![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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.