the FO3 demo.
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Man, you blew it! Now Bethesda can tell us to take them down before we even post them.
 
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