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Ha ha ha, oh wow.
I've ranted a bit about it in the past, but this is probably the best (or perhaps "worst" would be a better word) of several similar recent examples* of why Destructoid (a site I used to love, by the way, but now visit maybe once a month or so, if that much) has become only slightly better than completely worthless to me lately. It's really disappointing because it used to be a great site. Still, I admittedly have a kind of vague "just how low will they stoop for page-views next time, I wonder" interest about it as well. It's the whole "train-wreck, can't look away" phenomenon at work.
* - Which I won't link here, because I don't want to give the site any more traffic than that, if I can help it. But if you just can't help yourself, look up the follow ups to the FFXIII review I linked above, their Assassin's Creed II review, or the several articles about Heavy Rain including their review of it, as well as the various rants against indie/art games and the "Counterpoint" articles that invariably show up a few days after the very few good reviews that they give (not counting the 10 out of 10 they gave to Deadly Premonition, because that was merely another "joke" at Heavy Rain's expense). A big impetus for a lot of it is just angry fanboys being angry fanboys, true enough, but even so, I feel there's a lot of legitimate beef to be had with some of the crap the site puts out these days. Not to mention the fact that there are usually a bunch of sycophantic, pro-Destructoid fanboys clogging the comments of these crappy articles lately, too, which is another reason I feel that the site has hit the skids.
In other words, Destructoid went from being a cool site to being just another typical, crappy gaming website, with a similarly typical, crappy gaming "community" to follow it.
I've ranted a bit about it in the past, but this is probably the best (or perhaps "worst" would be a better word) of several similar recent examples* of why Destructoid (a site I used to love, by the way, but now visit maybe once a month or so, if that much) has become only slightly better than completely worthless to me lately. It's really disappointing because it used to be a great site. Still, I admittedly have a kind of vague "just how low will they stoop for page-views next time, I wonder" interest about it as well. It's the whole "train-wreck, can't look away" phenomenon at work.
* - Which I won't link here, because I don't want to give the site any more traffic than that, if I can help it. But if you just can't help yourself, look up the follow ups to the FFXIII review I linked above, their Assassin's Creed II review, or the several articles about Heavy Rain including their review of it, as well as the various rants against indie/art games and the "Counterpoint" articles that invariably show up a few days after the very few good reviews that they give (not counting the 10 out of 10 they gave to Deadly Premonition, because that was merely another "joke" at Heavy Rain's expense). A big impetus for a lot of it is just angry fanboys being angry fanboys, true enough, but even so, I feel there's a lot of legitimate beef to be had with some of the crap the site puts out these days. Not to mention the fact that there are usually a bunch of sycophantic, pro-Destructoid fanboys clogging the comments of these crappy articles lately, too, which is another reason I feel that the site has hit the skids.
In other words, Destructoid went from being a cool site to being just another typical, crappy gaming website, with a similarly typical, crappy gaming "community" to follow it.
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no subject
Date: 2010-03-24 03:54 am (UTC)From:However, those positives become annoyances when it comes to their reviews because they lack the objectiveness a review should have. While I didn't mind the FFXIII review (his opinion after all...and ironically people's issues with the game are what I'm enjoying about it LOL) it's the Metro 2033 (or whatever year it is) review that got me completely disinterested in their reviews.
To openly 'give up' on a game because you don't believe in how a game is designed is LUDICROUS. His job is to review games and he should have played the game. Not given up. It's great that he pointed out the fault, but what about the rest of the game?
And of course, the "pro-desctructoid fanboys" say that not giving it a number is more credible than assigning it a ficticious number. I agree, but at the same time, no opinion (or 1/3 of an opinion I suppose) is not a valid one either.
In the end, I generally read game sites for articles about games rather than reviews and Destrucoid is one of the better sites I've come across in that regard. I generally regard their site as "fluff" for the most part and take most of what they say as humourous ramblings.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-24 07:33 am (UTC)From:I mostly enjoyed their non-review editorials and fluff pieces before, but lately, all the negativity surrounding the reviews has been spilling over into those as well. Look at the recent "joys of being a game reviewer" post, for such an example. I don't know... it just seems that the site, as a whole, has gotten a lot more mean-spirited than it used to be, and the raging fanboys, the sycophants, and the writers themselves (because they rarely fail to continue to stir the pot in the comments) all share the blame. I don't know what changed, but I would guess it's that they're just trying to cater to what has apparently become their new core demographic, given that every time there's a negative review or a similarly themed editorial or whatever, there seem to be more "in before flame war" or "looking forward to the fanboys showing up for this one" or such posts than there are actual angry fanboys showing up at times. By that, I mean that their primary audience nowadays seem to be denizens of 4chan or Encylopedia Dramatica or whatever. It didn't use to be that way. It used to be that you'd often see actual intelligent conversation in the comments, but those days seem to have gone the way of the dodo. The site just doesn't suit me anymore, in general, because of this kind of thing.
Well, mostly, it's just a couple of writers (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SmallNameBigEgo) (one of whom is the FFXIII review writer and the other of whom is the one who wrote the Metro whatever not-review), and their hordes of "lickspittles," that annoy me the most. The rest of the writers are pretty cool, for the most part. I also tend to enjoy the articles that get "promoted" from the community blogs (though I don't follow the community blogs themselves), because those are sometimes even better than the articles by the paid writers. Except, of course, when these articles are simply weighing in on whatever the latest brouhaha happens to be. Perhaps that even partially contradicts my earlier statement about the core demographic seeming to be mostly /b/tards these days. Heck, even those two particular writers themselves didn't start off bad, and still, even now, occasionally put out stuff that isn't completely flamebait. But, sadly, those two particular writers also seem to be the most prolific on the site, as well, and more and more of their output seems to be geared toward trolling the fanboys. It just sours me on the whole site overall.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-24 02:21 pm (UTC)From:The FFXIII reviewer - sarcastic son of a bitch who's angry at everything
The Metro non reviewer - games as art and indie gamer guy
It's great to have a particular characterization for people to relate to. This is another reason why Destructoid caught my attention. Their staff seemed unique and not at all faceless. They had loads of character and it felt more honest when they gave their opinions. However, it just seems they're getting too carried away with it at times.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-24 08:27 pm (UTC)From:This is pretty much it, in a nutshell. They seem to have forgotten that, at the end of the day, they're still just dudes talking about video games on the Internet. Sadly, there seems to be less people criticizing them for this (or, at least, criticizing them in a way that can't be simply brushed aside as "ignorant, immature fanboy" and thus safely ignored, or, worse, paraded around as examples of how all of their critics are supposedly that way) and more people who merely eat it all up and ask for seconds. Not that it matters, because they (the first guy, especially) can't seem to stand any sort of criticism.
Heh, on that note, I wonder if the second guy ever did anything in reaction to the two or three articles the first guy recently wrote about indie games and how they need to stop being so artsy and pretentious ("pretentious" being one of the first guy's favorite words, apparently, despite the fact that it describes him to a tee lately), given that this seems to be the second guy's bread and butter on the site. If he did, I never saw it, though I know the second guy did one of his video rants a few months before all of that in which the subject was how games need to stop being just about "fun" and need to try to strive for more, or some such thing, which seems to be diametrically opposed to what the first guy was saying in his own rant posts. This is a case where I kind of agreed with both of them and yet neither of them, simultaneously, if that makes any sense (though, that said, I agreed more with the art/indie guy than with the angry-about-everything guy, even if both of them hated The Path).
But yeah, the sort of thing I describe there seems to be what the site has become, more or less. More and more of the articles (including, especially, the reviews) seem to be rants about this or that. They claim that they're still not taking themselves seriously, and that it's all in fun or whatever, but more and more often it seems like Serious Business™ to me. I miss the truly laid back attitude that the site used to have.[1]
It seems to be a maxim, generally speaking, that the longer a site such as Destructoid, i.e. one with open forums and comment areas and such, is in existence and the more popular it gets, the more likely it is that the earlier users, who are usually much more civil and capable of non-retarded conversation overall, will tend to get driven away or otherwise become outnumbered by the newer, more 4chan/Encyclopedia Dramatica-esque newcomers, who may or may not simply show up, at least at first, just to troll the earlier group. And the more their readership changes, the more the content of the site seems to change to reflect that, and the more the content changes, the more such users (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LowestCommonDenominator) are attracted, and the cycle feeds on itself. (Of course, TvTropes may have a page (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ItsPopularNowItSucks) for that maxim, as well. >_>; But, ironically, that principle (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ItsPopularNowItSucks) seems to be the driving force behind more than a few of these negative articles that Destructoid itself is putting out lately, too.)
(splitting into two comments because LJ is complaining)
no subject
Date: 2010-03-24 08:44 pm (UTC)From:Personally, the idea that those two reviewers have is idiotic to some degree. I find that NO ONE every talks about intent when describing a game. It's something I'm noticing more and more in the way most reviews are written (game, book, movie, whatever). Most games just want to be about the fun. Artsy games want to be artsy (and often pretentious). Some games try to be bad (Earth Defense Force...so awesome) and are great because of it. Some are merely tech demos (Doom 3, Crysis) and some are self indulgent (Metal Gear Solid).
Personally, if a reviewer to were to try and define the possible intent for a game (or at least define it in their own opinion) the review would instant gain context to the writer and reader.
Anywho, waaaaaaay off topic now, but since it's just me and you in here, who cares right? LOL
no subject
Date: 2010-03-25 05:26 pm (UTC)From:I agree that creator intent would perhaps be an interesting point to note in reviews of things like this. That said, I remember (http://kane-magus.livejournal.com/142511.html) an article (on Destructoid, no less, written by Anthony Burch, aka the "games as art and indie gamer guy") about a game a while back, where, at least in the comments, they most definitely did get into talking about the intent of the creator of the game. (Burch, in the article itself, just said that the guy was probably boozed up when he made the game.) A bunch of the comments were along the lines of "Bah, whoever made this crap is just a smug, pretentious twat and it sucks" and then there were comments disagreeing with that assessment, and then still other comments saying things like "Even if the author of this game is a smug, pretentious twat, so what? The game is still cool and fun to play despite that." For what it's worth, too, the actual creator of the game, posting under the name "heliopod" made some comments in the thread about his intent in making the game. (And I have to agree that it would probably be pretty hard to write a Flash game, or a game in any other language, while under the influence of anything more than strong tea.)
Also, for that matter, in the FFXIII review that kicked all this off, Jim Sterling says that the game was a "pompous and masturbatory affair, created seemingly to promote the developer's ego first, and the player's enjoyment second." That's kind of talking about creator intent, or at least Sterling's malformed opinion of said intent for the purposes of trolling, anyway. I doubt that's what you were talking about though. >_>
no subject
Date: 2010-03-25 06:40 pm (UTC)From:As an aside, it's very interesting to see the differing opinions on Passage between "games as art and indie gamer guy" and the "sarcastic son of a bitch who's angry at everything" (http://www.destructoid.com/passage-in-ten-seconds-art-games-lol--164818.phtml) (and all his "lickspittles" (thanks again TvTropes)).
no subject
Date: 2010-03-25 09:24 pm (UTC)From:I mean, Square Enix openly said that they wanted to create a strongly linear game so they could control the experience. You cannot all of a sudden hold it against them for creating a linear game. You may not agree with it, but you have to judge it accordingly.
Just like if you don't like the colour pink, and an artist uses the colour pink, you don't dimiss it. You judge it based on how he used the colour pink and weather he was successful or not.
I don't understand why reviewers (of anything) fail to understand this. That's why I've always like reading Roger Ebert's movie reviews. While I don't always agree with him, he often had the ability to judge what was on the screen for what it was, not what it wasn't.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-24 08:28 pm (UTC)From:In any event, even though I used to think the site was awesome, it still makes me kind of glad that I remained a pure lurker and never got around to making a user account there, though there were quite a few times when I was tempted to do so, both back in the day and more recently, either in agreement with or in opposition to various articles. I'm not a big fan of participating in flame wars at all, however, after getting embroiled in a nasty one over a decade ago (for you OW!ers that may be reading this, yeah, I'm talking about all (http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.sailor-moon/msg/38562d1a03f1bd9b?hl=en&dmode=source)[2] of (http://web.archive.org/web/20010508113014/http://www.otakuwars.org/~kane_magus/How_not_to_handle_author-to-author_relations.txt) that (http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.sailor-moon/browse_thread/thread/4d774c1498c3863e/01513ed88181777c?#01513ed88181777c) retarded (http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.sailor-moon/browse_thread/thread/7d7011837fe3039b/c0ec70b3ed5fa666?hl=en&q=group:alt.fan.sailor-moon+insubject:two+insubject:tuxedos+insubject:are+insubject:better+insubject:than+insubject:one#c0ec70b3ed5fa666) old (http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.sailor-moon/browse_thread/thread/7939c14f3ada20e3/ac9ff30008fbe3f4?hl=en&#ac9ff30008fbe3f4) crap (http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.sailor-moon/browse_thread/thread/5c25effbbd560e83/5c216abb5586ac6e?hl=en%05c216abb5586ac6e)[3], which still, to this day, has me rather gun shy about getting caught up in flamewars), so my likelihood of ever creating an account there is forever diminishing.
And.... I seem to be getting way too worked up over this. ^^; It's kind of worse, though, because I'm not so much angry about this as I am severely disappointed by it.
[1] - Though, to be honest, they kind of lost that way back when that Summa guy was around. They finally wised up and got rid of him (supposedly he left of his own accord, but I think there was pressure, both internally and externally, for him to be gone), even despite the fact that when they hired him, for whatever unknown reason, it was right after he had been previously fired from joystiq for more or less the exact same thing that eventually drove him away from Destructoid as well. But... even though they did get better for a little while after that, the site still never seemed to fully recover what it was before all of that needless drama (which is very similar to the needless drama we're seeing now). That was also around the time I started seeing more and more of the "lickspittles" (I do like that word, thanks TvTropes) showing up. And once they start showing up, that was all she wrote. They just now seem to have shifted their attentions from that guy to these other guys.
[2] - Holy crap! (http://web.archive.org/web/20010604043112/http://www.otakuwars.org/~kane_magus/Diablo-Pepin_and_Farnham.wav) O_O Archive.org is awesome.
[3] - At the risk of getting entirely off-topic... Seriously, has it really been that long? It's almost like another lifetime. >_> And how, not to mention why, was I able to find all of that stuff so quickly and easily, when I haven't thought about any of it in years, until now... ^^; It was definitely not a highlight, and was in fact probably the lowlight, of my time in the OW! >_>; In any case, it's all ancient history and I'm not even sure why I'm bothering to rehash any of it now, aside from pure morbid nostalgia (or whatever word there is that means "negative nostalgia," assuming such a word exists).
no subject
Date: 2010-03-25 10:09 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2010-03-25 04:43 pm (UTC)From:My site (http://web.archive.org/web/20010502151550/http://www.otakuwars.org/~kane_magus/) is still mostly there, anyway, including that big, scary, blue header pic. Sadly, it seems that SD-KM's theme, the one thing I would have wanted to pull from there since I don't have access to it on my broken PC at home, is the one thing from my site that isn't actually being stored there.
Completely agree with you 100%
Date: 2010-06-13 03:28 am (UTC)From:I have been frustrated reading Jim Sterling's all-over-the-map "journalism" for a year now, and it's no less cringe-worthy than it was when I first discovered him. (his humor was funny for about the first article that I read by him, but it got old very quickly...)
I find that Jim Sterling is infinitely worse than the 18 year old PS3 fans which he goes out of his way to enrage. Not only do I find the scores on the games he gives to almost be the inverse (or differing within + or - 4 points of the average review on metacritic) of what the games actually deserve (which isn't that big of a deal alone), but his reasoning about why the games are "bad" (or good) are usually very poorly explained, or it becomes apparent that the reason why he liked/disliked the game was based a shallow reason. I find the inflammatory nature of his comments to be consistently irritating, unprofessional and unfunny.
The guy pretty much comes into reviews of many famous games with a preconceived bias, like writing negative articles about Heavy Rain before even playing it, giving some low budget game a "so and so game is BLATANTLY better than... game X". It's really hard to determine if the dude is just an unfunny version of the onion magazine, or is just a pretentious prick who actually does take himself seriously. (I would say both, but I'm leaning more on the latter) I really don't know for sure, but based on his rebuttals, it seems that he is dead serious in most of his comments.
The thing that really gets to me are how he gets so hurt by negative critiques of his disrespectful tone and generally against-the-grain-for-the-sake-of-it writing. What a poor little snowflake. The fact that he simply highlights immature 18 year old comments (low hanging fruit, who are not really reflective of game fans as a whole) is pretty lame too, as there are often quite a few constructive comments who he responds to with a certain level of hostility and defensiveness, if at all.
I also agree that just about every other reviewer on Destructoid is pretty decent, which I found surprising.
Sadly, I think that Jim Sterling will continue to be successful precisely due to his inflammatory humor and the group of (how should I put it... "ass-kisser" groupies?) irritating fans who excuse his rudeness and immaturity. Seriously, just because he writes in all likelihood from a country protecting freedom of speech doesn't mean that toning down his rhetoric wouldn't do the world of gaming journalism a big favor.
The fact that this dude equates "fanboys" of games to be the equivalent of terrorists and religious fundamentalists shouldn't win him any favors with anyone, yet it seems to be that articles like those that get Destructoid most of it's page views, alas.
In some ways, Jim Sterling is the "Xah Lee" of video games. If you don't know who that man is, trust me, you don't want to know.
That said, he really is only a video game reviewer, but I find it appalling that this slacker is adored, when he should be completely ignored, or better yet, fired.
Re: Completely agree with you 100%
Date: 2010-06-13 03:41 am (UTC)From:Re: Completely agree with you 100%
Date: 2010-06-13 09:54 am (UTC)From:Yeah, I think that Jim himself has become, in essence, the thing that he supposedly claims to hate, or at least pretends to hate, that is to say: an obnoxious fanboy. In his case, the thing that he has become a fanboy of is himself and his own writing (and, as such, he treats his detractors in the manner that you'd expect an offended fanboy would). I think he may have been given too much power and responsibility. He's the "Reviews Editor" now, whoop-de-doo, and when he gained that title was around the time that he started to suck in earnest. Perhaps it's more than he can adequately handle, and as such has let it go completely to his head. This, of course, has manifested itself in his ever more blatant trolling lately. That wouldn't be so bad, except that instead of the rest of the site putting a leash and muzzle on him, they instead seem to be encouraging him to be even worse. The "community" certainly is, without a doubt, but I don't think his fellow editors and the site owners are doing much of anything to curb his excesses either.
His problem is that he definitely does take himself way too seriously. Yet when called out on it, he always does this magnificently impressive backpedal by claiming that, no, he in fact doesn't take himself seriously at all. If you call him out on his horrible journalism, his counter is to say that, hey, he's not a journalist, but is, indeed, just some dude on a website talking about video games, as though this somehow makes it perfectly okay for him to be a raging douchebag (not that he sees himself as such, of course). I don't really think he believes that, I just think it's something to which he pays lip service in order to stroke the egos of his legion of fanboys in the comments. Pretending that he's just one of the little people, as it were, and it's a big part of the reason he has so many sycophants, and is able to get away with so much rubbish. Or, you know, maybe he really does believe that he is, in reality, as funny as he is in his own mind, and that he's just some poor little flower who's being harshly and unfairly hated upon by a few big, ol' bed-wetting doody heads. Either way, it comes to the same end.
The sad thing is, back when he was getting started on the site and really was just one among many other editors, he honestly wasn't that bad. I'm still trying to wrap my head around what it is exactly that has gone wrong here, and why he has become as terrible as he has. Hell, I don't know, it may have simply been his move from the UK to the US that caused the change. It mostly seems to be a combination of, as I said above, too much responsibility and leeway given to him, and not nearly enough oversight to rein him in (assuming they even want to rein him in, given that he does bring in the page-views, there's no doubt in that), and the fact that there are far too many popcorn-munching lickspittles sitting in the comments, egging him ever onward, giggling at all the "lulz" he is continually generating. Honestly, I have more problems with these people than I do with Jim himself, almost, since without them Jim wouldn't be where and what he is today, for good and for ill. Sterling's assholery can potentially be seen more as reflection on Destructoid itself and its so-called "community", than on Jim in particular, since it could be argued that Jim is merely doing his job and giving the "community" what it wants. I personally think it's a column A/column B thing, though.
(splitting for length)
Re: Completely agree with you 100%
Date: 2010-06-13 09:55 am (UTC)From:As for the reviews themselves, of the very few that I've been able to stomach since they started to get really bad, I found that he tends to go to one extreme or another. He either finds some tiny, nitpicky little thing, that may actually be a legitimate grievance with a given game, but then he blows it all out of proportion, or else he will make these big, sweeping generalizations about the game which tell the reader absolutely nothing of real value, yet are excellent for the purposes of trolling. Typically, it's both of those things, with an underlying layer of simple, pure asshattery. But my main problem with his reviews isn't so much the reviews themselves, because they are what they are, but that there seem to be so many people who take them seriously. If you read many of the comments of any given review of his, you'll see things like "Too bad, I was thinking of trying that game, but now I won't" or "Glad I read this review, I dodged a bullet there" or "Thanks for saving me $60, Jim" and so on and so forth, and I find that utterly depressing since his reviews tend to be much worse than merely useless. As I've said elsewhere, it's gotten to the point where if I look at a review and see that Jim has given a game a horribly low score, that's a pretty reliable indicator that the game in question is actually going to be at least decent, perhaps even great.
And about the scores, the numbers are absolutely pointless. The only reason they bother to use them at all is so that they'll get included in Metacritic and such. Case in point: Jim actually gave Heavy Rain a 7 out of 10, believe it or not. (Seriously, I was surprised because I had forgotten that he'd given it such a high score when I went back later after writing the above post and looked at the review again.) And given how Destructoid claims to want to use "the whole scale" rather than the so-called "7-10 scale" that they claim most other sites use, a 7/10 from Destructoid should, you'd think, be equivalent to above 9/10 from any other site, i.e. (0.7 * 3) + 7 = 9.1 out of 10, assuming that 7 is the absolute worst and 10 is the best on the "7-10 scale". Of course, the assumption of the "7-10 scale" is ludicrous to begin with, since the sites they claim use it have often given scores well below that anyway. And yet, despite all of that, look at how much Sterling has bashed Heavy Rain, both before and after the review, as you pointed out. The meaningless score doesn't in any way reflect how Sterling actually felt about the game, given all of the other evidence.
I'm just hoping that he'll continue to get worse and worse, which definitely seems to be the course he's currently on, and that eventually (hopefully sooner rather than later) he'll reach a sort of critical mass of suckage such that even his most ardent of supporters will finally see through his bullshit, and the site will finally get off of its collective ass and do something about him. Well, actually, I'd prefer that he'd stop being so horrible altogether and go back to what he was before, but if I can't have the latter, I'll take the former.
As an aside, I was kind of shocked to learn a few days ago that Anthony Burch left the site (http://www.destructoid.com/see-you-around-destructoid-172126.phtml) almost two months ago (shows you how long it's been since I bothered paying attention to the site). Given that he was one of the two most problematic writers on the site (the other being Sterling, of course), I can't say that I'm sad to see him gone. Though, to be fair to Burch, he didn't hold a candle to Sterling (or even Robert Summa) when it came to sucking. Oh, and speaking of Summa, Sterling has long since passed that particular threshold of suckage, in my book. Summa used to be the impossibly high bar of sucking that I thought nobody else could possibly top, but Sterling has managed to easily vault over it with miles to spare.
Re: Completely agree with you 100%
Date: 2010-06-13 10:04 am (UTC)From:Re: Completely agree with you 100%
Date: 2010-06-14 05:32 am (UTC)From:For me, it was a string of reviews that seemed inflammatory (Final Fantasy 13, Assassin's Creed 2, negative previews of Heavy Rain, fairly negative review of heavy rain, and finally, the infamous "so and so low budget game is blatantly better than Heavy Rain" article) reviews/editorials, with each new one making me trust him less and less. I'm sure there are dozens of other misleading editorials by Mr. Sterling that I haven't even had the bad fortune of reading _yet_, but the non-review editorials that I read by him were annoying enough already -- the reviews were pretty much the last straw.
Re: Completely agree with you 100%
Date: 2010-06-14 05:34 am (UTC)From:That's his thing. He'll write a shitty review for a good game, and then waste the next three or four editorials on defending that review, continuing to bash the game he reviewed, and whining about all the people that called him out for his piss poor review. In the case of Heavy Rain, he simply used a review for another game in this process.
The "Blatantly Better" articles in general are supposedly not meant to be taken seriously, and he's been doing them for a while. They're just another example of Mr. Sterling's so-called "humor". He's done other "Blatantly Better" articles with other things, such as the PSP vs the DS, Prototype vs Infamous, and so on. I don't find them very funny at all, but his bootlickers seem to eat it up, just as one would expect of them.
As for me, I haven't had much faith in Destructoid's reviews ever since the very first one they ever did, for Twilight Princess, in which one of the editors gave it a 4/10. I could see even then that stirring up shit was going to be more important to them than actually fairly reviewing a game. Sterling has simply taken this attitude and run it into the ground.
Re: Completely agree with you 100%
Date: 2010-06-14 06:16 am (UTC)From:Whether or not the lousy reviews of Sterling and Co. will result in copycats and thus render reviews to be random, emotional and completely useless remains to be seen, but for the time being I can at still count on most other reviewers to give me a good idea of what they liked/disliked about the game, and why. I would go so far to say that I'd rather just see inflated but consistent reviews, done almost to form a consensus with what the reviewer would expect most gamers to enjoy.
I agree the Twilight Princess 4/10 was completely unfair, but at least they had multiple people reviewing the game to cancel out non-standard opinions, (if I remembered correctly) which worked well. Nonetheless, it's an insult to an otherwise top-tier franchise entry.
I guess reviewers like Jim Sterling just have idiosyncratic views on the way games should be, but I think more than anything else, he believed that his views were somehow the unsung truth of the gaming industry, when quite possibly they didn't even reflect his enjoyment of the games in question, but rather nostalgia about past installments, or his frustrations that the games weren't something entirely different.
Re: Completely agree with you 100%
Date: 2010-06-14 05:20 am (UTC)From:It becomes even more comical when keeping in mind that Jim Sterling has probably never programmed nor contributed to the development any game in his life, and apparently has no clue the amount of craftsmanship and effort required to create a modern video game. I cannot believe, in the current economy, how such a piss poor journalist can be promoted, let alone remain employed, I just cannot understand.
The community, (or, as I would call them, the ass kissers) or at least those that comment on his recent articles, just make me want to gag. It seems that he has at least 10 strident defenders on every article, ready to take up into arms the slightest bit of disagreement. What I find most absurd is that for a forum with a comments policy specifying as a requirement "Don't suck!", there is sure a lot of "sucking" going on just about any of his threads, and it seems to have permeated into other editors threads, even when the editors are fairly mild-mannered.
Hearing that there are/were even more cranks currently or previously writing for Destructoid is not encouraging to me, (I'm not yet familiar with the others you mentioned, although I probably don't want to be, at some point I'll look up their "reviews" -- I can totally understand that you don't want to promote their idiocy on to the search engines) although there are a few really good editors who seem to get lost in the shuffle. Unfortunately, they are either not very prolific, or don't get noticed as easily, such as Dale North, and probably a dozen others that I've stumbled across on the web site. But sadly, they get drowned in the storm of idiocy coming from the bad apples. Apparently it only takes one at a time to wreck most of the web site and community.
I actually ran into Destructoid originally via vgchartz and other gaming web sites, so I'm not familiar with some of it's previous more notorious editors, perhaps Jim Sterling isn't even close to Burch or Summa in suckage, though I'm not sure if I want to develop a basis for comparison, but I'll probably run into them through web searches eventually...
Re: Completely agree with you 100%
Date: 2010-06-14 07:14 am (UTC)From:As for the earlier editors on the site...
Robert Summa was fired from Joystiq (http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&as_qdr=all&q=robert+summa+fired+joystiq&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=) back in late 2006, which was maybe a month or two after I found Destructoid and started regularly following it, and Destructoid immediately snapped him up and give him a new job. That should tell you something right there, though I only realize it now with hindsight. He'd also written an article (http://gonintendo.com/wp-content/photos/061017metrosumma.jpg) for a print newspaper at some point, well before the Wii was released, predicting that Nintendo would come in third in the then upcoming "next generation" of consoles. He spent pretty much the entirety of his year or so on Destructoid (during which he somehow made it as high as editor-in-chief of the site) trying to justify that article and prove himself right, before he finally left, or, perhaps, was kicked out. I'm not entirely sure what went down behind the scenes, but the scuttlebutt was that the parting was not entirely amicable. On the site, most of the articles that were written by him as an editor have had his name replaced with "World Famous (http://www.destructoid.com/elephant/index.phtml?a=1335)", and I'm not sure if that is some kind of in-joke or a none-too-subtle Take That. All of that said, however, Summa also had plenty of his own ass-kissers as well, for pretty much the same reasons that Sterling has them now. He was also a huge PS3 fanboy, though he always denied it. He was only marginally better at taking criticism than Sterling is now. Here (http://dt1.destructoid.com/forum/showpost.php?s=004dd03bfce547bcee6f02e9eece81e7&p=168051&postcount=9) is a pretty good description of Summa, from this (http://dt1.destructoid.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7750) thread on Destructoid itself. The most amazing thing about that thread, to me, is how most of the comments could easily have the name "Robert Summa" replaced with "Jim Sterling" and still be almost entirely accurate. Speaking of Sterling, he joined the site maybe a month or two before Summa finally left. I don't know, maybe Sterling was just that bad all along, and I personally didn't see it simply because the site as a whole was still coming off of the Summa low. But as bad as Summa may have been when he was still there, Sterling has now shown himself to be worse by this point, in my opinion, though that could simply be because he's been there for a longer amount of time than Summa was. Oh, and I just noticed this myself, but take a look at this comment of Jim's in Summa's farewell post (http://www.destructoid.com/goodbye-destructoid-i-will-miss-you-32296.phtml): "I always enjoyed reading the shitstorms that would ensue from your posts. To be honest? I never got quite how you were able to shrug it all off so effortlessly."
(frickin' LJ and it's character limit...)
Re: Completely agree with you 100%
Date: 2010-06-14 07:30 am (UTC)From:Re: Completely agree with you 100%
Date: 2010-06-14 08:02 am (UTC)From:At any rate, it's mostly irrelevant to why Summa sucked so much in his articles.
Re: Completely agree with you 100%
Date: 2010-06-14 07:15 am (UTC)From:Anthony Burch wasn't all that bad, to be honest. (Though he was the guy that gave Twilight Princess the 4 out of 10 I mentioned in the other comment. Summa, who was one of the three who co-wrote that review, actually gave it an 8/10, surprisingly enough, given his otherwise anti-Wii nature.) Burch was a bit of an indie-game snob, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but toward the end of the time that I regularly read the site prior to his departure, he seemed to be getting more and more full of himself, though still nowhere near as bad as Sterling.
And yeah, most of the other people on the site are pretty good. Well, at the very least, they're inoffensive. A couple of them have tried to be Sterling-lite on occasion, but they seem to take criticism better than Sterling himself does, and so it didn't tend to last very long. As for some of the others that have left, I miss Ron Workman (http://www.nerve.com/archived/blogs/ron-workman-calls-out-destructoid-for-sloppy-journalism), who was there pretty much from the beginning of the site. He was a bit rough around the edges as well, but at least he could laugh at himself in a way that Summa and Sterling couldn't. I miss Aaron Linde as well, who was an all around decent guy. Earnest "Nex" Cavalli was a good one as well.