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New Games Journalism
Kotaku has a piece up today mentioning a style of video game editorializing called The New Games Journalism. This piece links to several others. State Wiki has a piece from early this year on what New Games Journalism is, and an examination of its goals. An example of the style is available on the Eve Online site in the PC Gamer article All About Eve. (large pdf) A seminal work referenced when discussing the style is Bow, Nigger, a sharply written and gripping piece about a duel in Jedi Outcast. From the editorial: "For one thing, my screen name has nothing to do with my ethnicity and for another, it's only a game and the fascist doing the typing is probably hundreds of miles away and far beyond anything you could call an actual influence on my life. But still... It's not very nice is it?"
The article isn't about the word "nigger."
I'll post something useful instead of just leaving it at that, so maybe it will be worth your time to read the article:
The author starts by describing a decline in gaming magazines and their sales and speculates on two options for improving profitability. The bean counters (the author thinks) will want to increase profits by cutting costs (labor costs) on the assumption that the actual writing in the magazine is irelevant. The editors should take a different approach, which is to make the magazine better by writing about games in a different way. He uses "Bow, Nigger" as an example of a different and better way of writing about games.
Along the way, the author understands that it's very very simple to write a buying guide and simpler still for a fanboy to do it. It's my opinion that game publishers (the bean counters) wouldn't mind publishing something in which all games are recommended.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
yes, you are. grow up and read the piece.
It happens. More so in the mid-90s when everyone was going apeshit over "political correctness."
Hadda post anonymously because of some retarded limit on /.
Insert Credit is one game site I hit up consistently. They frequently look at Japanese releases and what's going to be coming here stateside. Katamari Damacy is one of those bizarre, fiendishly successful titles which showed up on IC's radar first in the Western gaming-news scene.
The other site that really interests me is Tetsuya Mizuguchi's personal blog. It is like a glimpse into the life and mind of a game designer -- not just any designer mind you but the genius behind Rez. So hearing what he has to say on games and the Japanese techno-culture is interesting if only for the context it lends.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
That machine was a slouch in the CPU area. Barely faster than an Xbox CPU, but with all that 'wonderful' Windows overhead. Halo1 may not have a lot of geometry, but it features tons of shader effects, large environments, advanced AI, and bump maps on everything. (Not a lot of PC games have done some of this stuff prior to Halo, so drivers and everything simply weren't tuned for the game's requirements, which just exasperated performance issues.) Gearbox should have certainly done a better job on the port, but your machine had a pretty big weakness. :D
And a problem with your criteria is this - most games sold today exceed your requirements (ex: see most console games). Where do we go from there? Meeting a technical level is great and important, but ideally most games are going to achieve that. We need to be able to go further...
Disregarding that, I do agree a similar review check should be made on all software (especially for framerate, being relatively bug-free, and controls). But I think we should treat it as a basic requirement - it shouldn't factor into the game's 'important' score like it does now ("One star off for a bad framerate!"). It should just be a separate score, a simple yes or no. Then the game's content should be reviewed separately.
Right now if a game has a good story, or fun multiplayer, or some other really positive factor it can somehow outweigh basic unacceptable faults like a crappy framerate. That isn't right - devs need to be held to a certain level of expected technical quality. We don't really see films released that are unintentionally lit incorrectly, right? It needs to be that if a game can't work correctly, it completely fails some kind of very important criteria. No amount of quality in the rest of it should let it avoid that mark of shame.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon