Destructoid's FFXIII review

[kane_magus]

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.

Comments

Re: Completely agree with you 100%

[timna45.livejournal.com]

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.