As the world anxiously awaits the release of The Next Big Thing(s), I wanted to revisit a topic I had written about a few months back: professional game review sites/publications and the sorry state of independent (read: not purchased and paid for) gaming media.
Not that I can do much better, but hell … in the land of the idiots, the half-wit is king.
Have a look around at the review sites. Do you really think a site with flashing banners of “Me love you long time for 5 dollah (wait for animation) IN GRAND FELONY YUGOCRAFT 2!!” isn’t whoring out the wordcount to GFY2?
Ya ya, they’ve got to pay their bills somehow. With conferences to attend, game boxes, subscriptions, bandwidth, it really adds up. It couldn’t hurt, that much, to make a deal with the devil (so to speak), could it?
Except for one problem: the devil always gets his due. In my case, usually the morning after a big bender, but that’s another issue.
I prefer the little guys’ sites. The guys that play a couple of games and they both love and hate the ones they play. And since everyone is waxing poetic about Lum’s old place this week: ya, kinda like Lum’s was … before he got the suit.
I use GAME!!!!INFORMER!!!! and FilePlanetOfBannersAndPopups for news I mostly can’t use, but for the real dirt, I look for the little guys. They don’t have stats and studies to analyze why we players think losing three hours of gameplay for one death is stupid. They KNOW it’s stupid because they’ve lived it. Virtually, of course.
They don’t get a dozen Fed Ex boxes, compliments of Next Big Thing, Inc., and they aren’t in bed with Sony Online or The Vision(tm). Nothing against those who are getting the high hard one from Sony; I’m just not interested in what they have to say.
We stand on the cusp of a gaming journalism frontier (or for you cynics, an abyss). We’re still in a “bought and paid for” era; we’re starved for thoughtful, independent media attention. So, until the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times have an entire weekly section devoted to gaming, I seek out the little guys.
There’s very few of them. But, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.