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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."
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.
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.
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