Because sometimes even the most grown-up and respectable of publications, such as The Guardian, let completely gormless idiots do them, devaluing the whole concept and embarrassing all concerned in the process.

DoDonPachi Resurrection is in fact one of the finest games ever released on the iPod/iPhone, but subjective opinions on quality aren't the issue here. (Although so far DDPR has an average App Store review rating of 90%, and it's only that low because some tool couldn't run it and gave it 1/5.)

What's more important is the complete ignorance with which someone has been allowed to denigrate a tremendously well-executed game, while implying – entirely inaccurately – that they have some idea what they're talking about.

The Guardian's review of DDPR opens with the fact that the DonPachi series has been running since 1995, a trivia snippet clearly nicked from Wikipedia but designed to give the impression that the review's author is at least modestly knowledgeable in the field of shooting games.

(Something which he immediately undermines by suggesting that a game so unimaginably old as 1995 is "one of the longest-running shoot-em-up franchises in Japan", neglecting to mention several current shmup bloodlines going back a mere 15 years further than that. But the intent is still there.)

It's not until the second paragraph, though, that things REALLY start falling apart under a barrage of stupid. According to our hero, the game "offers both an optimised iPhone mode and a straight-up port of the arcade version – though the difference between the two is fairly negligible", an appraisal of the two modes which is accurate in so far as it would be hard to tell them apart if you were, say, blind and locked in a bank vault.

As with Cave's previous iOS release Espgaluda 2, the entire fundamental game mechanics of Arcade Mode and iPhone Mode are radically different, requiring the game to be played in totally distinct ways. The reviewer even acknowledges this fact by pointing out that iPhone Mode focuses on "scraping" enemy bullets, but professes not to know what that means and penalises the game for failing to further explain something that anyone with access to a dictionary or a functioning human brain could work out.

(What do you THINK "scrape against the bullets" means, you cretin? It means scrape against the fucking bullets. Which of those words is it that you don't understand?)

Almost every other line of the review contains something equally idiotic, whether it be factually wrong, betraying a mere total lack of understanding of any aspect of the game or shmups in general, or just plain gibberish, such as the tremendous "a landscape packed to the nines with enemies, projectiles, power-ups and score notifiers".

(I must admit to also gleaning a chuckle from the entertainingly precise "the screen is almost constantly more than three-quarters full of moving sprites", if not from the criminally-wrong allegations about "lag" – actually deliberate "bullet time" slowdown, a feature of the genre, demonstrated by the fact that your control response is unaffected – that followed it.)

Arnott describes the controls as "polished", yet professes the game to not be "remotely playable" – partly on account of his fingers covering the screen – yet has apparently failed to notice that Cave's clever relative-joypad system means it's NEVER necessary to have so much as a single pixel of the play area obscured by your digits.

He bemoans its punishing difficulty if played without continues, despite the fact that the default mode effectively gives you about 15 lives per credit and is almost impossible NOT to complete. As with Espgaluda 2, getting to the end of DDPR is designed to be easy for players of almost all abilities (I did it on my second try, and I'm not within a million miles of even being in the same league as the real experts), with the pro challenge coming from learning and exploiting the complexities of the scoring.

Something about Cave games, and bullet-hell shmups in general, seems to bring out the incompetent moron in videogames reviewers. It seems to be acceptable to not only get your facts wrong but also to be utterly ignorant about even the most basic aspects of the entire genre, in a way that wouldn't be tolerated if, say, the publication had its FIFA 2011 review written by the dim one out of Girls Aloud. It needs to stop.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 6th, 2010 at 1:47 pm and is filed under games, iOS, stupidity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.