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%

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

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...)

Re: Completely agree with you 100%

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

"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. -_-

Re: Completely agree with you 100%

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

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.