Slashdot Mirror
Magazines Faking Game Reviews?
lunchlady doris writes: "With videogames becoming a huge business and magazines having large lead times, something has got to give if they want to compete with web sites. Planet GameCube has a story where it seems that some magazines have decided that eschewing actual journalism is the way to go, with both Extreme Gamer and Request Magazine having reviews for Nintendo's Eternal Darkness, a game that is currently incomplete and is only expected to arrive in stores at the end of June."
Why not? Publishers have been faking good games for years now...
How many people will actually care though? For that matter, companies included? Im sure that the game manufacturers dont care much either way as long as the reviews are good.
I know someone who used to work for a film review magazine in London who said that the last year she worked there they hardly went to see any films at all. They were so understaffed that they didn't have time to see the films and wrote reviews of them without seeing them.
She got fed up and left. I think you will find this practise is not as unusual as one would hope.
Akvo.org - the open source for water and sanitation
Some years ago we had some similar situation when a journalist, Francis Rozange, got some acrimonious game reviews stolen, then corrected to please the announcers who would not spend a single cent for advertising in a magazine that would just let such disadvantageous reviews... ...
Actually, the French law allow a typical magazine to be classified as information-press if its percentage of ads remains lower than 66%.
Where that's becoming quite outrageous is that most "honourable" magazine maximize this percentage to 65% so that they get the bucks along with the status.
Now, the problem with the press is that the newspapers mostly belong to some big media lobbies
So, I wonder why one should be surprised of such headline...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
In further news ....
It is believed a politician has lied
The bank doesn't really care about you
There is some rude stuff on the internet
Cigarettes are not good for you
Don't chew glass
Most games mags get "special" versions of the game at least a month before the game goes gold, along with a list of things that will be fixed before it hits the shops (frame rate improvements, bugs fixed, etc.).
The only time mags get final versions are if:
(a) The game is finished long before its release (i.e. they are delaying the game for the Xmas rush).
(b) The mag in question can't be trusted to ignore the faults in their review copy (mainstream "lifestyle" mags for example)
If you look carefully at the screenshots they use you will occasionally see how they are subtly different to the finished product.
It's called Hype. Nothing to see here.
My particular addiction is NASCAR simulations. I used to love reading reviews raving about certain tracks and features being in the game, when in reality they weren't. When they touted great coding features that in reality were the opposite and serious gameplay bugs, that really cracked me up. Any player of those games would immediately have know the reviewer hadn't even bothered installing to game. As of now, I couldn't care less about magazine reviews. The critical (and sometimes overtly negative) observations made by posted in those game's forums help me out better in making my purchases. Fake journalism? Nothing new, kinda reminds me of the fake citations I had to make up for a college paper (although in this case I truly made my own observations and analysis throughout the paper, but yet the instuctor insisted on me citing people, so I "did").
It's obvious that Eternal Darkness skated much better than Half Life2 and that tripple Lutz was obviously a mess. I blame the judges they made their mind up way before the competition. Blame the French.
What's the scandal?
Well, it's non ethical, it is weird.
It is a non respect for our intelligence.
There's no legitimity of giving us irrelevent information like that.
There's AFP, Association France Presse, there is.
Near each and every of their technology news are 'fake', they looks and sounds made up by some public relations contractors.
Video Games Magasines are doing it too. Well, I suppose it is non correct.
In fact, the question is : Are the videogame magasines entertainment peoducts or information medias?
To be honest, all Game Reviews are suspect anyway, as Games magazines get review copies from the developers. If the Magazine writes bad things about a game the developer has been pinning big bucks on, the developer gets pissed off and stops supplying review copies (as well as other perks like invites to seminars, launches and other Things To Write About) to that Mag.
Essentially, the safe option is to spout whatever Press Release blurb the developers give you right back, translated through a Journalist with maybe 2 hours experience of that game. Just enough to put a personal spin on the Party Line.
If you're an online review site not out to recover printing costs, it's not quite so crucial to your bottom line to pander to the games developers, but for a print mag whose very existence depends on them, the guy who gets the first exclusive sneak peek because the developer likes his mag, shifts more copies of his publication.
So, if the developer says "Hey, want an exclusive sneak peek in return for saying what we want you to say about something you can't really test properly anyway?" most Editors are going to jump up and down singing "Free Content! Gimme Gimme Gimme".
And then theres the guy who writes a review because he's a writer, based on what his mate said about the game, but he's a different story.
Chris.
I forgot to add this in as an example of other types of fakery. NASCAR Racing 2002 Season came out this Wednesday. But if you checked EB's top selling charts last week, you would have seen this game listed at #4 among the top sellers. Huh?
There are numerous examples of bias within the games reviewing industry. It is common knowledge that some magazine publishers have a higher standing with certain games publishers *cough* M$ *cough* - it's the way the system works.
By giving favourable reviews, the magazines get more inside scoops, get the review bundles earlier and make more on circulation numbers.
I guess many of you are questioning why the magazines aren't just favourable to all publishers, but the answer would be that they need to maintain a modicum of journalistic integrity to 'sell' reviews in the first place.
It's all part of the machine!
To be honest, I just take this kind of thing as read. Here in the UK it seems to be par for the course that certain unscrupulous magazines will review unfinished code (favourably in most cases) and in some instances, you get the impression that the reviewer hasn't even seen the game. The cynic within suspects that deals for advertising may have been done...
One incident that sticks in my mind is the CUAmiga review of Elite: Frontier, which scored very highly, yet there was no mention whatsoever of the showstopping bugs that ruined the game. Having said that, CUAmiga was usually one of the more trustworthy magazines.
http://www.davetansley.com - you proba
Dont be so hard on these magazines, guys.
Maybe the editor's keyboard got messed up, and the key "p" stopped functioning.
This is old news, ive seen it happen a lot, some magazines make up a fake game and review it. Its a joke!
could this be a by product of the fact that a lot of games have the same gameplay whether you are 5 mins or 5 hours into playing it?
...
if you are playing one of those boring, linear, 'shoot 5 million identical creatures from their pre-determined postions' with their scripted, unchanging responses, vacant AI, and no more than one way of doing anything, max payne style games, which this game seems to be, then who cares if the review is early?
if the game is a dead duck before its even released, just spare a 1/4 page review of the demo, give it 60%, and forget about it. save the time, effort and review space for developers that take the time to make a decent game
It seems difficult to get true unbiased reviews of games these days. After all, it's in the interest of the magazine publisher to keep a good relationship with the game developer, because a) they want to sell advertising space to these people and b) they want to be invited back to see the next games. I've been in games development for several years now and I've seen reviews vary from 20% to 90%, depending on whether the journalist was taken to lunch or not. Also, in the rush to be first to cover a new game, they can create a preview with the skimpiest of factual information on the game design. That's always fun when the end result has varied considerably from the initial design.
The fault is probably equally shared between games developers and the magazines that (p)review their games. I just try to remember to these facts while reading reviews, and bear in mind that those lovely screenshots have probably been carefully selected and touched up by artists on the project. Who knows, you might really enjoy a game marked as mediocre by the reviewer because it's something that he or she personally doesn't like all that much. Best to wait and read the comments from people who have bought and played the game, on the forums and newsgroups out there.
"Oh god. Oh god. Daikatana is great. The game is incredible. Please keep it coming. Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, keep on fragging. Boring medival Japanese plotline, oh god. More, more, more!!!
Good Salad."
See, it's quite easy to fake a good game review.
Jeez! I can flip to CNN for that!
The only difference between these guys and every second person on the web is that they're getting paid to do it.
Except, weirdly enough, in this case, I can't actually blame them.
--Game titles offer few surprises these days. Plus, the description and declared subject matter offered by the publishers to the reviewers sounds both sick and lame.
The only thing these reviewers did wrong is to not say up front that they were only looking at demos and press kit material. The fact of the matter is that they've told me all I want to know:
"Newsflash: Another cookie cutter over-violent FPS released by some company run either by (a)Sick juvenile twit programmers, or (b)Unimaginative corporate executives trying to make a buck by designing what their market analysts tell them is 'hip with the kids'."
Yep. Now that's reporting!
-Fantastic Lad
PC Gamer in Europe, especially the British version. I remember when they gave Game of The Month to some game a couple of years ago (must have been a FPS, it's the *only* thing they like - probably Messiah) which was then delayed months because of severe bugs. They have also referred in reviews to features which have been dropped in the final version of the game.
The game publishers allow it becuase it helps build hype around their games before they are published. The game magazines do it because the one to publish the review first of the currently #1 hyped game sells lots of extra issues. The gamers do it because appearently the majority are idiots who don't notice or don't care that they are reading a review of an alpha version mixed with rehashed press releases and official screenshots!
One of the few magazines which have tried to change the trend is Computer Games, they have a policy (at least they used to) of reviewing only released games, as they are out of the box without patches.
/Lars Westergren
I ran into a problem with folks not reviewing games when the GBA (Game Boy Advance for the un-anointed) first came out. My brother and I were trying to decide which games we should both get vs. which we should just share. Bomberman Tournament was the title we'd anticipated most, so if there was any possibility of increasing the gameplay value by buying two, we were gonna do it.
And, after a quick perusal of two of the largest gaming sites around - Gamespot.com and IGN.com - we decided two cartridges were the way to go. After all, in Gamespot's review, Frank Provo writes:
Sounds good, especially when paired with David Zdyrko's comments in IGN's review:
So, we went and bought two copies, whipped those babies out, and set up a game. And, lo and behold - no multi-cartridge support. Yes, indeed, the single gamepak mode had lots of slow load times. But having more than one doesn't do you any good unless you lose a game in the couch cushions.
There was some moaning about this issue on the Gamespot forums, and as it turns out, the multi-cartridge support had not been brought over to the US version. Some of the reviewers had been given bad data by the company.
To which I first though, "OK, no big whoop. Shit happens." But the more I considered it, the more it bugged me. These two reviewers made claims based on information they got from the company that made the game - NOT their own experiences. They didn't test these features; they just threw them into the review.
I understand the most probable reasons: lack of time, only one cartridge to test with. But all I'm asking is for a simply "We didn't have two copies, so we can say for ourselves, but apparently..." Yes, it sounds a little wussy, but it makes the difference between journalism and an ad. At the very least, they could have corrected the error when they were notified; I'm aware of several people who have contacted both sites, including myself, and one Gamespot official even bothered to reply about it in the forums, but both still stand unchanged.
OK, this is a minor thing, I know. But it did cost me about 30 bucks, and it makes me wonder: how much else in these "reviews" is straight out of a press release?
awww i thought it was funny
I have a friend who while working for a Games magazine was assigned to review an upcoming game. The game was planned to be released no sooner than two months. :). :)
So she got a copy of the "close circuit game preview" CD and thought to give it a fair ride.
It took 3 days to install the game - it was so poorly written it only worked on a single test machine and it was UGLY and slow like hell.
So acting in consequence, my friend wrote the review and give it a 3 out of 10
Suprise, surprise ! The editor was pissed and started to yell something along the lines of "yo' tryin' to ruin us or what ?!".
It turned out it was (guess still is) common practice to write good reviews in order to get early previews. You see, the magazine sells because it features early reviews, hence it has to get early game releases and has to write GOOD reviews in order for early stuff to keep coming and readers keep buying.
OTOH, the game companies obviously need to have good publicity so they use (among other stuff like PR and paid trips to nice resorts in order for editors to get a "preview" of the new stuff) this mechanism of early reviews.
Needless to say the game ended up as a complete failure, but all things considered who remembers the article that gave the game 8.8 out of 10 ?
Who said politics is the only whore ?
__________
Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace!
'Exclusive' reviews of incomplete (or in some cases entirely non-existent) games have been around almost as long as computer games magazines themselves. I remember back in the glory days of the classic UK games mags of the 80s and early 90s - the likes of ZZap, Crash, Your Sinclair, Commodore Format, Amiga Format etc - the surprise was when a review of a real, *finished* game was published (it was not unusual to see rave, 95% reviews of games which were never even written :-)
UK and Australian readers will probably know what I am talking about: I'm sure I'm not the only one who misses the zany yet sophisticated humour, and complete and utter lack of moral fibre, of the great UK games mags. The copious pop-culture references, the disturbing running gags and in-jokes, the barf-inducing layouts.... all seem to be missing from today's sanitised publications.
There was a terrific site set up by the staff of the short-lived (but truly surreal while it lasted) Amiga Power magazine, telling the inside story of the fake reviews, blatant plagiarism etc of the UK games mag scene of the period. Unfortunately it seems to have vanished.... hopefully someone might turn up with a URL.
-- briggers Remove blinkers to email me.
you seem to be quite uninformed about France.
Maybe because you are either something else or a French from France : which means either uninformed or hypnotized...
Nintendo will not release reviewable copies of the game (or any game) until it is completed.
I should use this approach on my thesis...to think of the time I've wasted waiting for data!
My handle breaks slashcode, what does your handle do?
In the UK, the magazine Edge (http://www.edge-online.com) has a column called Red Eye by a veteran video game journalist.
About six months ago the column was about a journalist who boasted of writing a review of a game without even playing it. According to Red Eye, the practise is remarkably common - as magazines and web sites fight to make sure they aren't caught out by scoops from others.
Red Eye also criticises video game journalists from acting like a pack. He cites Driver 2 as an example where the universally positive reviews ignored significant flaws in the game.
Anyway, just my thoughts,
*r
--- My dad's political betting
Its not just games that get reviewed incorrectly, its software too.
Many computer magazines will have glowing reviews of software products that aren't available, aren't complete, or are broken in major ways.
A good current example of this the reviews that many magazines have run recently of Windows XP, these reviews started coming out at the release of the first betas - with little mention of the fact that the final release would be different.
...gets early builds of games and hardware before it's out. Geforce 4 and P4 2.2 are perfect examples of this. They reviewed hardware right on time based on early silicone. Meaning they had it in their hands almost 2 full months before it was released to the public.
Most recent "scoop!" was SOF2 described as a "playable late-beta build". Anarchy Online was reviewed during it's beta testing and given a 72%. It went on to win their best massively multiplayer game of the year over dark ages of camelot, rated at 90%.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
In addition to video games you can see it in other entertainment. Also in car magazines or electronics.
You should always make a judgement of the credibility of any information you receive.
Bb
-- where to go for University of Waterloo news
I always read GamesDomain for online PC game reviews. They always seemed much more uppity about things. Although lag was sometimes a bit painful for certain key reviews, it contributed to my impression that the reviewers actually played the games in question. I have to know, though, were they just taking their time, or was the lag some by-product of its (British?) origin? Or did they skate by like other reviewers, using the free time to pursue less noble goals?
Go ahead. Burst my bubble. I stopped reading the site compulsively after the last round of layout changes and site reorganization (more ads, less intelligent design). I just want to know the truth.
I can handle it. Honest.
Could be worse, I guess. They could post duplicates of the same articles and reviews over and over without even checking for copies....
FreeBSD for the impatient.
I used to spend money on mags like pc gamer and pc zone , but I got pissed off at both the tone and content of there review's and found that on the whole better and more up to date reviews with in depth commentary from gamers and a wider scope of opinions could be found online .I now do not see the point of spending money on pc gaming magazines who constantly have to do a balancing act bettween advertisers and there reader base which often leads to comprimise's in the quality of a review .
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he was talking about the winter olympics, where it is claimed the french judge fixed the result. Not how the french kept fixing the german elections by secretly funding Helmut Kohl.
duke nukem forever got 10 from 10 points.
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..
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2 years ago.
As long as I can remember, I have always hated the journalistic hogwash that gets thrown into places like PC Magazine, Windows Magazine, etc. Half their articles are just buzzwords and their own interpretation of them. I'm sure there are "review lobbyists" of some sort from software publishers that push for softer reviews of their products. As an effect of this, I would guess that more products are rated highly than those graded harshly, even though a large amount of software out there is utter crap (especially closed-source commercial stuff).
Personally, I enjoy reviews from actual gamers, like the horde at shacknews. Seeing multiple opinions of a game helps put it into perspective, taking the subjecticism out. However, these types of reviews usually don't come out until after the game is released, so the first wave of gamers are usually influenced by the larger, lobbied reviewers.
I guess what im trying to say here is that waiting a little while for a game to be released and tested by the masses might be worth popping $50 for something that isn't what you expected it to be *Cough*daikatana*cough.
Yeah I remember pcgamer in particular used to do things like that a lot , review a crap game,(and give it a good review),which would get delayed and come out months later , but better still were the games that got reviewed way after they were released. This , if I remember right used to happen alot when there were two competing games in the same genre.Pc gamer would give one ,(the one who had the bigger budget presumably),a really good review and then wait for a good 2 months and then review the other, both games would be released about the same time, this used to really piss me off.
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You'd have to be pretty bad with a calendar (and know nothing about games development) to believe that a review written at least six weeks before a game goes gold could be of anything even remotely resembling the finished version. I know for a fact that "Braveheart" was given 95% by one (ahem) reputable UK games rag based on a 10fps demo that crashed every 2 minutes and a promise that the development team was working 20 hour days to get a patch done in time for the boxes hitting the shelves (which was true, but signifies nothing).
Look, picture for a second how this works. A sales weasel turns up from the publisher bearing a package. In the package is a shitty beta version of the game, a promise that it will be fixed (so the magazine won't look like chumps), the advertising material, and a blank cheque. The cheque is ostensibly to pay for the advertising, but the number that goes on it depends on a lot of things. How many eyeballs the magazine is attracting; how understanding the reviewer is going to be about the bugs; how much the reviewer is prepared to just flat out lie; who is buying lunch for who.
The problem is really that the readers put up with it. Specifically, that we reward magazines for running rave review in every issue purely to tempt you to pick them up. Imagine a games mag with the cover page: "All the games reviewed this month suck." Would you buy it? Probably not, but that's exactly the kind of issue you should buy.
You want to know what a game is like? Play a downloadable or cover disk demo, or a friend's copy (local laws allowing, hey ho). Wait until it reaches budget, and see if people are still talking about it. I bought Diablo II + the expansion + Diablo + a strategy guide on Monday, for less than the original cost of Diablo II. Strangely enough, it's still the same game that it was when it first shipped - only without many of the bugs.
Games magazines are an irrelevance now, other than as a means of distributing advertising and cover disks. Online mags are a little better, partly because they don't have print deadlines to hit, but mostly because you can generally read player comments and get a feel for what the title is actually like.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The quite famous (at the time) french writer
JP Manchette got away with this for three years or
more ! He wrote film critics for "Charlie Hebdo"
from a remote mountain commune, based on what
his 12 years old son would say to him on the phone, and critics from daily newspapers. So he was the only french intellectual to (rightly) praise "Indiana Jones I" or "1941" !
The critics were actually so good that they were
recently released as a book.
I think he did it as a mixture of situationnism and despise for the readers, whom he may have considered of the same mental age as his son.
He ended the game when the journal went bankrupt
by announcing a sneak preview of a Georgian stalinist movie of the late 40's, without
subtitles, in a remote suburb of Paris, staged at 11:30 PM (so everyone would miss the last subway). Pitch : love story between a sovkhoze farm worker anda tractor repairer. Indeed, he just
wanted to make fun of snob, left-wing
pseudo-intellectuals. He then revealed that
he had cheated on all of his movie reviews.
Maybe this stuff with videogames is related : journalist just exploting the sheepy attitude
of teenagers (or not grown ups 20-30 yo),
only wanting to impress their friends with
their knowledge of the newest games.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
All the games play with the same rules. Que mas da? si todos los juegos se enfrentan a las mismas reglas duras... en comparacion quedan igualados. Esto puede ser una escusa de varios.. Ademas las criticas son importantes por su subjetividad, el periodismo de critica no es periodismo objetivo sino opinion.. y la gente lo que hace es LEER la firma del critico, para saber si es bueno o malo que lo recomiende o lo desrecomiende, de echo... conozco algunos criticos, que cuando les leo criticar una pelicula, libro o videojuego.. es como si me lo recomendaran, basandose en mi experiencia de otras criticas anteriores donde su mala critica, resulto de un juego genial!.. 1 saludo Tei
-Woof woof woof!
I write for several sites... Ive wrote reviews before on hardware like this, but that is all. For instance I had a review of Firewire vs. USB 2.0 spec at one point, and it wasn't released yet. However all my data was based on the FAQ's and tech data provided for both technologies. I don't know how that compares, but it may help to show this prcatice is very common. After all how many times have youo watched election results, and seen them tell you who won (a guess) before that person ever won the election? Happens a lot. Welcome to Journalism
Am I lying when I tell you that im telling the truth? Or am I telling the truth when I say that Im lying?
Seriously. The people writing the game articles looked like they were -- like me -- also in thier teens. Unlike me, they had access to press releases, and did a fine job of mangling them.
As an adult, I've been interviewed by reporters and had projects I've worked on reviewed. Nothing makes me wince more then having to read something that is simply wrong -- even if it's a "positive" error. I don't lie, so why should I expect someone else, supposedly objective, to hype or lie for me?
That the articles are still being faked isn't a surprise at all. Ethics and objectivity in popular tech journalism (ZD) is rare, and sometimes missing even at the bottom of the totem pole (Mozillaquest).
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
tech TV often has the worst games reporting, so bad I've always wondered if they were even playing them. Now I know!
How many times have you read a movie review that described the film in question as a "magical romp" or "delightfully funny" when it is obvious even from the ads that no one, even people who liked "Glitter", could possibly enjoy such rubbish? Is there really any difference between reviewing something that you haven't seen and reviewing things with a complete disregard for their actual quality?
In the case where a magazine previews a game instead of reviewing the pre-release version, we're still no better off. The preview is always positive because the magazine doesn't wnat to lose the advertising. When was the last time you saw a preview that said "This game sucks! We recommend you don't buy it unless major changes are made!"
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Sounds like the way I used to write my 10th grade English papers.
"All representatives are busy. The estimated hold time is one..hundred..sixty..four..minutes." Detroit Edison, 02/01/02
i don't play a lot of games (actually, besides GTA3 and dynasty warriors 2 - i don't play any), so it's no suprise that I don't see a lot of reviews.
But what bothers me is that I used to. It seems like game magazines USED to have a ratio like 30% review, 25% featured-item, 20% advertising, 10% news and letters, and maybe 5% for editorials, and 5% for "previews" -- and the previews rarely showed much of the game at all. Normally it was a mention of a particular title being licensed, a sequal game, or something like that.
Those previews were also explicitly labled that- they didn't pass off as an actual game review. And most of the actual game reviews were for games no less than a month old. Maybe the magazines only had previews then, but it seems like they at least passed it off better.
Or maybe it's just that video games weren't as big an industry back then. Or maybe games were finished sooner (distribution costs higher== more time to get out the door)
But something did this. It doesn't suprise me that this happens, but it seems suspiciously creeping: like Mcdonalds cheeseburgers shrinking over the past ten years, or television shows getting shorter.
I can understand the economic ramifications, but surely these must be reduced to advertising - and as such, shouldn't there be an explicit truth-in-advertising?
I don't want my kid comming up to me saying "OOH I WANT THIS GAME" -- I'd like to look at the bottom of the page or something and see a little label like they put on packs of cigarettes that says something like "WARNING: THIS GAME MAY NOT EXIST, AND THE PICTURES ARE FABRICATED" so I can tell the difference between a fun-looking and sounding game, and a fun-looking and sounding advertisement.
Anyway, I guess I'm glad this hit slashdot -- I might not have thought about this otherwise...
A review of Duke Nukem: Forever is in order. That's coming out soon enough, right? Well... we can specualte at least and make some money...
~Anztac
But.. But... If they're not, then why are they being sold? You aren't implying that the government would allow something dangerous to be sold to the public are you?
Best Slashdot Co
Imagine Teen Beat magazine giving a bad review to the latest CD by Brittany Spears or some boy band.
It just ain't gonna happen cuz its all a scam.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
The Colecovision (especially ADAM) was the record holder in vaporware, with dozens of titles that never made it to cartridge or "supertape".
But that's not the point here. The point is the official Colecovision magazine, which was a dozen pages of a mailed advertisement.
It had these precious features:
- Bursts everywhere with words saying "You have to have this!" and "You've got to have this!" and "Everyone else has this!"
- A portion talking about Donkey Kong that had a paper sticker over part of the article with a newly-written paragraph. Upon carefully peeling up the sticker, you saw the original paragraph had a reference to how Donkey Kong "retells the King Kong story", oops, sorry, King Kong is copyrighted, and we're having a tough enough time fighting off lawsuits over a giant ape game...
- Reviews of things like the supertape version of the awesome cartridge Smurfs game, or the soon coming T-bone Powers game (whatever it was called) or the Tunnels and Trolls game, or blah blah blah.
The only cosmic thing from that game was the cosmic justice that Coleco went bankrupt over it after it ate up all the profits of even the Cabbage Patch Kids.
"All representatives are busy. The estimated hold time is one..hundred..sixty..four..minutes." Detroit Edison, 02/01/02
The NME is renowned for this kind of thing - reviewing gigs that were cancelled, or talking about the atmosphere when there were only 10 people there.
Its the NMEs annaversary year this year - 50th I think - so theres a book out about it. I heard about it on the radio - but cant find it on amazon.
Mainly its reprints of reviews of gigs that never happenned as far as I can tell
Because ign.com does tons of other stuff other than video games, they don't have this problem.
I own a GC, and am certainly experienced enough not to count on reviews of games before the game has shipped. IGN is good about this stuff. They play the games, and they dont go easy on them in reivews (I've found the X-Box team at IGN is more prone to 'gloss' for bad games), I'd say that they arn't afraid of biting the hand that feeds them.
I think the key is relying on sources that are:
a) knowledgable
b) cover a broader base of interests than those you seek, such that their business doesn't rely soley on the area of interests you are seeking objective info from
is the best way to go.
But people should already be aware of this. I mean, everyone has to dance with the one that brought them to the party, so just make sure you're not listning to those who wouldn't gave gotten to the party otherwise.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Is there any magazine/site that gives honest reviews anymore? The last few times I bothered looking at a review, it was nothing more than a fluff press release. "Best game of the Year/century/millenium," "Ultra super-cool trilinear bifocalized quantum mechanazitoids," or whatever crap they press release spews out. PC Accelerator was ok, at least they would tell you something was crap, but the childishness wore on me after a couple magazines. What's the point of a rating scale when every game gets between 85 and 95?
The furthest negative I've read when I looked was something like, "If you are a die-hard fan, definately get this game, otherwise the big learning curve may be tough in the beginning, but still get this game." So it covers the huge spread of "definately get it" to "get it anyway." Oooo, compelling.
[1] Developers: See: 3D Realms (Duke Nukem Forever), Valve Software (Team Fortress 2)
This has happened alot in other fields. For example a Finnish magazine critic wrote a review about a play that was published even though the play was canceled and never performed (at least not before the review). The odd part was that he basically said that everything about the play sucked.
IVAN Nethack is not the king anymore.
"So, was it good for you?"
"Oh... yeah... fantastic. I'd give it an 8.7."
*Rolls over and quietly sobs into pillow*
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
This is absolutely nothing new and has been going on for as long as there has been gaming magazines. Some would like to claim EGM pioneered the art, but I think they just mastered it to a new all time highs back in early 90's. EGM, GamePro, Next Generation, etc... all of them were guilty of this. Not only do magazines review games as a "final release" review when the games are only beta. Some have been known to review games strictly from video footage alone, feeling they don't have the time to really play all of these games.
I know this from fact. I've been in the industry, having published a magazine myself over disgust at this type of B.S. I can't tell you how many tradeshow parties I attended in the early to mid 90's where after a few drinks, this or that reviewer from different magazines would start to blathering about how they reviewed this or that game. Or when pressed about a flawed opinion, they would say how they reviewed it from video and it's the publishers fault for changing the game, or how they refuse to send back loaner hardware/software for whatever reasons.
I think the most blaring case of this was the time when Capcom nailed most of the magazines and made them look like fools regarding the first Resident Evil game. Capcom had been sending us betas on an almost monthly bases for a few months. Capcom like most publishers were also getting upset at magazines publishing strategy guides a month before a game would come out and decided to take action.
Well, everyone... and I mean everyone decided that they were going to be the first to do a Resident Evil strategy guide based on the last beta that had been sent out... only Capcom completely redid both item and monster placement as well as what doors were locked/unlocked and what keys were needed in the final game. When all of the magazines hit the stands... all of them had guides that bore zero resemblance to the final game. The magazines that put themselves into this mess all bitched about Capcom screwing them over, but the reality was that they did it to themselves.
Another classic case that always stood out in my mind was back when WipeOut was released for the PlayStation. At this time Next Generation still was trying to pretend that they only reviewed final product... unfortunately, I know they had a two-three month lead time like most print magazines. Also, I was working very closely with Psygnosis at the time getting regular beta releases of the game that we used to generate preview video material on our website. Basically the review they ran was based on playing a next to last release of the game. It was clear by the comments made in the review, and it was the first time I had caught them flat out. I actually called out a staffer from their mag on it a tradeshow and was told basically (I'm paraphrasing) "so what, most people aren't observant enough to care, and the game was great anyways!"
Or how about Bubsy the Bobcat? I don't think anyone ever actually played this game, but everyone gave it top marks for the year... even game of the year in some areas. If you actually played the game you would see that it was marginal at best... but the publisher spread lots a cash and hype around... and it paid off in coverage.
The bottom line is if you want reliable opinions on a game, either play the game yourself, or talk to other gamers you know who have both played it, and share your likes in games. Advertising based magazines have to much at stake to give honest reviews for all games, or their staff are such fan-boys that they are incapable of providing fair or acurate coverage for anything.
Wow, a whole two paragraphs and a score given with out a real breakdown of how it was determined. I don't know about you, but that lacks any real content to be called a review IMO.
Considering that most print magazines allocate at least a good half page to fully review a game, this is more of a "leaking out that it exists and trying to make it look like a review, but it isn't" snippet that would be put in the "What's New" section.
I used to work at one of the more dubious publishing houses in Sydney, Next Media based in Redfern.
I was deputy-ed of one of the computer mags there, and worked as a contributor for a number of other technology mags. Almost everybody at Next falsified and made-up reviews. At best, reviews were based on alpha or early-beta code of the game. However, a good proportion of reviews just paraphrased previews featured at one of the IGN sites. For most short reviews of simplistic games, on-line previews give a capable writer enough to work with.
Magazines have, generally, a month lead time. In order to compete with the on-line world, they've got to cut corners. It's not ethical but, sadly, that's the way the wafer crumbles.
One thing that always bothered me about print magazines was that there were no policies on deceptive advertisements. Or more accurately, advertisements hidden as game previews.
You'd think a magazine would try to preserve their journalistic integrity by saying, "no, you can't run that," but instead magazines were (and I assume still are) filled with ads disguised as articles. The only thing that differentiates these from honest-to-goodness previews is the little "Advertisement" label at the bottom.
Always take previews with a grain of salt. Always.
As someone who's worked in PR, I can speak from experience about journalistic ethics. While there are some ethical journalists, the reality is that ethics and objectivity in journalism all media died long ago. You would be horrified to know just how many 'objective news stories' you read/see in the mainstream press are mildy retouched press releases (I've had several news releases printed word-for-word and run as editorials in first-tier newspapers (think Wall Street Journal)). Magazines are usually much easier to manipulate (PR flaks frequently ghost-write the articles).
As a side note, I got out of PR a couple of years ago because it made my skin crawl. I can't imagine its gotten any better.
Thought I seriously doubt it happened in this case, often magazines (at least here in the UK) will review beta copies of games, a practice that can be annoying and plain lame when the game is clearly so incomplete that they're skipping over the incomplete features and assuming they'll be fine in the final game. PC Zone in the UK had a review of Giants months before it was released. They even reviewed Simon The Sorceror 3D almost a year ago now and that game still isn't out due to publisher problems, so the mag shot themselves in the foot on that one.
I'm happy with my subscription to ign.com. Cheaper than a magazine and doesn't accumulate into big piles. Sure, most of it's free but I like paying for the rest to help them stay running. The writing standard isn't quite up to that of the best British magazines (disclaimer - this is not an anti-American journalism rant) but at the end of the day the opinion matters most and I haven't noticed IGN "cheating" yet. I'm sure we'll soon see magazine "reviews" of this press beta that internet sites are rightly only *previewing* of Freedom Force.
in '95 i was working on a demo of a game (robot club). The C code hadn't even been started, and there was already a review in a magazine along with feedback from the customers.
the game finally came out about 2 years later
I've no time to spend reading reviews for nonexistant games... Now back to my Amiga for a little more Blazemonger goodness.
blakespot
We had THE scoop on the Nintendo 64 (then called "Project Reality" or "Ultra 64") -- we were the first site on the entire planet that had mockups and the Editor-In-Chief, Jer Horowitz, created an image that turned out to be EXACTLY what the N64 controller looked like.
Imagine how thrilled I was to see that image ripped off in a pair of print magazines 8 weeks later. Video Games and Computer Entertainment (now defunct) and Electronic Gaming Monthly both lifted the image and claimed it as their own. I was irate, and made some phone calls.
The publisher of EGM, Sendai Media Group (aka Sendai New Media) purchased us 6 weeks later. It was, without a doubt, the worst business decision of my life. =) Not only were we vastly underpaid (they bought Gamespot 3 months later for $10 million -- we were not paid in the millions -- or even in the hundred-thousands) but our entire culture was ripped apart.
We took advertising. Yep, people were paying for online advertising in 1994. And not $0.000003 CPM! We never let that advertising money affect our journalistic integrity. We were rock-solid. Anything that was a review was labeled as a review and we told people what state the game was in when we reviewed it.
We had news and rumors too. Guess what? All rumors had a bright green label saying "RUMOR." Hey, we got some of those wrong too -- but at least you knew that could happen going in.
Sendai was bought by Ziff-Davis. They killed the magazine in 9 months. We had 250,000 paid subscribers but everyone started hating the magazine when we became a "me too" clone. In order to be first in print we were forced to play fast and loose -- and never write anything bad about anyone spending money with us.
HARRY POTTER FIRST LOOK INSIDE!!!!!
How many magazines had that just to get a bigger buy rate? More than a few. How many of them really reviewed that dog of a game? Not too many.
Sigh. The reality of the situation is that money drives the magazine business. Very few magazines -- and none in the US -- actually cover the video game/PC software business as real journalists. They are ALL hoars to the software publishers. All of them.
Online wrestling as a trading card game? WWF With Authority.
The problem with online gaming reviews is that there is to much choice.Bettween the sheer amount of reviews and gamers comments on even one site it can be hard to make a decision as to whether a game is worth hard currency.
,(say for example pc gamer uk ),has is that in most cases it comes with a demo cd and a whole lot of software of varying standards and values.Depending on who you are and what sort of net connnection you have this bundle of software/demos/crap may prove very usefull or as was the case for me a nice source for cd cases for my cdr collection.
,(not me).
,prime among which was the occasional complete bullshit review's , which they gave months and months in advance of a title which would be plagued by delays and bugs and in the end would be shipped with some of the features mentioned in the review missing.Also the other thing pc gamer did which really pissed me off was to purposly late review one game while reviewing another game which was in competion with it early.All of the above reasons were precisely why I stopped buying pc gaming magazines.
,I turned more and more to either word of mouth , or online reviews.Being as I live in Ireland and most games
,finding out if I would like a game or not based on the gamers comments and or main review given on even just one site can be difficult. Any one who does not believe this should go to gamespot and look at the readers reviews of any final fantasy game, alot
.I Wish that there was a game site which had a huge list of games on it , I would click on the ones I liked and would be able to read reviews posted by people who liked similar things to what I like.I would then be able to vote for the review I thought I liked
The advantage a gaming mag
In general Pc gamer gave reviews of a reasonable standard and seemed to have a lot of good first hand info concerning up and coming games releases
,also it had a sort of writing humor/style which some people enjoyed
Why I stopped buying pc gamer was for a number of reasons
After I stopped purchasing pcgamer
come out first else where Online reviews were and
are my main source of info when it comes to deciding if I am going to get a game.As I mentioned at the start
of people have VERY different and strong opinions about what makes a good ff game.
Now in my opinion the answer to this problem of over information online in relation to game reviews is profiling
best and I would also be able to see through the miricale of like minded moderating the reviews
that people who like simlar games to me liked thought were the best.
Now my question is , is there a site out there that fits all of my requirements? If so I would like to know!
_________________________________________________
This is pretty goofy on any number of levels. First you have a Gamecube website bashing a competitor. The site says, "In case it's not perfectly clear, these magazines did not actually review these games. The reviews are based entirely on old information and possibly the demo versions of the game that were available at Cube Clubs. Nintendo will not release reviewable copies of the game (or any game) until it is completed."
No, in fact it's not perfectly clear. This particular story is as questionable as the reviews. They have not presented any actual evidence that the publications didn't have review code from Nintendo or the developer. (The "Nintendo doesn't send out incomplete code" comment could be evidence, as I'm not sure of its policy, but perhaps Nintendo doesn't send incomplete code to Planet GameCube and does to the EGMs and GamePros of the world).
The question I have is whether they contacted Nintendo, the magazines, or the writers and actually asked them any of these questions. If they did, they failed to present that information to readers. As it reads, it's just a guess, complete speculation, and doesn't warrant the attention. Guess it was more important to put it up quickly as opposed to letting someone comment...
But it does raise a bigger topic that comes up every so often about ethics. It's very simple: any publication that compromises its ethics to better compete gets what it deserves. If these magazines ran reviews of incomplete games, or based them on demos, they wouldn't be the first and wouldn't be the last, and lord knows I wish more people would care enough to point this stuff out. And they'll get what they deserve in the end.
As for people pointing out how computer print magazines work, honestly folks, it's 100% different. At the publication I work for (Computer Games Magazine), we do not, and cannot, review "beta" code because of problems with bugs. (Console games typically don't have as many problems in their final code.) I don't care how many promises they make, but publishers have proven over and over again they can't be trusted to fix their PC game products before they shove them out the door. (The console world is much more stringent, with the console makers handling some of the QA.)
I note some of the people mentioning press in the rest of the world, and my own experience with the UK press shows a competely different approach. Their reliance on newsstand sales (nearly 100%, very few subscriptions) makes the competition brutal. This often results in reviewing betas in attempts to out "exclusive" each other. They also have shorter lead times, which makes review covers a much greater possibility.
The US market is completely different, with more subscribers than newsstand sales making that level of competition somewhat less relevant (most magazines feature "previews" of upcoming games as their main sales tool, as opposed to reviews of existing ones).
I'm not sure if enough people realize that magazines don't have to compete one-to-one with websites. If you can't compete on timeliness, which a print magazine generally cannot do, go for depth and accuracy, two things often thrown by the side when pursuing the almighty scoop (this particular story may be evidence). What's of more value to you, as a reader, the review posted a day after a game's release, which is based on a few hours of play, or the one that includes a few weeks of actually playing the game to completion? Do you want first impressions or a true review of the entire game? Both serve a purpose, both have some value, but if you can't do one, go for the other. (Or in this example, doesn't someone want to know what Nintendo, the developer, or the publications think of this particular issue?)
As for publications toning down reviews to get previews, as some toss around in threads like this as if it's a known fact, I've not seen such a thing, though my perspective is limited to my own publication (unlike apparently everyone here, who either has first-hand knowledge of this or has "a friend" who does). But if you think about it, it's goofy. If readers caught wind of this, do you think they'd continue reading? No readers=no publication.
More importantly, reviews are the most mportant part of a game magazine; previews are candy. Reviews make, and break, your reputation. It's incredibly difficult to build a reputation, and incredibly easy to lose it. Risking that reputation so you can secure the one-month exclusive on "Tony Hawk 4" makes no long-term sense.
Also, if a company doesn't want to give out preview information because of a negative review (something no one does, and I've been writing about videogames for over 10 years now), why would we care? Fuck 'em. There are plenty of games to cover, and if they want to lose out on reaching our readers, that's their call (and one they don't make because they're not that stupid and/or petty).
Steve Bauman
Editor in Chief, Computer Games Magazine
He didn't say you shouldn't eat glass, he just advised against chewing it.
Geez.
Virg
I have got one ID, and it will stay that way. I have got my Preferences set so that I am allways logged in when I visit Slashdot.
I am posting at -1 anyway, as my Karma is about -5.
Unlike you sad people, I dont really care. If I post something sensible, and it gets modded up, then great.
If I say something stupid, or flame-worthy and I get modded down, then... I dont really care.
Really, what is the obsession at having so many karma points?
I still say that the person who complained about the parent sig is a boring retard - thats why I posted saying so.
I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'
Look, I worked in the Game industry, and I can say that it is similar to Music industry (altough I haven't worked in). I'm not saying they are lying in reviews, but if you want your game to be a successfull sell, you have to advertise it way before it's on the market. And what's better ad than a review? The game usually looks pretty complete weeks before release, and you can't risk that the game will be (would be) a good sell just at the time when the hardware it was created for is already outdated.
A month or so ago somebody at GamingGroove (you can guess the URL) "reviewed" our upcoming game based on a leaked demo from April 2001. Even if you put aside the fact that the demo was soooo old, the reviewer has managed to express an opinion on the game's multiplayer, single-player campaign and AI opponents while the demo included only a single mission without any AI and without multiplayer support. Of course, no amount of polite, whining or threatening emails made them take the stupid thing down.
I used to work for games magazine and it was quite usual for full review to be done based on different platform (e.g. N64 review based on playing PC version of the game), reviewing from pirated (Warez) CDs, reviewers being told in advance how many stars they should give to the game and reviewers going abroad to visit the developers, playing the unfinished game there for 2-3 hours, then coming back and writing their "full review" based on that. As far as I remember, this didn't seem weird to anyone involved...
--- Frantisek Fuka (Yes, that's my real name and you have no idea how it's pronounced)
Thank god this is a recent trend. I think we can safely assume that the reviews of Duke Nuke'em Forever from a couple of years ago are based on actual, solid play of the shipping product.
Both of these charts gather thier info from "Number of items shipped form the publisher".
What this means is that if B&N order 10 million copies of the new Stephen King book then that book gets the NY Times Best Seller #1 spot for that week even though those books my sit unbought on the shelf for months and even returned to the distributer. The NYT BS list is just that BS. This statistical method is also the reason why the same authors on on it again and again. Large retailer will buy bulk (with gratutious discount) the 1st week or three of release if an author's last book sold well.
Same deal for the music albums. "Debuted at #1" means that the publisher convinced large reatiler to buy in bulk up front.
Money says that that EB video games "chart" is based on the same style statistics.
When it comes to music there is "AudioScan" which tries to figure out how many copies were actually sold. A tough number to figure out quickly because most smaller reatilers do not have the necessary inventory control eqip install.
A 6mo commercial private beta cycle is NOT uncommon. Hell we have a product here that's on 9mo. Seriously Games don't even have the "benefit" of being able to updated with a .1 or .5 release. If your games doesn't work enough that QA can compelete the game 6 months before release, which means 4 months from packaging/shipping, then changes are the game is going to have SEIOUS bugs.
Correction for music. The charts are based off of sales. It's the gold/platinum/diamond awards that are based off copies shipped.
Manchette apparently suffered from Agoraphobia and so didn't leave his house. And his son was named "Doug Headline"
t ic le=10
http://benoitthierry.free.fr/article.php3?id_ar
It's in French, though...
Do all of magazines sell out?
"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."
I may be misinformed about the Billboard chart, but NYT I'm sure of. A question does remain, how are the Billboard charts tallied so quickly and how to they account for my local "one man shop" retailer who has no electronic inventory accounting system.
Oh _please_.
IGN is the biggest bunch of cube fanboys on the planet. _Nintendo_ couldn't write pro-nintendo spin that good..
Every f'king article IGN does on xbox is for "insiders" only..
I've been done with ign for a long time...
The reality of the situation is that most games cost $50, and if you play a game for 10 hours thats $5/hour, and its a sliding scale of how much you're willing to pay for 1 hour of entertainment, and how many hours you think you can get out of a game. For instance, i'd much rather buy a moderately amusing video game than see a movie - i or any number of other players can enjoy a game for _at least_ 10 hours. A movie out here runs like $8 for 90 minutes..
Many of the largeish RPGs take 30-50 hours to beat. Those are probably worthwhile.
The best thing to do is sit down with the game a bit and play it. When thats not possible, you get to wade through the hype and decide what you want to beleive..
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
My friend used to be a journalist for a gaming magazine in Aust. The stories he used to tell made me lose all faith in game reviews from magazines.
Anyone who remebers BattleCruiser will remember it as a game which could have been good except you can't play for longer than 10 mins becasue of the bugs. Rightfully my friend reviewed it and gave it around 60%. The publishers heard about this and threatened to pull their advertising...so now this gets raised to 80% and some of the bad points are glossed over. Publishing companies throw hudge parties for press to coerce them for a good review, I mean really nice parties (models in swimsuits etc.)
For the magazine its pretty hard they need the advertising dollars to stay in business.
C'est la vie
He didn't write this his 10 year old son did he is living in a hippy compound somewhere in a still bucolic, pristine, and wholesome stretch of land, eating granola and inserting subtext forcefully into conversations about bodily functions for the good of hippy humanity.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
> IGN is the biggest bunch of cube fanboys on the planet
There's is a big difference between being a fanboy, and having your opinions bought. Sure they're fanboys, but look at the GC reviews. Non-objective fanboys (and 'advertising' publications) usually keep all the reviews above, say, 70% or something.
The fact that I have to pay them to read the reviews only confirms that they dont rely soley on the income of game promotion to publish, which goes a long way in allowing them to remain objective. How much they love hammers and refuse to use any other tool is outside the scope of the information I'm looking for.
In short, there's nothing wrong with being a fanboy, as long as you arn't so blinded that you think *anything* in your franchise of choice is god's gift to the market.
Would you expect Scientific American not to love science too much? If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I just want to have relationships with entities who are not being paid by a hammer maker, is all.
"Old man yells at systemd"
A GBA multiboot image that's less than 64 KB will take less than fifteen seconds to copy over the cable even in slow transfer mode, and a good developer can fit a lot into 64 KB (other than perhaps sampled audio). Heck, the entire Super Mario Bros. 1 was only 40 KB. The fact that Bomberman's multiboot image is so damn big is a flaw in the program design. Period.
Will I retire or break 10K?
good insight into the biz...
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
uh huh. so FFX was a best seller for months before it came out, and the guys at EB thought noone would question them, right?
If memory serves, MGS 2 was selling pretty well before it was available too, it is just the way of things.
semantics are everything!
In the case of computer magazines, they're trying to get the FIRST REVIEW!!! (a bit like First Post!) which will sell more copies of the magazine.
But sloppy work happens everywhere. David (Hutch) Soul recently successfully sued the one time showbusiness columnist of the "Daily Mirror" (crappy UK tabloid) over a review of a play Soul starred in.
The review said at the Monday performance, only 45 people turned up and the audience laughed derisively at Soul. They didn't do Monday performances...!
"Information wants to be paid"
You want to know what a game is like? Play a downloadable or cover disk demo, or a friend's copy (local laws allowing, hey ho). Wait until it reaches budget
By "reaches budget" I assume that you refer to a reduction in the price of a genuine copy of a game as demand falls off. How are you sure that a particular game will reach budget within the next few years? It won't if it's recalled and destroyed, sending the price upwards of $200 per genuine copy. This happened with a popular game called Tetyais, an independent Tetris clone for NES by Tengen that supported side-by-side simultaneous play. To learn more about the incident, start at Google. (The letter says 'ya' in Russian.) It also happened with several Super NES role-playing games by Squaresoft, but not because of any lawsuits.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm not sure if it is still done this way, but when I was running the campus radio station back in college the Billboard charts (and several other magazines) were based on radio station playlists, not on actual sales. Every week our music reps (Rock, Alternative, Urban, etc) would submit a list of the top 10 songs played in that genre which included how many times during that week that the song was aired.
:o)
This was all part of a complex system were we also reported playlists directly to the record companies to show them that we were playing the music that they were sending us. The more we played the stuff they sent us, the happier they would be and the more likely they were to send us more free music.
Of course, since we were a college station we had a wide range of music that we would play and we were still niave enough to go "screw you" if we didn't want to play something that they were pushing
Gasp! The horror! It's clear to me that we need govenment oversight for video game reviews.
Check the good-reviews-to-advertising ratio in any game pub -- you'll see that the more advertising dollars spent = better reviews on average. The only gaming pub that at least pretended to have any integrity about such things was CGW -- and now that Ziff-Davis is facing bankruptcy and is selling off their publishing assets, the integrity of CGW may be a thing of nostalgia.
...magazines have been publishing "reviews" of games they've never really seen, and development teams have been faking up screenshots for games that aren't quite soup yet. I know I've fabricated up quite a few screenshots for articles for early reviews of our games in the big three mags.
NO CARRIER
Some believe that a game shouldn't be reviewed until the writer completes the game.
The sad fact is that many game reviewers don't have the time to play every game to it's conclusion before drafting their review.
Perhaps now, gamers will be satisfied with journalists that care enough to actually play the game.
-g
somebody had to say it
Rangers Lead the Way!
In the old days the "chart" was essentially just made up.
"are the Billboard charts tallied so quickly and how to they account for my local "one man shop" retailer who has no electronic inventory accounting system"
Currently they use a system which taps into the POS systems at large retailers like Sam Goodie or Wherehouse. Then it goes through some complex formula which includes radio airplay, etc etc, and returns a number which again is essentially made up.
I've heard that if they went by actual retail sales and included every streetcorner recordstore, the charts would almost entirely Rap and R&B. The system is rigged towards suburban middleclass tastes.
This is common practice, especially when a mag is not focused on reviews. Writing food reviews, I was encouraged by a journalism professor (and professional book review editor) to just go there once, have a single meal, and write about the rest of the food as if I had had some. And do you really think the two-line reviews of books and CDs in general-interest mags are based on anything more than the book jacket (and maybe a scan of the first paragraph or two)?
Doubt it.
Magazine reviews are worthless anyway. The quality and quantity of the writing are so poor that I wouldn't pay to buy a magazine.
Somehow I managed to get a free 6 months subscription to CGW and I don't think it's even worth the princely sum of $0.
The writing is so immature and they spend half of the written content trying to crack stupid jokes that I would probably have laughed at when I was about 13.
The reviews are so short, that by the time you've skipped the opening paragraph where they usually try to crack another crappy joke, you've finished the review before they've told you anything about the game. So basically the review is worthless, as I haven't learnt enough (anything) about the game to make a decision about whether to buy it or not.
The best alternative for a while has been to browse the web until you find a games review site that you are comfortable with, that fits your needs. Who needs computer gaming magazines? I don't; they're a waste of time.
I was told by native English speaker that my name should be phonetically written as "Fran-tjee-shek Foo-kah" (the pronounciation of FUKA is the same as in Japanese (where FUKA is rather common name), but I was not, am not and will not be Japanese). Anyhow, as long as you don't pronounce it "Fucka", anything is OK. :)
--- Frantisek Fuka (Yes, that's my real name and you have no idea how it's pronounced)
It's common enough... Do you really think that fashion magazines know that far in advance that the color of the season will be puce? While this practice of reviewing software that does not exist is slightly more odiferous, it's understandable. Magazines need to compete with the online market somehow, otherwise the magazines will go out of business and we'll be left with nothing to read in the bathroom. (The ink on printouts runs too quickly when accidentally wet.)
I don't think the reviews are entirely "pie in the sky". Magazines probably obtain beta copies of the software for review purposes, along with descriptions of feature-sets. This is beneficial for the companies releasing the software because it gets the public hyped up about it before its release and makes them more likely to rush off to the nearest computer store to make the purchase and be the first kid on the block to get the newest toy. The magazines get larget numbers of people reading their articles because they're the "first out" with the news. Who will read a review that's only a rehash of half a dozen others on software that was released a few weeks ago?
Problems only arise when the review becomes inaccurate due to miscommunication, bugs in the beta software, discontinued features that never make it to the public release, etc. That's what follow-ups, corrections, and deeper research are for. Reviews, afterall, are frequently tainted with mistaken impressions, prejudices, and plain old "difference of opinion". If you believe what you read the first time around, then you get what you deserve.
-Sara
I don't think I can trust them not to cancel a mag I like after the last few years; First it was PC Games, then it was PCXL, I'm staying away from Imagine, Who knows if maximum PC will be cancelled next? Or Maximum Linux?(I haven't seen it around lately, so maybe...)
It's been a long time.
Have you ever looked at the way most magazines review games? They don't ever rate something very low, usually no lower than a 70% or so. This is because if they do, the company won't send them more games, and won't advertise in them. Which is why whenever I see a game review in a magazine, I subtract 70 and divide by 30 to find the real precentage.
Got Apathy?
I'd love to see some old reviews praising Daikatana, does anyone have any links to these reviews? (May have use Google, maybe a lot of the writers backpedalled after the big stink it left)
This problem of fictional reviews is the main reason we started Geartest.com. The problem doesn't only exist with video games but with most consumer technology products. Most tech 'reviews' out there are nothing more than regurgitated press releases with 'reviewer' doing nothing more than spending a few hours of playing around with one product or another.
That's in stark contrast to our review philosophy: Real gear. Real world. Real reviews. We don't write reviews about products based on press releases or in a pre-release stage. We use the products for an extended period in real conditions. And we tell the people what we found, with updates as warranted. That means if it's good we'll say so, and if it sucks we'll say that too... but usually the truth is somewhere in between.
We have had difficulty in getting manufacturers to send products to us for review. That is despite having grown to the point where we consistently have 5-figure impression levels, projecting breaking the 100,000 impression level soon. All of that is without us doing any advertising. Pure word-of-mouth. It's no Slashdot but we think it's decent traffic.
We suspect that the biggest problem (from the point of view of manufacturers) is that they simply don't want to risk getting a negative review. We believe it's in a manufacturer's interest to receive unbiased, journalistically sound reviews of its products. Ultimately that can enhance their credibility and add value to a brand in the eyes of the product-buying public.
We have had some people suggest to us that we 'play ball' if we want their cooperation. Frankly, it's not going to happen. We may miss out on getting 'insider' opportunities to cover and review items -- and we may not get to review some items that our users have asked us to -- but the feedback and response we have received from our readership (a good mix of techies and laypeople) tells us that we are on the right track.
The way we see it is this: if you have confidence in your product, then you should have no problem putting it to an unbiased test. It's surprising how many product managers recoil and refuse when you put it to them so plainly.
We're in the process of designing our 3rd-iteration site to enhance user-friendliness and add some more features and functionality. The one thing that will stay constant is that we won't trade our integrity for 'A-list' access to products. If that means we don't get access, we'll just deal with the people and companies who see the value in what we're doing.
Check out Geartest.com and let us know what you think.
what about those who try to impress their friends with knowledge of movie critics :P
Talk about missing the fucking point entirely!
You should change your nickname to Anarcho-fucking-moron. At least then it'd be more accurate.
What are you talking about, you humourless nose-goblin? That's the funniest .sig I've read all day. Besides, it's perfectly acceptable to make fun of people who aren't capable of recognizing they're being made fun of. Or even if they are, as a matter of fact... Hell, if you CAN make fun of someone, you probably SHOULD.
Furthermore, while I think that IGN does a fair job, they hype more games in their previews to appease their audience. Wreckless was hyped as a GTA3 clone repeatedly, and looking on general gaming forums or news sites outside of IGN (meaning not PS2 newsgroups and whatnot where there is a high potential of conflicting interests), many gamers agree that the game is hardly as free and open ended as GTA3. You can't run people over for instance which many people get a thrill from apparently.
-jc
Chewing glass is not as bad as it might sound. Your stomach is pretty tough, designed to withstand a constant acid bath and the odd bone fragment. A little glass will not hurt it.
I worked as a product manager for several games magazines and web sites and am now a producer at a games developer, so I have a pretty good perspective on this issue. The whole "Conflict of Interest" issue is pure rubbish.
1) Developers are not part of the equation. They don't determine what gets shown to whom, when or how. Weare the guys behind the curtain and have no communication with the magazines unless a publisher specifically sets up a meeting or phone call. Forget about us.
2) Magazine editors deal with the Publisher PR folks. All the PR people care about is getting their games mentioned in the media. They don't particularly care whether it's a positive mention or a negative mention because:
a) Any publicity is good publicity
b) It's not their problem if the game sucks. They can't do anything about it anyway. All that matters is the mention.
3) Magazine Sales people deal with the Publisher Marketing people. Marketers do nothing except spend money getting ads in magazines and signage in stores. They also don't care if magazines slam their game because:
a) it's not part of their job
b) they believe they can counter bad press with full page ads
4) The only time Sales People and Editors talk to each other is when a Sales Person has to tell a magazine editor to cut four pages of content because the pages have been sold for ads. In an online site, there isn't even that much contact -- no pages.
5) PR folks and Marketing folks talk to each other about the same as Sales People and editors. They have no reason to talk, as their jobs don't intersect.
In the five years I worked in publishing, I can remember ONE time when Sales and Editorial overlapped, and that's when we published the level codes to Doom64 two months before the game's release. Midway asked (well, threatened) us to pull down the codes and we did.
Grrr!
I used to review games for the Dallas Morning News and when I wrote a general article on Harry Potter, I tried to get the game to review for the same issue. It didn't work out because it wasn't available when the article ran (one week before the movie). In this case, I didn't get an offer to review a demo, but I would've turned it down since it's not giving the public a fair look at the product. We did receive a demo of a new software product and kept contacting the company to say that we couldn't do a review of an incomplete product. They never got the message, so they never got the PR. It's a matter of time (publication) vs. morals as well as the type of write up. Some places just give a summary of what the game is about rather than how good it is. In this case, you can write it up sight unseen.
The geekygirl from Texas
Anybody remember Outpost, Sierra Online's foray into the non-adventure game market a couple of years back? It was the most bug-ridden game since, oh, maybe Daggerfall (which turned out to be a GREAT game, go figure), and probably held that title until last year's Pool of Radiance shipped. Anyway, bug-infested, features listed in the manual but not in the actual game (and vice versa), a clumsy interface, the list goes on and on.
PC Gamer gave it a 93% review in their
September 1994 issue. PC Gamer then proceeded to spend the next half decade apologizing for the rating, even in their review of Outpost 2.
The moral of the story? People can get away with pretty much saying whatever they please, as long as it serves SOMEBODY.
-Frobozz
Brought to you by the friendly folks at FrobozzCo....
I'm too lazy to create an account, so I guess you can call me anonymous coward, but I worked on IG as well, and will say one thing - if you think we had 250,000 paid subscribers, you're high. :)The total circ was somewhere between 20 and 30,000 - overall. That's including subs + newsstand. I dunno who gave you that 250k figure, but it's wayyyy off.
And more importantly - WTF are you talking about when you say we never wrote anything bad about those who spent money on us? Are you kidding me? Did you even work on this magazine? Jer never gave in to that sorta BS with publishers. It sounds like you needed to let off some steam for being basically taken out of the creative picture from day one, and figured nobody in the know would be reading this anyway.
It's a shame they killed the mag of course, but ZD was new to the game biz at the time, and everyone involved - including the IG staff - was new to the publishing business in general. Chalk it up as a learning experience. Some people weathered the storm... others didn't. Nobody cried like a baby about it though.
A friend of mine, was asked by a friend of his (who works for Microsoft) to review some games which Microsoft now owns.
Being a bit of a gamer, he was at first pretty happy with the thought that he might get some pre-release freebies to play with and be able to use his writing skills in a real magazine (Communique).
Well... he did'nt receive the games, instead, he received Microsoft promotional material about these games, for which he was instructed to basically be creative with.
He had to write glowing reviews for games that he did not get to see at the time. Hey, you don't ever expect honesty from Microsoft, do you?
all the EB's ive been into in aus (about 3 or 4) have all had games marked as "comming soon" when they have been released for about a month ;)
Gnome wasnt built in a day.
While this is a blatant plug, try a site that doesn't rely on advertising from publishers: www.gamepower.com.au
May I suggest reading the review for Lotus Challenge - that is honesty!