prog | Need video game sanity.

Can any of my video game-playing pals know of a publication (print or webby) that prints objective and non-insane video game reviews? Many years ago, when I was really really into video games, I knew about all the relevant mags, and what their relative levels of content were. (I arguably learned how to write by reading the better video game magazines, and I like to think this is more testament to their quality than... well, I guess it would also be testament to my maturity level, since I was, y'know, 10.)

But today, the most obvious game-review publications are all found online, and... they all seem to be out of their minds. The reviews I've encountered are often poorly written, and more often than not explode with hyperbolic praise about the game at hand. According to

daerr, the conventional-wisdom explanation for this behavior involves grumbling that all the reviewers are influenced by game-publisher payola. My own experience working within the media, however, suggests that the reviewers all have Harry Knowles Syndrome; that is, they're largely excited young men who like teh shiney and really really want to love every new piece of new-game hotness that comes their way. And so, they are very forgiving of a game's flaws, so long as it's got something cool in it that triggers their fanboy gland. If this fails to happen, it's the wost game EVAR and O the gnashing and wailing &c.

Return of the King is a good example of this phenomenon. Most of the online reviewers seem to think it was one of the best games published last year, so I picked it up last week on the cheap. In reality, it's OK, but nothing special in most ways, and flat-out broken otherwise. I state this objectively; it does things that games really shouldn't do.

It's a pure-action game closest in heritage to a side-scrolling beat-em-up like Double Dragon; for all the richness of Tolkein's world, the only thing the characters know how to do in this game is FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT the legions of Orcs and Easterlings continually boiling across narrow, flat landscapes. Disappointing, but at least executed reasonably well.

The broken features include things like a mazelike level with a live map that tells you where all the bad guys are, but, for no real reason, doesn't tell you where you are. It still expects you to find and snuff out the bads in a short time limit. Um, yeah, thanks. There's also a "cinematic" camera system that jumps between angles like a flea, instead of following the lead character smoothly. After each of these jumps, the player must adjust the joystick to compensate for the suddenly completely different screen-relative direction that the character is moving. What were they thinking?! More than once I lost a race against the clock because I unwittingly guided Aragorn to run in a wide circle, which I thought was a straight line. Wheeee! The King is drunk!!! Out of his way, rar rar

The thing I like most about the game, I like for entirely the wrong reasons. Since the game is so fight-oriented, its face-value interpretation of the story is ultra-violent to parodic levels. For example, during the first Hobbit level, little Sam figures that the best way to keep Frodo out of trouble is to slay every Orc in Osgilliath himself. And personally, I thought this was great. I got really into it, to the point of leaping into battles already underway to steal kills from slowpoke Gondorians. And really, that's the way to play, since the only way to get power-ups is to kill as many things as possible. Go Sam! Likewise, Aragon allies with the Army of the Dead by going into their cave and beating them all up before kicking their king's ethereal ass. After he pledges his loyalty, you have to beat up his soldiers a second time on your way out; I guess they didn't get the memo. But, again, it's so over-the-top that it won points with me, even though I don't think it was necessarily trying.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

I think you mean Southrons... Westrons are the good guys, i.e. the Dunedain descended from the Numenoreans from the West. (Westron is also the name of the common human language of Middle Earth.)

On the other hand, from your description of how inane the game seems, it's very well possible that they call the bad guys Westrons.

Ha ha, you're right. I think I actually meant Easterlings, which is what I read in a FAQ about the game. (Post edited.)

Have you checked gamefaq.com ? Of course you'll get reviews of various caliber there, but if you can examine how the reviews are written and take that into account, perhaps it might be helpful. I used to go often to http://ps2.ign.com; now I go there sometimes. Although not in a news-searching way.

I subscribe to EGM. They're not bad, which isn't to say I always agree with them. They can get kind of obsessed.

I used to read a bunch of online sites, gamespot and ign.com most notably. I haven't regularly read any online sites in a long time, but my sense is that gamespot is more reliable. ign.com definitely suffers from that Harry Knowles thing, and it seems like the writers have gotten younger every time I go there.

I don't read much video-game journalism, but when I do I read insertcredit.com. They're insane, but they really care about games and about journalism, and they definitely don't just cheer for whatever games they get free.

Wow, EGM still exists? Back in high school & early college I read Andy Eddy's "Video Games" magazine religiously, and yapped at the heels of its editorial staff on its online version (on the Delphi computer service, this being all kinds of pre-Web), trying to get a writing job with them, ha ha. (Andy distracted me for a little while by suggesting I start a zine, which I did, in 1990; good times.) A running gag on the delphi forums was what a crappy magazine EGM was; all slick hype and bright colors, compared to the somber literary quality of VG. But it died sometime in the mid-90s, for all that. Oh well.

(I still remember the blistering controversy over EGM (I think it was EGM) running a bogus (maybe April Fool's) story about how to fight Sheng Long in Street Fighter II, complete with doctored photograph. Hahahaha.)

(I will now sing a little song called "All the Andys I Have Known".)

EGM's April Fool's stories continue to piss people off. A couple of years ago they had a code for unlocking Sonic and Tails as playable characters in Super Smash Brothers Melee. (This is kind of unlikely, given that Smash Brothers is all about Nintendo's franchise characters and Sonic is Sega's big character. Of course, since then, Link from Nintendo's Legend of Zelda showed up in Namco's Soul Calibur 2, so I guess it wasn't completely unbelievable.) It involved some inhuman feat of gameplay. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from people who spent weeks trying to unlock the characters, only to find that it was a joke.

For bonus points, tons of EGM readers submitted the info as a cheat code to IGN. IGN really had no sense of humor about it at all.

Good stuff.

Yes, that's exactly how the Sheng Long thing worked, too, and with the exact same effect... except it was arguably worse since these dopes were actually spending another quarter for each attempt.

Need video game sanity.

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