The Gamer’s Quagmire #69: Heeding the Wisdom of E.E. Cummings
Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less
by Jamison DeLorenzo
Finding required viewing in the world of video game writing is a rare event. Over the past five years the cornerstone of my gaming bookmarks has been Penny Arcade. I realize that this is a lot like saying people swear by ESPN for sports news, so that statement has far less impact that I would want. I have often found that my style of humor is right in line with their strips, and that is what drew me to make them required reading.
With the many web comics and regular columns devoted to gaming you are probably wondering why I haven’t mentioned any others. There are many interesting and unique reads that people absolutely love. XKCD and Ctrl-Alt-Delete immediately come to mind as solid reads, but for whatever reason they don’t have the pull on me that they probably should.
The only sites I ever bookmark are sites that I see that offer something unique and either informative or entertaining. Based on that criteria there should probably me more sites inside my gaming radar. Still, this article is not about me and my overwhelmingly bad reading practices. This is about something that’s been bothering me about my #2 reading destination.
It wasn’t all that long ago that this second destination was added. Within the past 3 months Zero Punctuation (think about the pun embedded in this week’s title - it’s subtle… and, now that I think about it, not all that funny) has become a Wednesday mainstay. Yahtzee has become the latest gaming culture phenomenon and with good cause. Again, that statement doesn’t have a whole lot of impact. That’s okay - that wasn’t the intent.
If you’ve been reading the Quagmire for with any regularity you have seen my relative apprehension of Nintendo’s success. I never thought about it when I was young, but now that I’ve managed to entire my cranky old man stage early in my gaming critic life (which appears to have happened prematurely) I have a hard time not thinking about the number of times Nintendo added another title to an existing franchise. This is my current favorite double-standard to harp on with respect to gaming, and when this was brought up in ZP the first time I couldn’t have been more delighted.
Please understand that schadenfreude is not a common problem for me. I don’t take delight in flame wars, but sometimes I feel like I need to step up and say something. Super Smash Brothers is going to be the target, so if you have trouble handling any comments that do not involve slobbering all over the franchise you should be prepared for some artillery fire.
Brawl is the first game in the franchise I have owned but not the first one I have played. This game has never had that much appeal to me, but playing this game with three friends has been a good amount of fun. After extended service time with the game I had many negative things to say about it. My biggest problem with this game, and most 1st party titles for the Wii, is that the games are not deep. Okay, the perceived depth of a game is highly subjective, but as a fighter the gameplay in Brawl does not feel any different than its predecessors. I certainly don’t buy the argument that it is a masher, but I don’t see it as the complex fighter so many fans try to make it out to be (if you want a complex fighter I strongly urge you to play a Tekken game).
Not long after I start jotting down all the complaints I have about SSBB, ZP came out and said everything that was in my notes. This made me happy, not because laziness was once again paying off, but because someone that I would consider paying attention to about games can’t stand mediocre gameplay, highlighted characters being complex unlockables, and off-chance random character movement. This still was not my favorite part of the review.
Two weeks later the SSBB review prompted a response to e-mail feedback which took great strides towards proving that people who hated the comments had no idea how to properly respond to the comments made. This response also highlighted, inadvertently perhaps, that the phrase “I am not a fanboi” is a tired cliché that now almost always serves as proof that the writer is, on top of everything else, a hypocrite.
I realize it took a heck of a long time to get there, but it is time for another Public Service Announcement from the Quagmire - please stop using that phrase to begin your arguments. Every single time this phrase is used to make a point, it proves the author is too scared to let their argument stand on its own merit. It is not as if I expect to see witty discussion every time I read through a message board or walk into EB. In fact, more often than not I expect a bunch of idiots making incoherent statements. Certain phrases become overused way too often, and “I am not a fanboi” is now on the list along with “Nintendo just makes fun games”, “I prefer gameplay over graphics”, or “I’m tired of boring old sequels.”
Please understand that fans of any console who feel the need to attempt to validate themselves by shooting down other consoles are all guilty of use of at least one of these comments. Somehow there is this great divide in the community with respect to each console, and I feel like people are searching for catch phrases to make their points. I won’t shoot down anyone for enjoying a Smash Brothers, Mario Kart, Halo, or any other gaming franchise just because I don’t happen to enjoy it. I will, however, rip you apart if you are unable to handle people pointing out flaws they see without babbling on incoherently. In other words, I’m only here to help.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go prepare for another SSBB party.
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March 28, 2008
The Gamer’s Quagmire #65: Getting Fallout Boy a 9 to 5
Everything you wanted to know about gaming, and less
by Jamison DeLorenzo
Understanding the role of a game critic has become a rather difficult task. Game critics have many different facets to their job - advertising for games, informing the public, washing hands with publishers, entertaining viewers, and so forth. Knowing how to handle all of these so-called responsibilities can be difficult. Sometimes you get fired just for speaking your mind.
During my early years of writing about games I took it upon myself to write reviews whenever I could about any game in my illustrious library. There is always an uphill battle due to having to front the costs for every game and getting new people to pay attention. Coming up with a system that you are comfortable with and having it mean something to people is always the biggest challenge. There is almost nothing to gain by copying systems that are already in place because regurgitating information is never original or interesting. In fact, regurgitation is often quite disgusting.
It took me a couple of years to realize that writing reviews was largely for my own edification. I did get occasional e-mails from people asking questions about games I had not reviewed yet, which was refreshing, but it was never a fulfilling hobby. Gaming was the primary hobby, so the futile reviewing was put to bed and the endless gaming continued.
Several years later my semi-weekly rants starting to become a norm. I had built up a lot of anger over many years of playing horrible games, listening to idiotic reviews, and seeing idiotic mistakes made with console technology. Eventually these rants started to become relatively coherent. This was a big development considering the number of e-mails I got when writing about things I didn’t really understand. Still, they always served as a highly customized aphrodisiac to calm my nerves.
Today, I find myself wondering what the real role of a game reviewer was in today’s gaming culture. This sounds like an asinine question, but there is a philosophical question at hand. We have so many different reviewing publications and sites that hand out numbers and awards the accolades have almost completely lost all meaning (this is more commonly known as the Jiminy Jillickers Effect). For example, you must find it disturbing how many different video games can become a Game of the Year.
In a sense that sounds like I’m suggesting that only one group should be able to give a game this, or any other title. The Ivory Tower approach is hardly the situation I think we should be in either, but the number of reviewers should be trimmed down. Reading differing opinions on games is always a good thing, provided that there is anecdotal evidence backing up the claims that are made.
A lot of what you read now about games is very comical. I don’t even mean funny comical - I often mean comical with respect to degree of incompetence or integrity. Once we started having visual proof that reviewers were being paid money to say positive things about games the game reviewer in the public eye shifted from honest reviewer to company spokesperson. You cannot take these people seriously. They are paid to write positive things or too scared to write negative things because they won’t get advanced copies of future games (which is the crux of my argument that most video game reviewers are inconsequential).
More to the point, sometimes money was never needed to get reviewers to write positive things about games. Lawsuits, or even the lingering stench thereof, kept certain reviewers from saying what they really wanted to say about a game.
This was part of larger problem that the Jeff Gerstmann firing raised. He wrote a game with a score that was deemed to be too low by his employer, so he was fired. Naturally, this was not the reason GameSpot gave, but you cannot expect a company to ever seriously admit fault no matter how transparent the lie is.
Think about what sources you implicitly trust for honest game reviews. How many different sources are there? If it’s a publication, how many of the reviewers that work there do you trust? What is the lowest score for any game you have seen from them? Which games have received the highest scores? Are they owned by a parent company that also produces games or consoles? Do they provide concrete reasons for why they like or dislike certain games? If you have not thought about these questions before it is time you start doing so.
To me, the mark of consistent reasoning behind reviews is not the most important ideal anymore. I need to see a publication have the testicular fortitude to give bad games bad scores. Find a game that is absolutely terrible on almost every level (e.g. Apex, Driver 3) - did they get a score below 30% (or even 50%)? I need to know that a site is willing to completely bury a game when it is deserved.
If you want to know the worst about games you need to find people that work on the entertainment of how games are described and ignore the professional reviewer. My current hypothesis is that web comics are the most informative game reviews we have going. The weekly Zero Punctuation web comic, one of the funniest and most entertaining running pieces in the known universe, is popular because he is, along with other reasons, willing to completely skewer a game when necessary. The same thing holds true for Penny Arcade.
Look, there is absolutely nothing wrong with having a subscription or two to gaming magazines or monitoring several gaming websites to get information. Getting previews and detailed descriptions on games far into the future are very invaluable. All I am saying is that placing your faith in one source for video game reviews, or any other form of information for that matter, is always a bad idea… except for me.
You can always trust me.
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