I can't decide whether or not you're serious, but I'll respond as though you are.
I can authoritatively say that no one at The Gamer's Quarter is a "wannabe-intellectual weenie." We're just a bunch of people who love videogames, and love to write about them. We're not out to be "journalists," as nothing in TGQ is traditional journalism. None of our articles are reviews, and nobody is pretending that they would be useful things to read if you want to make a purchasing decision.
Our writing is for a different purpose--not a "higher" purpose, not a "totally new purpose that's going to fucking rock your world," but a purpose all the same. Rather than writing dry, purely informative and objective articles about games, we try to give things a more personal, introspective spin. Yeah, if you want, you can look at a game, sitting down with it and saying, okay, it looks nice, and it sounds nice, but the control is shit and it's all over in six hours; 7.3/10. But...what is that accomplishing? In analyzing the game that way, have you learned anything deeper about the game, or even about yourself?
The idea is, we try to establish a personal context, and to analyze games more in terms of their themes, their tone. How do they make us feel? Is it important that they make us feel that way? What more can we get from them? You can say that they're "just videogames," but...what the hell does that even mean? Are books "just books?" Is the sky "just the sky?" Is life "just life," something that doesn't need to be examined?
People, you know, some of them care about games, and what they mean. I know I do. And it's not just videogames--you analyze everything you come into contact with, on a sensitive, personal level. When you read a good book, it's not something cut-and-dried, something that was assigned a numerical score by a reviewer for a huge media conglomorate. It's something you felt; something you understood.
The point is: the same thing applies not just to videogames, but to all things in life. The Gamer's Quarter just focuses on the videogame part.
And, you know, it looks like you don't want to think about this sort of thing. It looks, to me, like you're spouting off vitriol about how we're just freaks patterning ourselves on gonzo journalism having secret conventions and plotting to destroy your hobby. Trust me. We're not out to get you. No one, very likely, is out to get you. Relax.
There is no movement to speak of. When you talk about us being "frauds," what the--pardon--flying fuck are you talking about? No one is defrauding anyone. We think videogames deserve sensitive, critical analysis, for reasons I've already laid out. So, you know, we're trying to provide that. Maybe some of our writing is shit, and we need to work on that. Okay, fine. Maybe our magazine didn't catch your fancy. That's fine, too. People want different things, in life. If you think this is all "bullshit," that's cool. Don't read it.
But why the defensiveness? Why the vitriol? Why do you feel you have an obligation to stop this "nonsense?"
Update: Duck and Cover takes cover as they debunk their own story:
I mailed you earlier about Interplay probably being dead, it turns out they're still alive (sorry about that), Titus have been liquidated but it only affects companies based in France, which doesn't include Interplay.
It was mentioned that the guy "thinks" that the load time should be just like that of the Playstation 2. I have a Playstation 2. The thing takes a good twenty to thirty seconds to boot and load a game, which is all right for a home system, but is insanity for a portable. If the thing has 2 hours of battery life on the optimistic side, and actually requires you to wait thirty seconds for games to start (in contrast to the GBA and DS which start games instantly), then I can't see much hope for the PS2. Perhaps it can carve out a niche among casual rich adult gamers, but how many of those are there really?
The problem with video game reviews, as I see it, is that they are subjective, by their very definition. There is no such thing as a definitively "good" game, nor is there any such thing as a definitively "bad" game. The same is true of movies, or books--when you read film reviews, you don't see a bunch of numerical scores ranking the film's "special effects" and "acting" and "sound technology" and the "tilt factor" on a (decimal) scale of one to ten. Instead, you just read some of the reviewer's genuine thoughts, and with those, you are free to determine whether or not you'd enjoy it. Game reviews, I think, need much the same thing. Far too many reviewers are focused on, "oh, this review must be under 1000 words," and "oh, I must split it up into sections for each component of the game," and "oh, I need to rate and rank everything and then use a calculator to get the result." No. Game reviews are subjective and should be treated as such.
I think it is the job of the review-writer to just convey a feeling about the game...to get the reader into his headspace, to explain the game, circumstances surrounding the reviewer's involvement with the game, that sort of thing, no numbers involved. It should be an introspective, organic process. For example, as an experiment with this sort of thing, I wrote this a few days ago--it is, sort of, a review of Doom 3. It was an experimental thing--yeah, I rambled a lot, I talked about some aspects of the game I liked, some I didn't like, and about some things that had zero bearing on the gameplay. In the end, I revealed that I had mixed feelings about the game--I didn't really like it much, but it was all right, I supposed.
Anyway, I took this review to the Doom 3 message board at GameFAQs, a web site which you will know, if you had been there, is absolutely frigging full of rabid fanboys. There are threads there with titles such as "I can't believe Gamespot gave Doom 3 only a 8.511111" and such. Anyway, yeah, I showed it to people there, and they enjoyed it--they said that my thoughts were, in general, interesting, and that they understood why I didn't like the game much. And these are rabid fanboys I'm talking about.
I guess this means that people tend to get more worked up about numbers--rankings, ratings, all that sort of stuff. Reviewers and readers tend to concentrate on that--on the mechanics, on the cut-and-dried aspects of things--rather than on the subjective things; a review shouldn't be "Whether or not a game is good," but rather it should be "How this particular reviewer felt playing the game." I think that's more interesting all around.
There's plenty of other Doom 3-related coverage over at PlanetDoom, including a pointer to a new IGN review, which PlanetDoom considers "a lot more fair and balanced than some of the reviews we've seen so far", with an overall 8.9/10 score.
And yet PlanetDoom is a member of "the GameSpy network." Didn't GameSpy and IGN have a merger? Isn't this basically GameSpy/IGN praising its own review...?
Dude. You're absolutely right. I mean, I liked Xenogears, the "sort-of-prequel;" I thought it was fun and had a pretty in-depth plot. Xenosaga just went completely overboard and was this long, drawn-out, half-assed anime with a game thrown in seemingly as an afterthought. And it would have maybe been all right if the story was interesting, but it wasn't; it was just random, badly-written gibberish that made no damn sense at all. And when you weren't watching boring plot scenes you were walking through these freaking gigantic dungeons fighting the same battles over and over again. That's actually where I put the game down--in that "inside the Gnosis" dungeon that never seemed to end.
I have a Gmail account, but I too have ben using Fastmail for a while, and I am very pleased with it. In a lot of cases it's better than Gmail, since it's, well, faster, and it works fine with really old browsers. Plus, you've got IMAP access...
So, yeah. Fastmail rocks.
Ah. I see what you mean.
I have played Radical Dreamers, though; it's really nothing special, and arguably Chrono Cross was the realization of Radical Dreamers as an actual game--it recycled a lot of RD's music, had a similar intro, and its story was actually nearly the same, although of course it was drastically expanded on.
But, yeah, despite all of that...that would be cool.
Deus Ex is actually pretty close to an RPG FPS...
Actually, I think that games in general are starting to move in an RPGish direction; even run-of-the-mill action games these days are backed up by decent stories. Games have gotten more complex gameplay and control wise and they've been doing the same in terms of story.
I haven't read the article since it now appears Slashdottted, but, if anyone cares, personally I really like Eterm. It's lightweight, fast, and also quite pretty--it has a lot of nifty background images built in and it allows for pseudo-transparency. Very customizable, too. I use it on my desktop Linux machine all the time.
Up until some years ago, though, GameFAQs was part of the IGN network, and back then it was actually a lot cleaner looking--GameSpot seems to have forced tons of advertising onto it.
Just because marketing is done a certain way, does not mean that that is because there is the effect that you conclude. Perhaps it's just because every other company does the *.99 marketing.
Right, but you fail to realize that there must be a reason that companies began using the *.99 marketing. They can't all be doing it because everyone else is doing it, because then where would it have begun? Your argument, if you don't mind my saying so, is somewhat illogical.
Instead of saying things like "How stupid is the average shopper?" and "A very large segment of the population considers $19.99 to be a hell of a lot cheaper than $20.", why don't you just enjoy the fact that you're so intellectually superior to the average shopper and that you know that 19.99 + 0.01 = 20.00?
I don't really see your point. I know that 19.99 + 0.01 = 20.00, and so does the average shopper; that doesn't mean that we, as shoppers, aren't psychologically affected by pricing. In fact, you actually took my statements more or less out of context. I asked How stupid is the average shopper? as a rhetorical, exaggerated question--much like my statement that the economy would collapse if prices were raised by one cent. [Incidentally, I guess I could work a political dig in here: You conservatives can't take a joke / don't understand hyperbole / something]
A $30 price drop is significant, whether you want to admit it or not.
I don't doubt that. But is it significant enough to warrant sales suddenly doubling? I was not sure about that, and so therefore in my original post I ruminated on the psychological devices that would cause the average shopper to perceive the PS2 as dirt-cheap.
With the glut of PS2 games in the cheap bin at EB, that's at least two more games people can now buy with the same amount of cash as before.
I apologize, this is pretty much off on a tangent, but...how many good games are there in the cheap bin at EB? Be honest, now.
...the average American consumer, i.e. the lower to middle class consumer, [which you, as a liberal, should be a champion of and have a good understanding of] may have a certain amount of liquid income per month that is equal to $150 but not $180.
Or they may not. Anyway, the issue is moot; the lower to middle class consumer is perfectly capable of saving money from month to month. Hell, I do that. I have a good understanding of the middle class, considering that I'm in it.
I can see exactly why you're a liberal. You believe that you are better than the common American and so you want government to provide services to these people because they can't provide for themselves, right?
No, I believe that the function of government is to serve its citizens, to keep them healthy, and to provide a safety net to those who need it. How stupid people are is entirely irrelevant.
--Firefox 0.9 really is a bit faster than 0.8. It's probably not noticeable to all you lucky bastards with broadband, but I can tell over 56k. I think FF is now about on par with, perhaps even faster than, IE, which was previously a lot quicker (for me).
--The new default theme...well, I'm in the "damn, that's ugly" camp. I went to Tools -> Themes -> Get More Themes to download Qute, and was taken to Mozilla Update, where there was a link to "install Qute now." I did that but it didn't work. I ended up having to manually download the.jar file and use the theme installer on texturizer.net to get Qute working--It seems like something's broken here, I dunno. Anyone else had a similar experience?
--FF's interface seems a bit snappier now, as well--it doesn't slow down a ton with multiple tabs open. It remains to be seen whether it still has 0.8's nasty memory leaks, though.
--I wonder if anyone else has noticed this: the menus now are rendered a little bit...differently. They no longer look as "Windows native" as they used to, and now resemble Mozilla 1.5 on my Debian machine. I wonder if this was done for cross-platform compatibility (So FF doesn't look as out of place on Linux?)
Overall, though, I'm quite pleased with the new FF's performance. It's a bit of a pain to go around and re-obtain all your extensions and such, but once you get it set up, it works very well. Great job Mozilla dev team!
I'll call bullshit on that. Where's your evidence? Have you taken any surveys to back that up? Furthermore, your assertion that the economy would collapse is simply foolish.
Well, yes, I was indeed exaggerating about the economy's collapsing. And of course I've not really got any numbers to back up my assertions. I will say, though, that I believe people think "within the boundaries of price points." $19.99 is "under" $20, so it's okay, but something that actually costs $20 is not. It's a psychological thing that stores try to exploit by pricing everything one cent below its actual price: you look at the numbers and your mind immediately sees those nines and equates it as something less expensive than $20. Why would stores do it if it had no effect? If anything, they'd save ink by just writing "$20" instead of "$19.99" but, no, they price everything this way. It must work on some level. Probably not on as dramatic a level as I've intimated, but there's something in our subconscious...
Slashdot Mirror
I can't decide whether or not you're serious, but I'll respond as though you are.
I can authoritatively say that no one at The Gamer's Quarter is a "wannabe-intellectual weenie." We're just a bunch of people who love videogames, and love to write about them. We're not out to be "journalists," as nothing in TGQ is traditional journalism. None of our articles are reviews, and nobody is pretending that they would be useful things to read if you want to make a purchasing decision.
Our writing is for a different purpose--not a "higher" purpose, not a "totally new purpose that's going to fucking rock your world," but a purpose all the same. Rather than writing dry, purely informative and objective articles about games, we try to give things a more personal, introspective spin. Yeah, if you want, you can look at a game, sitting down with it and saying, okay, it looks nice, and it sounds nice, but the control is shit and it's all over in six hours; 7.3/10. But...what is that accomplishing? In analyzing the game that way, have you learned anything deeper about the game, or even about yourself?
The idea is, we try to establish a personal context, and to analyze games more in terms of their themes, their tone. How do they make us feel? Is it important that they make us feel that way? What more can we get from them? You can say that they're "just videogames," but...what the hell does that even mean? Are books "just books?" Is the sky "just the sky?" Is life "just life," something that doesn't need to be examined?
People, you know, some of them care about games, and what they mean. I know I do. And it's not just videogames--you analyze everything you come into contact with, on a sensitive, personal level. When you read a good book, it's not something cut-and-dried, something that was assigned a numerical score by a reviewer for a huge media conglomorate. It's something you felt; something you understood.
The point is: the same thing applies not just to videogames, but to all things in life. The Gamer's Quarter just focuses on the videogame part.
And, you know, it looks like you don't want to think about this sort of thing. It looks, to me, like you're spouting off vitriol about how we're just freaks patterning ourselves on gonzo journalism having secret conventions and plotting to destroy your hobby. Trust me. We're not out to get you. No one, very likely, is out to get you. Relax.
There is no movement to speak of. When you talk about us being "frauds," what the--pardon--flying fuck are you talking about? No one is defrauding anyone. We think videogames deserve sensitive, critical analysis, for reasons I've already laid out. So, you know, we're trying to provide that. Maybe some of our writing is shit, and we need to work on that. Okay, fine. Maybe our magazine didn't catch your fancy. That's fine, too. People want different things, in life. If you think this is all "bullshit," that's cool. Don't read it.
But why the defensiveness? Why the vitriol? Why do you feel you have an obligation to stop this "nonsense?"
I mean, honestly.
That's not very sensible.
It wasn't me.
I use more commas.
From the article:
"Obviously, we'll connect Xbox Love up to what we do with Messenger"
I am intrigued.
Lost Vikings was developed by Blizzard, which still holds the rights to it. They even ported it to the Game Boy Advance about a year ago.
Fallout 3. 'Nuff said.
From TFA:
Update: Duck and Cover takes cover as they debunk their own story:
I mailed you earlier about Interplay probably being dead, it turns out they're still alive (sorry about that), Titus have been liquidated but it only affects companies based in France, which doesn't include Interplay.
So. Apparently this story is now meaningless.
It was mentioned that the guy "thinks" that the load time should be just like that of the Playstation 2. I have a Playstation 2. The thing takes a good twenty to thirty seconds to boot and load a game, which is all right for a home system, but is insanity for a portable. If the thing has 2 hours of battery life on the optimistic side, and actually requires you to wait thirty seconds for games to start (in contrast to the GBA and DS which start games instantly), then I can't see much hope for the PS2. Perhaps it can carve out a niche among casual rich adult gamers, but how many of those are there really?
That was Robyn Miller.
Torment works fine with XP, yeah, and I too have seen it at Best Buy in the "dual jewel" set, bundled with Soulbringer.
The problem with video game reviews, as I see it, is that they are subjective, by their very definition. There is no such thing as a definitively "good" game, nor is there any such thing as a definitively "bad" game. The same is true of movies, or books--when you read film reviews, you don't see a bunch of numerical scores ranking the film's "special effects" and "acting" and "sound technology" and the "tilt factor" on a (decimal) scale of one to ten. Instead, you just read some of the reviewer's genuine thoughts, and with those, you are free to determine whether or not you'd enjoy it. Game reviews, I think, need much the same thing. Far too many reviewers are focused on, "oh, this review must be under 1000 words," and "oh, I must split it up into sections for each component of the game," and "oh, I need to rate and rank everything and then use a calculator to get the result." No. Game reviews are subjective and should be treated as such.
I think it is the job of the review-writer to just convey a feeling about the game...to get the reader into his headspace, to explain the game, circumstances surrounding the reviewer's involvement with the game, that sort of thing, no numbers involved. It should be an introspective, organic process. For example, as an experiment with this sort of thing, I wrote this a few days ago--it is, sort of, a review of Doom 3. It was an experimental thing--yeah, I rambled a lot, I talked about some aspects of the game I liked, some I didn't like, and about some things that had zero bearing on the gameplay. In the end, I revealed that I had mixed feelings about the game--I didn't really like it much, but it was all right, I supposed.
Anyway, I took this review to the Doom 3 message board at GameFAQs, a web site which you will know, if you had been there, is absolutely frigging full of rabid fanboys. There are threads there with titles such as "I can't believe Gamespot gave Doom 3 only a 8.511111" and such. Anyway, yeah, I showed it to people there, and they enjoyed it--they said that my thoughts were, in general, interesting, and that they understood why I didn't like the game much. And these are rabid fanboys I'm talking about.
I guess this means that people tend to get more worked up about numbers--rankings, ratings, all that sort of stuff. Reviewers and readers tend to concentrate on that--on the mechanics, on the cut-and-dried aspects of things--rather than on the subjective things; a review shouldn't be "Whether or not a game is good," but rather it should be "How this particular reviewer felt playing the game." I think that's more interesting all around.
There's plenty of other Doom 3-related coverage over at PlanetDoom, including a pointer to a new IGN review, which PlanetDoom considers "a lot more fair and balanced than some of the reviews we've seen so far", with an overall 8.9/10 score. And yet PlanetDoom is a member of "the GameSpy network." Didn't GameSpy and IGN have a merger? Isn't this basically GameSpy/IGN praising its own review...?
Actually...that system should be able to run Doom 3 just fine. If you care about such things.
Dude. You're absolutely right. I mean, I liked Xenogears, the "sort-of-prequel;" I thought it was fun and had a pretty in-depth plot. Xenosaga just went completely overboard and was this long, drawn-out, half-assed anime with a game thrown in seemingly as an afterthought. And it would have maybe been all right if the story was interesting, but it wasn't; it was just random, badly-written gibberish that made no damn sense at all. And when you weren't watching boring plot scenes you were walking through these freaking gigantic dungeons fighting the same battles over and over again. That's actually where I put the game down--in that "inside the Gnosis" dungeon that never seemed to end.
I have a Gmail account, but I too have ben using Fastmail for a while, and I am very pleased with it. In a lot of cases it's better than Gmail, since it's, well, faster, and it works fine with really old browsers. Plus, you've got IMAP access... So, yeah. Fastmail rocks.
Ah. I see what you mean. I have played Radical Dreamers, though; it's really nothing special, and arguably Chrono Cross was the realization of Radical Dreamers as an actual game--it recycled a lot of RD's music, had a similar intro, and its story was actually nearly the same, although of course it was drastically expanded on. But, yeah, despite all of that...that would be cool.
Mario RPG was Square-developed. You, er, know that, right?
Deus Ex is actually pretty close to an RPG FPS... Actually, I think that games in general are starting to move in an RPGish direction; even run-of-the-mill action games these days are backed up by decent stories. Games have gotten more complex gameplay and control wise and they've been doing the same in terms of story.
Er. Metal Gear Solid 3 hasn't received excellent reviews because it's not out yet.
I haven't read the article since it now appears Slashdottted, but, if anyone cares, personally I really like Eterm. It's lightweight, fast, and also quite pretty--it has a lot of nifty background images built in and it allows for pseudo-transparency. Very customizable, too. I use it on my desktop Linux machine all the time.
Here is a snapshot.
$2 bills; that's interesting. When was this?
Right, but you fail to realize that there must be a reason that companies began using the *.99 marketing. They can't all be doing it because everyone else is doing it, because then where would it have begun? Your argument, if you don't mind my saying so, is somewhat illogical.
Instead of saying things like "How stupid is the average shopper?" and "A very large segment of the population considers $19.99 to be a hell of a lot cheaper than $20.", why don't you just enjoy the fact that you're so intellectually superior to the average shopper and that you know that 19.99 + 0.01 = 20.00?
I don't really see your point. I know that 19.99 + 0.01 = 20.00, and so does the average shopper; that doesn't mean that we, as shoppers, aren't psychologically affected by pricing. In fact, you actually took my statements more or less out of context. I asked How stupid is the average shopper? as a rhetorical, exaggerated question--much like my statement that the economy would collapse if prices were raised by one cent. [Incidentally, I guess I could work a political dig in here: You conservatives can't take a joke / don't understand hyperbole / something]
A $30 price drop is significant, whether you want to admit it or not.
I don't doubt that. But is it significant enough to warrant sales suddenly doubling? I was not sure about that, and so therefore in my original post I ruminated on the psychological devices that would cause the average shopper to perceive the PS2 as dirt-cheap.
With the glut of PS2 games in the cheap bin at EB, that's at least two more games people can now buy with the same amount of cash as before.
I apologize, this is pretty much off on a tangent, but...how many good games are there in the cheap bin at EB? Be honest, now.
I can see exactly why you're a liberal. You believe that you are better than the common American and so you want government to provide services to these people because they can't provide for themselves, right?
No, I believe that the function of government is to serve its citizens, to keep them healthy, and to provide a safety net to those who need it. How stupid people are is entirely irrelevant.
You make me sick and have now made my foes list.
Thanks, I'm honored.
That is odd; "select new tabs opened from links" really doesn't make any sense compared to "open new tabs in the background."
--The new default theme...well, I'm in the "damn, that's ugly" camp. I went to Tools -> Themes -> Get More Themes to download Qute, and was taken to Mozilla Update, where there was a link to "install Qute now." I did that but it didn't work. I ended up having to manually download the .jar file and use the theme installer on texturizer.net to get Qute working--It seems like something's broken here, I dunno. Anyone else had a similar experience?
--FF's interface seems a bit snappier now, as well--it doesn't slow down a ton with multiple tabs open. It remains to be seen whether it still has 0.8's nasty memory leaks, though.
--I wonder if anyone else has noticed this: the menus now are rendered a little bit...differently. They no longer look as "Windows native" as they used to, and now resemble Mozilla 1.5 on my Debian machine. I wonder if this was done for cross-platform compatibility (So FF doesn't look as out of place on Linux?)
Overall, though, I'm quite pleased with the new FF's performance. It's a bit of a pain to go around and re-obtain all your extensions and such, but once you get it set up, it works very well. Great job Mozilla dev team!
I'll call bullshit on that. Where's your evidence? Have you taken any surveys to back that up? Furthermore, your assertion that the economy would collapse is simply foolish.
Well, yes, I was indeed exaggerating about the economy's collapsing. And of course I've not really got any numbers to back up my assertions. I will say, though, that I believe people think "within the boundaries of price points." $19.99 is "under" $20, so it's okay, but something that actually costs $20 is not. It's a psychological thing that stores try to exploit by pricing everything one cent below its actual price: you look at the numbers and your mind immediately sees those nines and equates it as something less expensive than $20. Why would stores do it if it had no effect? If anything, they'd save ink by just writing "$20" instead of "$19.99" but, no, they price everything this way. It must work on some level. Probably not on as dramatic a level as I've intimated, but there's something in our subconscious...