kane_magus | Destructoid's FFXIII review

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Destructoid's FFXIII review

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.

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(continued from previous)

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.

Or, it just occurred to me, maybe Jim's score of 7 to Heavy Rain was meant to be sarcastic, in that he might have been actually utilizing the supposed "7-10 scale" himself, in that case. That, at least, would jive more with all the bashing of the game that he did. I'm probably giving him too much credit there, though.

Well, for me it wasn't so much Jim's score of Heavy Rain, but rather his strongly negative tone of a game acclaimed by both critics and fans, and it seemed like his negative preconceived notions of the game interfered with both his objectivity, and in all likelihood, his enjoyment of the game. I have no idea if the low budget game that Jim Sterling said was "blatantly better" than it actually was, but I seriously have my doubts. I don't even trust the integrity of his statement, as I think he was mainly focused on the > sign in his editorial. I don't care if it was actually sarcasm or not either, I'm sure the developers of the low budget game are laughing hysterically.

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.

The game that he said was "blatantly better" than Heavy Rain was Deadly Premonition (http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/xbox360/deadlypremonition?q=deadly%20premonition), a game that is... not very good at all, which is something that really isn't up for debate. Whether it's "so bad, it's good" or "so bad, it's horrible", however, is open to interpretation, but in either case, to imply that it's even in the same league as Heavy Rain, much less that it's "blatantly better", is just another unfunny attempt at a joke on Sterling's part. Not to mention the fact that in his actual review for Deadly Premonition, Jim gave it a 10/10, which is simply further proof that the score numbers on Dtoid are absolutely useless. The whole thing, both the review of Deadly Premonition and the "Blatantly Better" article, were little more than further digs at Heavy Rain. That's the way I saw it, anyway.

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.

I'm aware that the editorials in their entirety are meant to be satirical, but they aren't funny enough to be justified. It seems that Deadly Premonition review was dictated by his desire to write one of those articles in this case, which is what bugged me. I guess the end result is that Metacritic will be a marginally less useful tool than it usually is, but fortunately most critics are competent at their easy jobs, so even with Sterling around, I can still determine if a game is junk before buying it.

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.

I've never thought of Jim Sterling in that way, but now that you mention it, your "fanboy of himself" theory really seems to describe him to a T, as comical as it might seem. How some guy who is a reviewer for a fairly niche internet site has gotten such delusions of grandeur is beyond me. The man speaks as if he is Kojima, Miyamoto, Sakaguichi, or a leader of one of the big three console companies. I guess even a reviewer can let what little power they have get to their heads...

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...

I had been following Destructoid pretty much since it got its start, back in 2006. Only recently, maybe within the past half a year or so, did I finally get so fed up with the site that I stopped bothering to visit much anymore, because both the articles themselves and the comments underneath those articles were getting increasingly stupid. The only reason it took me that long was simply because I'd been reading it for so long. If I'd only found the site in the past year or so, I probably wouldn't have given it even a second glance. I still check it every once in a while, even now, for what it's worth, but then I see that most of the articles still seem to have the "Jim Sterling" byline, which makes me go away again.

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...)

"its character limit" dammit. Meh, I'm sure that's not the only typo I didn't catch, but it's right there at the end and it bugs me. -_-

Oh, and all that stuff about Summa and the 19 year old girl that comes up later on in that Destructoid forum thread I posted... that's all new to me as well, since I never really got into the forum aspect of Destructoid. I have no idea what it's all about, other than what was talked about in the thread. I do vaguely remember a few videos of Epileptic Gaming (which sucked pretty hard, from what little I remember of it) being posted on the Destructoid front page around the time just prior to Summa leaving, and that Summa and the girl were sometimes guests on that show, before he left and joined them full time.

At any rate, it's mostly irrelevant to why Summa sucked so much in his articles.

(once again, continued from previous)

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.

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Destructoid's FFXIII review

Re: Completely agree with you 100%

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