Critical Eye: What is a Critic?

One of the main problems I find when reading reviews, or more accurately, the comments of said reviews, is the difficulty people have in differentiating between reviewers and critics . People, especially the dreaded fanboys, tend to get all uppity and violent just because someone badmouthed their game/console/mother's cooking.

Let me lay it all out for you, so you can know in advance of my other Critical Eye articles. Reviewers review games. They look at them in a neutral view and give their honest opinions from a professional perspective. Reviews tend to be balanced and give both good points AND bad points of the subject at hand. Unless of course the subject is worse at being a game than an collection of blind, deaf and dumb two year olds would be an army. In that case they could be hard pressed to find anything good to say about it. Fair enough.

Critics, on the other hand criticise games. I mean for the love of all humanity it's in the bloody name! Critic , critic ise. See? They're more inclined to point out the bad in games, and it's here that people get all crabby. It doesn't mean they think it's a bad game, they just want to make sure you see it's not necessarily all sun shine and rainbows.

The people who just cannot take this are fanboys, and I find that X-Box and Halo fans are worse offenders than PS3/Wii/Killzone/whatever fans. Not a prejudiced remark, just an observation. God forbid some doesn't like Halo or even worse, realises that it's NOT the best FPS ever made and didn't redefine the genre! Such a madman must be called "gay", "fag", "fagballs" and whatever else the non-imaginative angry mobs can come up with. I have played Halo. I have played Halo 2. I have no intention of playing Halo 3 because I did not enjoy the others. In fact I found them to be no different to any other FPS I've played except Call of Duty 4, and I actually enjoyed Killzone and 007: Night fire a hell of a lot more.

So, now that we have that out in the open, please try to keep in mind I will be pointing out flaws in games that people seem to ignore. I will be the hand that feeds that little nagging voice in the back of your head telling you that the game you're playing isn't as great as you thought it was. No game is perfect. I'm here to try and prove it.