In Defense of Party Games; Game Reviewers Are Full Of Sh*t

Today was Christmas, and seeing as how I’m a human-being who celebrates and enjoys all of the consumerism and materialistic goodness associated with the day, it was only natural that I would spend some time with my family and friends. I hadn’t planned on playing Just Dance. Heck, I was exhausted from how long the day was, but when I was urged to rekindle my relationship with the game, I just couldn’t resist. I stood up- Wiimote in hand- and danced my ass off to “Viva Las Vegas” and “Girlfriend”. Like every single time I’ve played that game, I came away completely baffled at how anyone could dislike it.

It has overwhelmingly negative scores on aggregate “websites” like Metacritic, “true” gamers condemn such tom-foolery all of the time, and yet every single time I’m playing it, I can’t help but smile. I enjoy myself more when I’m dancing poorly with a game that may or may not be registering my movements at all than I do shooting people in the face on Xbox Live, or even smashing people off the edge of a map in Smash Bros. Both of those things have their place, but I really love Just Dance, I think it’s very well crafted, and I just don’t “get” the hate.

When it comes to party games (as far as I’m concerned, anyway), there’s really only one measure of how good a game is: How much fun you’re having. When you’ve got a group of people together and you’re casually playing some video games to enjoy a nice evening, I hardly imagine that you’re looking to have mom and dad gather around the PS3 to watch you scroll through menus and kill dragons in Skyrim. You’re not trying to have everyone reach a consensus on which useless text option to choose in Skyward Sword, and you’re not going to sit down to get pissed off at the immature ten(twenty)-year-olds infesting Xbox Live; you’re trying to have fun to make sure that they don’t ask you about why your house smells funny and why there isn’t any food to eat.

She has no idea I haven’t washed the dishes since last Christmas.

What games accomplish this most effectively? Well, it varies from person to person, but in general you can look to things like Mario Party, Just Dance, Wii [Game], or, Mixed Messages to produce the best results. All of these games are by far the best in their respective genres, and that being the case, you’d think they’d have pretty good scores. And if we accept that you cannot compare apples to oranges in gaming, review scores aren’t supposed to cross genres. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

Games like Just Dance and Mario Party have scores that are often hovering close to 60/100 or lower- scores that are considered “bad” by today’s horribly skewed sense of scale. So, okay; If you wanna give Mario Party a 5/10, I don’t care at all. It just means that you didn’t think that it was the best in its genre, right? The problem I have stems from people giving every single fucking party game scores below 7/10. I don’t care about numbers at all, but condemning these games to a life of “this game was poorly designed” is not fair to do simply because you don’t like the genre.The developers worked hard on them and produced a result that is up there alongside the best in their genre.

Honestly. What do you want Just Dance to do differently? Do you want it to have more quests? More songs? Dragons to kill? A gripping story? This is not what the game set out to do. It set out to make people dance and smile, and it did just that (and much more) nearly flawlessly. Stop comparing a game meant to have people moving around and laughing to Skyrim. Stop comparing  a virtual board game designed to keep people competitive and happy to Modern Warfare 3. These are not the same style of game, and as soon as you start blurring the lines, you’ve lost credibility as a game reviewer. “Party games are just inherently worse” just does not cut is as an excuse anymore.

Pro-tip, game reviewers: If you don’t like party games, don’t review them. If your genre of choice is First Person Shooter, go review Modern Warfare 3 and stay away from Mario Party. I’m not going to review and Call of Duty title because I don’t like the genre. I wouldn’t give you a fair and balanced review, and because I realize that, it’s my job- as a “journalist”- to stop and say “Hey, maybe someone else should review this.”

Consider that?