Can you find me a worse site and magazine?

[BRP]

Right now I firmly believe IGN to be the worst videogame website in terms of reviews and overall content. Blog sites don't count.

For magazines I would say Gamepro shares that honor, but to be honest I haven't followed any magazines in a long time. I can say this, back when Gamestop was showing it in my face I could say without doubt Game Informer had picture captions that were so bad they prompted me to throw them away before reading more than 1/5th of the magazine.

[Correction]

I'm sure there are worse, but I'm guessing you're talking about sites with major funding behind them (News Corps subsidiary owns IGN).

The intersection of people with an understanding of media journalism and who know what they're talking about with videogames is vanishingly small. It will probably always be small since no commercially viable audience will pay attention to such a person for long, anyway. It's like any hobby, really. Find me someone interesting who writes about fly fishing.

[Kyo]

EGM,OXM and PSM are horrible.

[Xno Kappa]

I like EGM. I agree about Gamepro though, to them there's no such thing as a bad DBZ game.

[BRP]

EGM would be my candidate for one of the few good magazines left. Though some of its staff are just stupid beyond repair. (ie Phalanx of stunners)

[Kyo]

Dont like the magazine at all, some of the most moronic people Ive seen write video game articles and I probably should have mentioned game informer as well, some of their feature stories are good reading but overall the reviews and other content is garbage.

[Beckwin]

EGM is and has been pretty good for quite some time, even if Milkman is editor in chief now- honestly in spite of him being fucking retarded when it comes to ffxi, he's pretty decent. They get some major points for rehauling their review system to something much more honest than the industry standard 7-10 scale.

[Yuri-G]

EGM is fine, but their preferences on RPGs are vastly different from mine. I wouldn't go so far as to say they score the games badly, since they tend to give good reasons for their reviews, but I wish they had at least one staffer who liked more obscure RPGs instead of drooling over every Final Fantasy release and docking other games because they aren't as pretty.

As for websites, gamespot's reviews are my least favorite on the net. Their other content I have no problem with, but their reviews reek of controvery for the sake of controversy. They have a tendency to score big-name games badly just to get attention and then hide behind some bullshit made-up reason as to the low score. Not only that, they often contradict themselves in their own reviews - Order of Ecclesia was praised for bringing difficulty back to the series, then the guy turned around and said the boss battles were too hard. And even better, they'll give shitty big-name games good scores if they're getting enough advertising revenue from the publisher.

Yeah, I hates me some gamespot reviews, that's for sure.

[BRP]

Man I really don't want to make this thread about game scores in general, but difficulty is exactly why they fail. There is just one 10. How is every game in the genre based on that one perfect score when they are all trying different things. What you get are games that are "too hard" or "too easy" falling short of games in some retarded grey area.

Game reviews are suppose to tell someone if they should be interested in a game, how could they ever be useful in an environment where what is a good difficulty is controversial. Don't get me started on the super casual breed of reviewers who complain about fighting games being too complex to learn and games beyond FPS are scary concepts.

[Deejay]

Start your own gaming site or podcast if you can't stand the shit that's out now- only saying this because you seem to have a fundamental gripe with most gaming sites and the way they operate.

[Kuya]

Game Informer's humour made one of my testicles pop because i couldn't stand the rush of rage that came about at trying to comprehend how anyone could be so fucking lame.

[Correction]

The Escapist is rich with writers who get it right. And they've been at it for years now.

The Escapist : Features

If you don't like print magazines or online 'reviews' then read features, they're much more enlightening. Raging about terrible video game review writers is so 20th century. Chances are you hate the 7-10 scale and won't be influenced by a review any more than you would be by simply watching game footage on the internet and asking forumgoer peers for their opinions.

[Eticket]

The Escapist is rich with writers who get it right. And they've been at it for years now.

The Escapist : Features

If you don't like print magazines or online 'reviews' then read features, they're much more enlightening. Raging about terrible video game review writers is so 20th century. Chances are you hate the 7-10 scale and won't be influenced by a review any more than you would be by simply watching game footage on the internet and asking forumgoer peers for their opinions.

Wasn't The Escapist the one that fucked up the PW story and published a story based solely on others' journals and forum posts?

[Correction]

This is where I wonder if I have to explain the difference between 'blogging' and writing original content.

[SephYuyX]

Why just stick to one? Visit all the sites (1up/EGM, GamePro, IGN, etc) and read all the reviews? I just use Kotaku as they do this, they take all the reviews from major mags/sites, and put it in one post.

[Katlan]

IGN's actual reviews may suck, but they are usually good reads and inform you about the game & what to expect, ect... I enjoy reading [most of] them. One thing I hate about all game content sites is their previews/hands-on impressions and stuff, even if the game is horrible beyond belief the hands-on impressions do nothing but compliment a game.

And a lot of the time I'm like "wow... I was really looking forward to that game and everything said about it seemed so positive <reviews/impressions come out> holy shit its a piece of crap." If a game is "that" bad they shouldn't give early impressions if they can only lie about the product. It's obvious why they have to, just irk's me sometimes cause you can't get any honest impression of a game before its released

[Kohan]

Right now I firmly believe IGN to be the worst videogame website in terms of reviews and overall content. Blog sites don't count.

In relation to much of IGN's content, I'll agree with you. However, most people who state such a thing haven't read the Retro section. While there are exceptions too, a lot of the writers there are very talented and extremely passionate. Of course, since this is the "Retro" section, you won't find as many know-nothing kiddy editors--and it unfortunately doesn't get as much attention.

[link deleted]

Why am I defending this? Well, two reasons: one, a good friend of mine writes for them. Two, this section should not be lumped in with the rest, ever.

Here's one of my friend's articles:[link deleted]

Travis and Levi are amongst their best authors. Read some of their stuff and enjoy.

[Deejay]

And a lot of the time I'm like "wow... I was really looking forward to that game and everything said about it seemed so positive <reviews/impressions come out> holy shit its a piece of crap." If a game is "that" bad they shouldn't give early impressions if they can only lie about the product. It's obvious why they have to, just irk's me sometimes cause you can't get any honest impression of a game before its released

It's hard to be critical of games when they're an unfinished product. You never know when a developer will fix whatever bugs or shortcomings they may have and it's unfair to them for someone to come into their building and shit all over the game they've spent a quality amount of time working on.

It's like going to a movie set and complaining that the flick sucks without ever witnessing the ending or all of the editting done before it being released to the public.

Edit: And a lot of games are genuinely fun for the first 15 minutes to an hour. Prime example would be Assasin's Creed.

[Correction]

It's hard to be critical of games when they're an unfinished product. You never know when a developer will fix whatever bugs or shortcomings they may have and it's unfair to them for someone to come into their building and shit all over the game they've spent a quality amount of time working on.

Of course if game developers really wanted this to stop, they'd stop sending release candidates instead of golden masters to review sites.

[Hitoshura]

EGM is still alright from time to time, it's usually hit or miss for me. Game Informer's latest issue covered a lot of reviews on games I was too broke to afford. I really miss the days of the old PSM, that magazine was so much win to me.