Nick plays games

It didn’t sound like a good idea on paper: Purchasing a four-year-old port of a last-gen GTA clone that was critically panned at release?

But a friend of mine vouched for it, and what the hell — $7.99 seemed like a fair price.

It’s rough, and it’s unacceptably terrible in its story, but it’s just so much fun that none of that stuff matters.

I realize that, just as books and movies can be “great” and “classic” without simultaneously being “fun” or “accessible,” some of the most fun games aren’t always the most refined or perhaps substantial. But why does that almost always equate to a low review score? I’d argue that a game’s perceived value shouldn’t always be assumed to exist under a uniform set of expectations.

Just Cause is absolutely more fun than Heavy Rain, for example, and just as engaging, but they set out to do different things. That’s fine. So is one game more important than the other? Can that sort of claim be made objectively?