I have Destructoid in my RSS feeds and I check it often. Ironically, it's their reviews that I find least interesting. Their honest articles are great and it feels like their writers have a unique personality with specific tastes and style and a often a sense of humour
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My problem is mostly with the reviews as well. They don't seem to realize that it's possible to give a game a negative review without coming off like assholes in the process (or, more likely, they fully realize it, but are deliberately ignoring it). It just seems to be that their entire modus operandi lately is to stir up fanboys just for the sake of stirring up fanboys, which they seem to be very good at doing and the more popular/hyped the game the easier it is, because they know it will bring them thousands of page-views and about that many comments per article. And then they circle the wagons when they get called out on it, as evidenced by the multiple follow-up articles they put out in defense of their reviews
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I think part of the problem is what any person in the media has issues with. They get "known" for something and immediately start to take it to extreme levels.
The FFXIII reviewer - sarcastic son of a bitch who's angry at everything The Metro non reviewer - games as art and indie gamer guy
It's great to have a particular characterization for people to relate to. This is another reason why Destructoid caught my attention. Their staff seemed unique and not at all faceless. They had loads of character and it felt more honest when they gave their opinions. However, it just seems they're getting too carried away with it at times.
"However, it just seems they're getting too carried away with it at times."
This is pretty much it, in a nutshell. They seem to have forgotten that, at the end of the day, they're still just dudes talking about video games on the Internet. Sadly, there seems to be less people criticizing them for this (or, at least, criticizing them in a way that can't be simply brushed aside as "ignorant, immature fanboy" and thus safely ignored, or, worse, paraded around as examples of how all of their critics are supposedly that way) and more people who merely eat it all up and ask for seconds. Not that it matters, because they (the first guy, especially) can't seem to stand any sort of criticism.
Heh, on that note, I wonder if the second guy ever did anything in reaction to the two or three articles the first guy recently wrote about indie games and how they need to stop being so artsy and pretentious ("pretentious" being one of the first guy's favorite words, apparently, despite the fact that it describes him to a tee lately), given that
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Re: Completely agree with you 100%timna45June 13 2010, 03:41:15 UTC
Note that, when I was talking about differing 4 points from the average metacritic score, I meant 4 out of 10, so probably around 30 to 40 points of the average on metacritic. Not to say that reviews are the holy grail, but I don't take his opinions to be reflective of either gamers or of critics.
Re: Completely agree with you 100%kane_magusJune 13 2010, 09:55:03 UTC
(continued from previous)
As for the reviews themselves, of the very few that I've been able to stomach since they started to get really bad, I found that he tends to go to one extreme or another. He either finds some tiny, nitpicky little thing, that may actually be a legitimate grievance with a given game, but then he blows it all out of proportion, or else he will make these big, sweeping generalizations about the game which tell the reader absolutely nothing of real value, yet are excellent for the purposes of trolling. Typically, it's both of those things, with an underlying layer of simple, pure asshattery. But my main problem with his reviews isn't so much the reviews themselves, because they are what they are, but that there seem to be so many people who take them seriously. If you read many of the comments of any given review of his, you'll see things like "Too bad, I was thinking of trying that game, but now I won't" or "Glad I read this review, I dodged a bullet there" or "Thanks for saving me $60, Jim" and so on and
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The FFXIII reviewer - sarcastic son of a bitch who's angry at everything
The Metro non reviewer - games as art and indie gamer guy
It's great to have a particular characterization for people to relate to. This is another reason why Destructoid caught my attention. Their staff seemed unique and not at all faceless. They had loads of character and it felt more honest when they gave their opinions. However, it just seems they're getting too carried away with it at times.
Reply
This is pretty much it, in a nutshell. They seem to have forgotten that, at the end of the day, they're still just dudes talking about video games on the Internet. Sadly, there seems to be less people criticizing them for this (or, at least, criticizing them in a way that can't be simply brushed aside as "ignorant, immature fanboy" and thus safely ignored, or, worse, paraded around as examples of how all of their critics are supposedly that way) and more people who merely eat it all up and ask for seconds. Not that it matters, because they (the first guy, especially) can't seem to stand any sort of criticism.
Heh, on that note, I wonder if the second guy ever did anything in reaction to the two or three articles the first guy recently wrote about indie games and how they need to stop being so artsy and pretentious ("pretentious" being one of the first guy's favorite words, apparently, despite the fact that it describes him to a tee lately), given that ( ... )
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As for the reviews themselves, of the very few that I've been able to stomach since they started to get really bad, I found that he tends to go to one extreme or another. He either finds some tiny, nitpicky little thing, that may actually be a legitimate grievance with a given game, but then he blows it all out of proportion, or else he will make these big, sweeping generalizations about the game which tell the reader absolutely nothing of real value, yet are excellent for the purposes of trolling. Typically, it's both of those things, with an underlying layer of simple, pure asshattery. But my main problem with his reviews isn't so much the reviews themselves, because they are what they are, but that there seem to be so many people who take them seriously. If you read many of the comments of any given review of his, you'll see things like "Too bad, I was thinking of trying that game, but now I won't" or "Glad I read this review, I dodged a bullet there" or "Thanks for saving me $60, Jim" and so on and ( ... )
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