Shit Reviews

Posted by oddbob on October 6, 2007 · Lovingly Filed Under Articles 
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The internet, it’s fucking brilliant. If ever you wanted to disprove the monkey/typewriter theory it’ll take you five minutes using the internet.

The place is utterly jam packed full of people spouting turd rot. Now, that’s fine to a degree - I don’t for a second claim to be the most sparkling of writers myself. In my defence, at least I’ll come right out and admit this. Every single review I’ve put to zeroes and ones so far could be better. In some cases, a lot better.

Also, in my defence, very few people have the idiocy level cranked up to eleven to take much notice of me. Which is a good thing. Factor in the fact that I tend to sprawl a stream of consciousness out onto the page, I’m not paid to write for a living and I couldn’t really give a flying fuck most of the time… well, anyway, enough about me.

I digress, as usual.

What amazes me about the internet is the depth that alleged professional reviewing sites sink to at times. I was reminded earlier of Kristan Reids infamous review of Sensible Soccer for Eurogamer - something I don’t wish to dwell on too much but for those who have either not read the review, my earlier witterings about it or actually played the game - it got 9/10. The game is a fucking buggy useless piece of refactored poop. So, nowhere near a nine then. The main reason I don’t want to dwell on that review though is at least it was a reasonably literate read. Ok, so it was a massive lie from start to finish, but at least it was a readable lie.

I’m not here today to question journalistic integrity (not much, anyway) - Stu Campbell already did a fine job of this in his Drivergate analysis.

It’s rare you can find a reviewer on the internet that you can appreciate, and even if you don’t agree with them - find yourself nodding along happily or at least still awake by the end of their prose. Perhaps this is why when Graham decided to put his reviewing skills to the test with The Arsecast there were a few months of collective sighs of relief across the internet. At last, someone talking about games and not talking shit. The same, I think, applies to the brilliant Zero Punctuation series being ran on The Escapist. See also Stuart Campbell and Way Of The Rodent. Tim and TIGS and so on.

It’s a shame that there aren’t more quality reviewers out there. Or maybe they are out there and no-one has told me about them. I don’t know - if I’m missing something that doesn’t involve a lot of art-lit wankery or chin stroking coma inducing analysis then I’d be more than happy to have my eyes pointed in that direction.

This subject came up on RR a few months ago and I made the point that what we need are more people like Stu Campbell, Graham Goring and (now) Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw. I subscribe to the excellent Rocks Back Pages, an archive of music journalism. The quality difference between even the poorest reviews in the archives and the poorest reviews I’ve read about games is staggering. Yes, games reviewing comes out drastically lacking, in case you hadn’t gathered.

Why? Why do we, the public accept this shit foisted upon us and lap it up like we should be grateful? Surely, it’s not much to ask to ask games reviewers to:

a) have a fucking clue what they’re writing about
b) be able to write about something without resorting to making shit up
c) be able to convey what they mean in a relatively literate manner
d) not resort to thesaurus swallowing wankery, art-lit hardcore criticism or in depth analysis of a polygon
e) entertain me

Instead, we get left with stuff like this priceless paragraph or two from IGN (It’s the Folklore review, in case you wondered)

If the beauty of Folklore could be summarized into one general theme, it would undoubtedly be its nearly masterful execution of stillness and motion, and the interplay between them. Without getting overly technical or poetic, let’s just say that the imagery, sound, and even some of the gameplay mechanics harness these two opposing energies to induce some incredible effects both tangible and otherwise.

We’ll discuss this more as it becomes relevant, but let’s take the real world/Netherworld structure as the first example. The stillness of this particular dynamic is rooted in Doolin, and its unchanging, gray-skied melancholy, while the movement comes from the greatly diverse and kinetic realms of the Netherworld, which are constantly ripe with battle and exploration. This balance is what makes the game so interesting not only from a gameplay standpoint but from a poetic standpoint as well. Even more moving is the chilling reversal of this juxtaposition because the living world is the world that feels deathly still, while the realms of the dead ripple with life.

4 pages of this review, and they’re still wankering on about the importance of the juxtaposition of stillness and motion on every fucking page. How in shitchrist does this crap get published? I realise that it may be a case of paying peanuts, not paying anything at all, rushed deadlines to meet or what-the-fuck-ever but nothing can excuse such flagrant bullshittery from ever being thrust under the public gaze.

Seriously now, what the fuck does that mean to me about the game? It’s got things which move and things which don’t and this is really impressive? Go fuck a duck.

I’m sure at this point there’ll be someone wandering in to say “It’s IGN, what do you expect?” but lets be fair and honest here, it’s not just IGN who publishes shit like this,is it? It’s par for the course with games journalism. For every one well written and thought out review, there’s five hundred pieces of shit like this and in some cases worse.

So, I’ve got a heartfelt request. If you ever find yourself writing a review and feel the urge to make shit up about the juxtaposition of stillness and motion in order to justify a stupidly inflated high score - kill yourself. You’re doing the world a favour and maybe, once the gene pool has been purged of you fuckwits we can start giving some love to the people who can write, entertain and share their love of games with us all.

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Speak your brains

7 Responses to “Shit Reviews”

  1. tim on October 7th, 2007 3:41 pm

    Nice. I quite enjoyed the read. More rants please. :)

  2. oddbob on October 7th, 2007 11:30 pm

    Ta Tim, I’ve got naff all else to do at the moment aside from fiddle with the interwebs and rant ;)

  3. tim on October 8th, 2007 4:09 am

    I have to say that I despise writing, even though that is what I do most around these parts. I don’t know how these people go on and on about a game sometimes.

    Usually I just paste some instructions from a readme somewhere and pretend that’s the review. Readers hate it, but at least I don’t have to be poetic about the whole thing. ;)

  4. gnome on October 8th, 2007 9:30 am

    Ooooh the dynamic stillness of your prose… An excellent read!

  5. Richard Phipps on October 8th, 2007 9:49 pm

    I tend to write like that when I get carried away.. :(

  6. oddbob on October 9th, 2007 12:32 am

    Gnome - you never fail to make me smile :D

    Rich, who’s carrying you away now and what can I do to stop them? ;)

    Tim - I don’t mind writing, if anything I wish I had more time to put into it and work out some of my kinks and ruts I get stuck in. But y’know - families etc… I envy your and Gnomes posting rates a fair bit. Wish I had the time and the gumph to write even half as much as you two.

    I completely take your point on some games though. I won’t go into competition review central here, which all it takes is one duffer to put you off putting fingers to keyboard for a long time - but when I came to do the (now lost unless it’s still on my old HDD) review of Blast Miner for the first time in a long time I was completely stumped by it.

    I find writing about stuff that I hate easy, the same for writing about stuff I love - writing about stuff thats neither here nor there for me throws me right out of whack.

    I guess I’m just one for extremes ;)

  7. gnome on October 9th, 2007 7:44 pm

    (blushes)

    :)

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