Famitsu For Beginners

Via Kotaku, a post on the forums at the selectbutton site that may interest you. Famitsu is the gaming bible for a lot of people, but not all of us have the language skills required to follow it. Many more are confused by what's seen as 'buying review scores', a practice that's more about the realities of the magazine's role than about corruption. From the article: "What Famitsu is -- and you wouldn't know this unless you've held a heavy issue in your hand on a tired Friday morning -- is straightforward (if not entirely honest) PR in a pretty, meaty, high-quality bundle. It's an advertisement feast. If the western concepts of 'journalistic integrity' are distorted and twisted within its pages, they're done so very lovingly. Because, you see, that degree of over-thinking really doesn't exist here. You can cry 'viral!!!!!!!!!!!!' and 'TEH PAID!!!!!!!!!!' all you want at Famitsu's features and articles. However, you can't change that it's a hell of a thing to look at on the train on Friday morning, or at lunch on Friday afternoon; it provides stimulating topics of conversation (for geekos) over Friday dinner." So, as Kotaku's Luke Plunkett says '[This is] why we all ignored the scores they gave Sonic, but paid attention when games like Blue Dragon and Lost Planet won them over.'

Comments

Which is better?

[HappySqurriel]

Which is better, a company which openly accepts money in exchange for better reviews/hype or a company which (behind closed doors) exchanges better reviews for money; because that is (pretty much) what print game magazines all are.

With a few exceptions, you will notice that many magazines have a tendency to give higher reviews to games that have "invested" in several issues worth of full page advertizements.

Re:Which is better?

[WormholeFiend]

This is not limited to gaming magazines.

IMO they should drop all pretense and instead of reviews, have in-depth descriptions of games.

Hardly anyone believes reviews anymore anyway, and rely on fellow gamers' opinions on forums

Enlighten Me...

[Omestes]

How did this end up on the front page? All I got from this is that "Japan has a big gaming magazine, that is biased, but Kotaku and Zonk like it. You should read it, but you probably don't speak Japanese". I think this is the worst front page story I have seen on /. in my umpteen years of sifting through drivel.

So what is the news? Japan has paid for review magazine like the US (and rest of the world), but people expect this and don't complain?

Wow.