I absolutely remember being a kid around 06's launch and picking up a gaming magazine while at Barnes and Noble with my dad and there being an insanely good 06 review in it. I'm talking nothing but effusive praise, ending in a 9/10 or something similar. It was like the dude was reviewing an entirely different game. The only line I really remember was one praising Shadow's vehicles sections. I think I've seen people reference this review sometimes (mostly in a "what was bro cooking!!!" sense), but it's been a long time since even that.
Yes. Dave Halverson from Play gave it a 9.5/10 at the time. BlazeHedgehog wrote a blog post some time ago about how he was probably paid off.
Interesting read, thanks for sharing! I don’t think there’s much doubt that the review score was artificially inflated, whether that be by an agreement with SEGA or something else at play there. Dave argued that he was told the game would have fixes in place by launch, which of course never materialised. That itself is an odd way to review a game; how can you predict how a game will turn out when so many bug fixes and issues still need implementing? It would be like reviewing Simon Wai’s prototype as final. They told me Wood Zone would be completed, so I give Sonic 2 10/10
It's possible he wasn't paid off and was just such a huge Sega fan that he independently decided to inflate review scores for their games. The GameSetWatch article I link in my blog mentions Dave wrote Play Magazine's E3 coverage in 2008 despite the fact he did not actually attend E3 that year, a fact he apparently repeatedly boasts about in the very same E3 coverage. He was known for doing dumb shit like that.
Dave Halverson was also always rumored to be taking different kinds of drugs as well around that time and long prior. So anything he wrote was definitely suspect. Hardcore Gaming 101 covered some of the behavior from the old Diehard Gamefan era. Essentially Gamefan - Gamers' Republic - Play - Gamefan was a long string of publications with similar people behind them and each had a history of crazy things happening. The fact that Sonic 06 was the one people can still pick out to this day is always hilarious to me though.
Yup. There's a famous Gamefan story that he spiked the office coffee pot with LSD and at least one published article was written under the influence.
This isn't entirely unheard of. Game reviewers prefer to have plenty of time to review a game, so publishers will sometimes send a game a few weeks in advance (sometimes even months depending on how big the game is, and how long it'd take to play through it). As a result, sometimes bugs aren't weighed as heavily in the review due to the promise that there'll be fixes to the game by launch, and it's not in the final state. With how day 1 patches have become ever the more prevalent, this issue hasn't exactly gotten better. Now, not to say he wasn't paid off (he likely was), but the practice isn't unheard of. SEGA's PR team could've spun a tale that the build he was given was before a lot of fixes were applied (a tale made much easier to swallow after a nice bonus for reviewing the game).
If you look on Metacritic you can see that many magazines gave it around 5-6. Some exceptions. It is largely the online critics who were much more critical and drove the overall score down. To be honest it is quite a hard game to review in the format of magazine reviews. I think this may be hard for a lot of people to appreciate but magazine reviews (I'm thinking Officicial PlayStation and Xbox magazines especially) would often look for an overall score which reflected graphics, sound, gameplay, and length. Sonic 06 for its time was fairly impressive in graphics and length. The sound is great other than the VA. The gameplay is atrocious. So I remember the reviews rounding out about 5 or 6 because of these qualities of the game. At least that's how I remember it, I could be completely wrong!
The game also got a lot of glowing previews too. One UK mag (Might have been Gamesmastsr) did a 6 page preview which is insane considering how the game turned out. But on the subject of the integrity of magazine reviewers... this... has unfortunately been quite a poor record. Yeah there were good outlets which had a good strong ethical code. But especially around the PS2 era, it was possible to put out a relatively cheap mag and some of the writing and reviews I saw even back in my teens was amazingly questionable. I always remember one early PS1 mag that wrote a guide for FF7 Ruby Weapon and claimed the best approach was to use the Phoenix Summon. 2 problems. 1: Ruby Randomly removes 2 characters from the fight so it's a 1v1. 2: phoenix is a fire attack, fire heals Ruby. There was also a big drama around a number of Star Wars games, some mags gave even the poor ones glowing reviews, one writer apparently let slip they'd been bought for their review.
Alright, glad to know I wasn't going nuts lol As a kid, I didn't pay much attention to gaming news besides E3 and whatever I caught on G4, so I think this review was legit my first exposure to Sonic 06 at all, so when the game came out and was...well, ya know, it blindsided the hell out of me. I wouldn't even get to play it till years later where I snagged a super cheap copy and beat it. Funnily enough I thought it was just okay and nowhere near as awful as people said, but I guess I was just an undiscerning teenager and also used to Sonic jank.
As a general rule of thumb, people need to stop assuming reviewers are literally paid off by publishers. Bribery is much more indirect than that and takes form through exclusive access and early review copies. Kotaku and Zelda is a good example of what happens if you get on the wrong side of a publisher. I find it very funny because I actually am friends with a reviewer at Eurogamer. He's told me how things work and how many junior reviewers are paid terrible or literally not at all. So the fanciful dreaming of reviewers getting paid out by publishers illegally is just pretty funny to me.
To Laura's point, yes and no. The era of game reviews for websites and the older era of magazines were two different beasts but had different types of pressure applied. Back then it was witholding advertisments which meant the revenue they needed to stay open and the pay for employees might get cut off. I'm pretty sure I remember some examples of direct bribes but they were few and far between. I'll see if I can find some in my notes. Even the mid 2000s things were directly different from what was before and to now. The entire debacle with Jeff Gerstmann at GameSpot over Kane and Lynch where he was in a managerial position and fired over a bad review 2007 I thin, it does show how it tends to be more indirect pressure on the companies which can lead to action and not that they are being paid off. People and companies do get blacklisted too. Bethesda was known for it for a stretch. That being said, manager meetings for retailers, swag that gets sent to reviewers, the review copies themselves. You don't play ball and you tend to be cut off, but a lot of this stuff are also perks to incentivise better reviews. They are definitely trying to buy mindshare at least. Have dealt with some of these things in publishing and in retail it's a fairly common practice. Now a lot of the online review copies go to influences as they tend to be free advertising for them and many of the same factors apply. A handful of copies definitely factor into their budgets and projections. As to Laura's other point, I'd also tried to apply for a website review position I'd been sent not too long ago and they paid per word and were far below normal publishing standards elsewhere. This seems to be a pretty common thing at this point. Even as extra income as a part time thing that much work for so little wasn't worth it. Even if the companies are raking in money, they squeeze it from poorly paid rank and file employees. Knowing people in these circles myself there are definitely stories of how these jobs don't pay the bills like it used to. Also seems to be why quality of writing through so many outlets are on the decline as clickbaity articles are on the rise to try to claw some attention for ad revenue.
