Another lame Twitterhead comic in a long line of lame Twitterhead comics. Glad to see membership tanked again this month. Means all the counterpoints from the Twitter defenders will be hitting shortly, and those are always good for a laugh.
What’s more likely to happen: The Mayan doomsday scenarios depicted in Hollywood blockbuster schlock like 2012, or Sony’s gaming division actually turning a profit?
I don’t think either has a legitimate chance of happening, but if I’m wrong they’ll probably happen at about the same time.
SATIRE, U.S.A. — Citing customer demand, Activision Blizzard announced today a new line of video game booths that reviewers will now use to review the company’s cutting edge, critically acclaimed games, including Modern Warfare 2 and the upcoming Starcraft 2.
The posh, portable chambers can be custom-fitted to serve the video game journalist’s every need, including lush 5.1 surround sound, 50-inch plasma screen HDTVs, and travel/hotel accommodations across the U.S.
“We’re not influencing reviews with this new product, so much as we’re giving the game reviewer piece of mind so that they can best serve their readers,” said Activision Blizzard Game Review Relations Director Trent McBias. “Also, there are snacks.”
All Activision game reviews will be conducted in this manner going forward, read a release from Activision.
From Newsweek today:
Why did Harry Potter and Twilight become so cool, when Dungeons & Dragons was never cool? Not to play Joseph Campbell here, but it seems that for fantasy to be acceptable, the fantasy can’t come first. A story has to earn its street cred first – the reality has to feel really piercing, and then put the child in a situation of unusual responsibility.
Indeed, and I immediately applied this to video games. Video game movies suck, by and large, because they are based on a medium that have shallow stories and stupid, predictable characters, in predictably stupid scenarios. Like when you’re asked to shoot up a civilian airport as part of a marketing effort to generate buzz about your boring FPS, for example.
The irony is the hardcore gamers who love these games so much and want them to become movies think they’re perfect, worthy of the “art” category, and think they can serve as a legitimate discussion points in an argument about the importance of video games in popular culture.
But they have no story. Other than shooting things with guns, I mean. Hardcore gamers are the Dungeons & Dragons players of our time. They have no story.
I had the most eye-opening, disheartening discussion with a video games journalist today about review policy, free trips, and objectivity.
Lemmings off a cliff came to mind more than a few times throughout the course of the discussion. These guys really are being paraded around by the major publishers like puppets. Sad thing is they don’t know, or, if they do, they’ve managed to convince themselves everything is peachy keen so long as they throw up a disclaimer and say it was all done “in the reader’s best interest.”
In a land where all reviews are apparently bought and paid for by the publishers, the real “reader’s best interest” is the one publication that picks up the game at retail, sacrifices the page views for not being first, and reviews the game honestly.
I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Which video game publication is going to be the first to sack up and cover Nintendo games and news like a big boy?
Is there any mainstream video games journalist who didn’t get flown into Infinity Ward’s studio to “review” Modern Warfare 2? Did they hand you the review guidelines before you started playing, or after? Did Infinity Ward assign who got to do a 10 review, and who got to do a 9? Was that determined by drawing straws, or site traffic goals, or what?
What a joke.
Here’s a wild and crazy question: Why the fuck were so many video games “journalists” flown into Infinity Ward to “review” the game on the developer’s home turf? They couldn’t mail them a copy like it’s been done since the 1980s?
OK, it doesn’t really, but I’d love to see all the pimply little bigots who play this game and act as though being good at it means something try real war on for size. Soiled underpants, anyone?
Gee. I wonder why companies don’t take these pissy-pants little boycotts so seriously. Hmm. Truly dumbfounded.