Friday, October 30, 2009

afrika on ps3

One of the major issues I take with game reviewers online is that sometimes it seems like they judge all games against the standards of the most fun, most mainstream, most popular game to have come out recently rather than fairly judging a game against its own standards. If a game sets out to entertain you for hours with bloody and crazy first-person shooter fun, then judge it to that standard. If it instead sets out to teach you something, or help you lose weight, or make you relax or think, these are the standards it should be judged against! In particular I am seeing this happen with a new Playstation 3 game called Afrika. Afrika seems pretty much like a realistic safari version of Pokemon Snap - you cruise around the African plains as a professional photographer shooting prize-winning photos of African species on the Serengeti. This game is suffering from the fate of a wide disparity between critics' scores and user scores, and I think the problem is the one I outlined above. Of course if you are a huge fan of Halo 3: ODST and you compare Afrika to that you will probably think it is boring! I haven't tried Afrika yet so I guess it could totally suck but I just can't believe that it deserves IGN's score of a 3.5 "Bad". Lucky for me I still get my GameStop privilege of "signing out" a game for a few days like a free rental - I think this game is the perfect candidate as, well, it's just not a good time to be spending $50 on a glorified Pokemon Snap!
Anyone out there tried Afrika yet? What did you think?

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