kane_magus | 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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

Destructoid's FFXIII review

Re: Completely agree with you 100%

Re: Completely agree with you 100%

Re: Completely agree with you 100%