Path: ...!Xl.tags.giganews.com!local-1.nntp.ord.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2024 18:34:22 +0000 From: Spalls Hurgenson Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action Subject: Game Reviews: Spoiled By The Internet Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2024 14:34:20 -0400 Message-ID: X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 2.0/32.652 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 57 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-zA5RpymoPiuzdndzyQmf/EQJyt9a5PbZ4DoQiJEYmB/IKsPjOaGluNys55Wvm6+gbFXQHc6JEbodP0j!rkdNkksZAym2ev7HSWTERvKojRp+Isr5OKAB1Ihz1NYtFOVDLduN9jmXUWpDR6CwWB7nMLn1 X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 Bytes: 3747 The other day [Good god, it was over a month and a half ago!] we had a discussion about old video game magazines; Computer Gaming World, Strategy Plus and the like. Archives to these were passed around, and -dutifully- I took a look at some of them, for nostalgia's sake. It was something to read (my new-to-me) laptop served particularly well in this role; it' sucks as a general-use tablet but for reading PDFs of thirty-year old magazines its 16" screen works gangbusters!) Anyway, if there's one take-away I've had from reading some of those old magazines, it's this: video game reviews are _so_ much better nowadays. Maybe it's just that the reporters are no longer restricted to certain word-counts. Maybe it's that we've all just gotten better at understanding what makes a good game or not. Maybe our expectations are better, and video-game reporting isn't seen as the lowest-tier of journalism anymore, so better writers are attracted to the industry. But, man, those early reviews were _shoddy_. It didn't seem to matter what magazine either; they were all universally shallow. Two-thirds of each review just unquestioningly rehashed the game's box-copy, and then the reviewers gave their opinions. There was almost no analysis or deep-dive into what was actually good or bad about the games; at most we got stuff like, "It was fun" or "it seemed a bit hard to play". Now, look; if you've been here at c.s.i.p.g.a you probably know I should be the last person to criticize somebody else's reviews. My monthly 'what have you been playing' lists are endless verbal diarrhea with little in the way of useful content. Then again, I'm not getting paid for these reviews (nor am I putting particularly much effort into them, or having them go past an editor's canny eye). Still, the stuff I write often has more depth to it than the stuff you'd read in video-game magazines of the 80s and 90s. There's a lot to dislike about modern video-game journalism, and I'd be remiss to suggest there aren't still a lot of shallow, publisher-serving reviews out there still. But on the whole, the bar has risen dramatically over the past thirty years; we're more suspicious about where a journalist's editorial loyalties lie, and in general just expect a broader understanding from reviewers about how games work, and what makes them good or bad. In the more innocent 80s or 90s, we'd accept the word of any schmuck they took off the street, even if he couldn't write well (and some of them really couldn't), so long as his words were under the masthead of a reputable magazine. So thank you, Internet. For once you actually didn't make things worse.