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Cheap crappy imitations of game ideas done years ago are somehow the savior of a just order of the game industry where quality would flow in proportion to dollar spent.

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/on_value_for_money/

"But even if one tried to disentangle the subject of a game's price from the main body of a review, perhaps placing it under a separate "value for money" heading, that effort would still end in failure. For how could a modern action game ever compete in the "value for money" stakes with something like a chess game -- or Sid Meier's Civilization? And what would be the point of us pitting them against each other anyway? Is an hour-long game of basketball more worthwhile than a one-minute long skydive, simply because it lasts longer? Would you like some apples with your oranges, sir? Have you ever had an orgasm? But even if we restrict ourselves to comparing "values for money" in the context of individual genres, we'll still end up praising inferior games and trashing superior ones; we'd still end up talking nonsense, and compelling designers to pad their games with shit in order to make them seem like "better deals" to the poor and the feebleminded. I never tire of bringing up the example of Tomonobu Itagaki, who, in an interview regarding Ninja Gaiden long before its release, stated that if it was up to him he'd have made the game two hours long instead of twenty. Can you even begin to imagine the possibilities of such a design choice? (meaning a two-hour game made with the budget of a twenty-hour one). I certainly can, and no doubt Itagaki, yet half a decade later and still no one has dared explore them!" ...

"It is at that point that the issue of "value for money" disappears to be replaced by that of "value for time", even for the feebleminded (for the intelligent person it had always been thus), for when all games cost nothing the only question left to ask is whether any of them are worth anything. This is the timeless, the eternal question -- it is the only question worth answering"

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/for_artfags_only/

Smartest man on the planet says:

"But as for the subject of "art and videogames", this will be the only controversial subject I am going to deal with for which no specialized knowledge is necessary. It is such a simple, trivial issue that any mildly intelligent person off the street should be able to understand it, even if he has never touched a videogame in his life. It's basically an issue of semantics. The question "Can games be art?" is nonsensical, and therefore any answer one might come up with for it will also be nonsensical. Put another way: the question is not a question and the answer is not an answer. It's kind of like asking if the "sky" can be "sad". When you ask such a "question" you are using language in an improper way, and the only solution to the "problem" posed by the "question" is for you to simply STOP ASKING IT."

If you care about quality you should care about arcades. Arcades force ruthless competition between games. Only the best earn enough to be worth their floor space. Developers are forced to innovate, and good ideas spread to the rest of the industry.

This essay explains the greatness of arcades:
http://insomnia.ac/commentary/arcade_culture/

Better yet gaming news sites/review sites are mostly garbage outside of convenience of finding aggregated info, trailers and user reviews/forums.

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/the_videogame_news_racket/

Most of the HD resolutions from the consoles are fake anyways, as this article points out. http://insomnia.ac/hardware/the_fake-hd_era/

JRPGs are completely linear. You make no choices and everything is pre-determined. There are no moments when you think "what would my character do?" Your character is exactly as the developers intended.

And no, I don't care if a small number of JRPGs allow for some degree of choice, or bear some other similarities to CRPGs. That means nothing. Exceptions don't invalidate rules.

Rare in JRPGs, but this is a point where I think the JRPG philosophy leads to better storytelling because its easier to write more moving stories when a character isn't an unknown mass of stats.

Strawman. Your character in a game like Baldur's Gate is not an "unknown mass of stats."

Insomnia: On Role-playing Games (although I think the guy is an assclown and mentally unstable, he still manages to have some good articles).

Insomnia.ac has this topic covered pretty well actually.

GTFO artfags.