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L.A. Times on Game Reviewer 'Playola'
madmancarman writes "Celebrity parties, target practice with automatic weapons, and free trips to spend the night in haunted castles are just some 'perks' game reviewers enjoy as described by this article from the L.A. Times. The reviewers say this has no effect on their reviews, but we've all heard politicians say the same thing with respect to their jobs. Maybe Ion Storm should have spent some more money on Daikatana junkets?"
Entertaining the press is probably not necessary, I doubt games like Half-Life, Q3, GTA3, need to bribe the press in order to ensure positive reviews. The smoozing the press strategy is probably helpful for games that can't sell on themselves or had a negative media reaction initially.
Umm,
If you are one of the few who actually PAY for their games, you might want to find out a bit about it, if its got a crap interface/buggy code etc..
If a review holds back on its opinions in regard to major playability issues coz the company has sent the guy to Aspen or whatever then its nothing more than a commercial...
Besides, I always have some friend who ends up beta testing or just buys the game, and that ends up being the best review I ever get.
but does that guy check the reviews before he forks out his hard earned dough or does he go into the shops and buy every $50 game on the wall??
Burma?
I like it when a site does a good indepth review, showing screen shots, telling about how many hours of play, replay value (Very important), multiplayer option, what hardware is supported, what gfx resolutions, audio (ex, eax? eax2? directsound, surround sound?), mod support, special features..
And about 100 things I forgot. Not everyone has 49 bux to drop on the 10 new games that come out each month, some guide helps pick out the good games and dump the crap.
BTW, power to the reviewers.. Let them get all the goods they can, cheap hookers, booze, whatever. I think I'll notice when all the reviews sites say a game suck, and JoeBlow reviewer says its the greatest game since quake10.
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Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong. - Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)
Bah, being a game tester is NOT that easier, compared to say a game reviewer.
...
Being a game tester basicaly entails going through the same damn game a few hundred times until you know every kink of the game inside out, all while having any of your data erased at any possible time (or at very least rendered useless) without warning when the latest build comes in.
It means documenting every last little damn thing that you do every damn time that you go through the game, comparing and contrasting the most minuet of detail, and oh yah, did I mention that you get to do it over and over and over and over and over again?
Even if the game SUCKS?
A _LOT_?
Sure being a Beta Tester for a game like Fallout 1 or 2 or Arcanum would rock, but what about if the company you worked for put you on duty testing out the latest barbie game? You think being a game review would be fun then?
It is not like with closed betas were you get to sign up for a game, heh. Its more like your an employee of a company and you get assigned whatever you get assigned. ^_^
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
If a magazine or website is going to be fair and open about their reviews, it would be nice if there was a bit of disclosure about perks/payoffs that they are getting. I have seen (can't remember the site) situations where EMPLOYEES of game houses have written full reviews and palmed them off on gaming sites as a unbiased review.. only to be caught out by some alert reader.
Maybe too, people are going to hold back on reviews that shitcan bad products for fear of litigation (PetsWhoreHouse etc...). It does seem that a lot of big game sites tend to get more sychophantic as the years go on.. especially to the big software houses.. is that because of either a) Advertising Revenue (Biting the hand that feeds) or b) the junkets get better..
It gets harder to find objective reviews ESPECIALLY in print magazines..
But what can you do???
sigh
Burma?
Do you honestly think namco gave a damn that they said the plot for time crisis 2 was a little thin?
Have you ever actually played the game?
It's like saying the plot for quake 3 was thin, yeah, sure, it was...
So?
Yes, but a *lot* of game designers start out as lowly QA game testers, and work their way up to the point where they can help design projects and eventually do their own. Very few people start as a game designer. It is a destination, not a launching point.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Yep, it's websites as well. I speak from experience.
The ONLY sites you can probably trust are like GamesFAQ's which posts actual user reviews. I've based a lot of my decisions on what I've read there, and it very rarely steers you wrong, unlike magazines...
Which magazine would you buy based on these covers:
Now, which one is more likely to be honest?
You see the problem yet? No? Look in a mirror.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Being a reviewer myself (pimpage: for Strategy-Gaming.com) I'll be the very first to admit that reviews are subjective. The only way a review is of objective value is if you follow a few reviewers or sites and find that their opinions coincide with your own on some past games that you liked or didn't. Once you've established that commonality, then you have a reasonable chance that their opinion is going to be a useful predictor of a new game.
Back on-topic, I'm still waiting for my swag, dammit. I get free games, but that's it.
-Styopa
He got a bunch of stuff from game companies; sounds like he was "in the biz" to me.
Sounds like he traded english papers for games/hardware, and access to E3...
Being a game reviewer is a WAY easier job than being a game tester. If you ever think different, imagine a job consisting of 2 days at least where you have to run through your least favorite part of your favorite game, making sure all the commas are in the right place, and that the word you thought was spelled wrong that flashed by in the upper left corner of the screen for a 1/2 was actually spelled wrong...with no save areas for the next 15 minutes.
Or better yet, take a game where you've beaten the crap out of a game...I mean, totally played it to death, as part of your entertainment life. Then you get hired by a company to do the expansion pack, and the first thing you have to do is look through the previous version of the game for bugs...that the dev team won't fix now.
The biggest problem with being a game tester is that the clueless people above you, you know, the Marketing types responsible for shipping your games out ahead of their completion, think the same thing, that you're just in there playing games. Most companies exclude QA from the perks, respect, and courtesy provided to even the temporary secretary.
QA is essentially a thankless job, a job that every one out there playing a game thinks they can do better than you. Take Fallout 2, for example. Remember how buggy that game was? How it would crash right off, and the back half of the car would travel with you wherever you went? Well on the Message Boards who did everyone blame? The developers? Marketing? No, they blamed the testers, as if every tester cooped up at Interplay for 12+ hours a day didn't notice the back of the car following them along on every screen. And Interplay never said, "Wait, this isour fault in upper management...we pushed the game out too early." They just sat there and let QA take it.
The sad fact is, that a lot of people in QA are seriously unqualified for the position. You get high school dropouts and the like in there. The company I started testing with asked that we all have some sort of college. All you people who run around in Counter-Strike and can't tell which "your" to use, or which "its", you cannot be game testers...grammar and spelling are important parts of game testing, and probably result in over 50% of all bugs written up for any given game that isn't fighting.
Not to mention that no company makes 100% hits. Wanna spend the next 6-9 months of your life telling John Romero that Daikatana sucks while he does nothing to fix it? How about playing some Chocobo Racing or Chocobo Dungeon 2 for 3 months? And who wants a nice big side of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 3D? Remember, a lot of the video game companies don't make just games...they're edutainment companies, too.
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