Triangle Man wrote:First of all sterlihalla, "or whoever your elitist and/or attempt-at-forum-alpha-male-status ass is", I found 3D through my brother, who found it from searching online, I'm not an alt.
Second of all, Gamespot isn't always very accurate with reviews from what I've seen in general (I stopped even looking at them almost 2 years ago), and while IGN is usually pretty good with theirs, they've bombed a few in the past. Some of the best games I've played in my life have had horrible reviews, you can't always trust these sites.
You need to get it out of your head that guys that work at these places are super genius game connesuers (spelling). They're lucky guys who found a niche in life that allows them to squeeze out a living talking about video games which they get to demo for a whole 30 minutes, a week before a game's release. Most of these guys don't even know what a good game IS.
Half the time they rate games by how many modes the game has, hahahahah. If it's a PHENOMINAL game, but doesn't have eonugh "modes"' it gets a 6 instead of a 9.7, stuff like that.
Or they'll be like, "The game overall was unbelievably fun to play, however in the mission 'Randall Heads To Wisconsin', I noticed the 346th blade of grass on the right side behind the third building turns orange for 2 seconds as you're rounding the corner, which unfortunately forces me to bring down what would've been a 9.8 scoring game to a 4.6. In today's day and age, you just can't let those kinds of errors through.", LOL.
Site reviews are a joke. You need to hear it from a good group of gamers, not carebears who demo a game for 30 minutes, get frustrated if they get owned or didn't fully understand the controls yet, and then have a hissy fit and write a bad review because of it.
There's a great forum full of mature gamers that my brother always looks to check on how games REALLY are, but I forget the name right now, I'll ask him later and come back and post it. Most of the people there actually give real reviews on games, not reviews written by A.D.D. cases who think a game sucks if they can't absolutely dominate it within the first 3 minutes of picking up the controller when they don't know the full controls yet.
This is why it was rated a 5 on one of those sites - because the guys demo'd an exhibition match (which in those they fight like htey do at the very end stages of career mode - very hard and alot of pressure), when they didn't fully understand the controls yet or how to defend very well, they got the shit knocked out of them, and then gave it a bad review.
When you don't know what the hell is going on, and you get knocked to the canvas before you can even get a feel for what's going on, yeah, you're going to think the game is a cheap piece of shit. Keep in mind too that the tutorial is in career mode, and you need to spend some time with it before you even attempt to have an opinion on the game.
This is all evidenced even by the game's official forum. The first *8* pages are filled with, "OMFG THIS GAME ---SUCKS--- don't waste your money!! The movement is so sluggish and it's just a haymaker fest where you get knocked out in two rounds!! DO NOT BUY THIS GAME!!!"... And then around aboutt he 10th to 12th page you see guys coming back going, "Ok, after learning the controls a bit better, I lasted to the 8th round and barely lost after letting my guard down for a little too long and got caught with an overhand, and I won my following 2 fights! Oh yeah, and the movement isn't as sluggish as I thought, turns out you have to double-tap the direction you want to move if you want to move quicker or create some distance and move around a bit. Turns out I'm liking this game alot after-all!"
I read every single page (all 32 at the time) of the "Impressions" thread on the official forum before making the decision to buy, because of a few things I was scared about. I thought they'd overdo haymakers, make them take no stamina, that there'd be huge massive stumbles everytime you take a hit, that the movement would be trash, etc.. And after reading the first 8 pages I was starting to get sick, until about the 9th page when I realized that yeah, the first 8 pages are filled with people who wrote a review after literally fighting 1 round in exhibition, who never went through the tutorial or even looked at the controls in the book really. They got the shit beat out of them, then came back and complained about how "bad" the game was, when they literally didn't even know how to use their footwork yet, LOL!
As far as the game itself, it's more sim than any other mainstream boxing game out there. Your distance has a big effect, if you're throwing haymakers left and right you lose energy very quickly, and lower stamina means much slower punches as well as much weaker punches, the ring movement is LEAGUES better than FightNight ever was, etc. Infact I wrote a huge explanation of stuff to my brother on his computer and saved it to his desktop cause I was going to write a review on the site with alot of what I had there. If he didn't delete it, I'll copy and paste it here.
I love the classic 30's venue as well as the 70's and 90's one, was a great touch!
Again, I think the single-player gameplay is great, but they messed up online with the hyper-recovering health - there's no chance to turn the fight around with a big punch, and definately no chance for a flash K.O. as it is now. Again people are petitioning to have it changed so I'm sure they will, it ruins online. There's no reason to make a game more than 3 or 4 rounds at this point, as nothing will change in later rounds due to the massively beefed up (online only) health recovery.