Decline Share The Absolute Worst of Game Journalism

[Fedora Master]

Initial scores upon the release.

 

[Chanel Oberlin]

Or do you want to read about the time a Daily Dot game journalist played through Fall Guys with a butt plug programmed to go off whenever their controller vibrated?

Ana Valens eh? mmm...

Get to know your new favorite journalist​

Journalist, author, and video game designer Ana Valens is someone I very much admire. Valens writes about things other people are too scared of getting wrong. But whether it’s covering ‘hypnoslut’ gamers as a NSFW columnist at The Daily Dot, going long on Tumblr porn for her novel, or offering her perspective as managing editor of We Got This Covered, Valens dissects her subjects with enough close care to serve a pufferfish. After meeting at a Brooklyn bar, we talked about gaming and how women writers exist in it.

Tell me a little bit about you and how you first got into gaming. How has your relationship to the video game community changed since then?​

Hi! I’m a games journalist and critic and an adult game developer. I currently serve as managing editor for the geekdom site We Got This Covered, which was recently acquired by Gamurs.

My relationship to the video game community has definitely changed over the years. I’ve played video games since I was a kid, and I used to read Kotaku and Joystiq (RIP) daily as a teen. I definitely started out as a bit of a gamer, then moved on to more nuanced political beliefs about the games world during my college years.

I’d definitely say I went from left-of-center to a bit of a leftist, with very radically inclined queer beliefs about what games are and what they can be. Case in point, I’m an enormous advocate for supporting the adult side of the games community, and my writing tends to spotlight how kinky pornographic titles can be affirming for queer players (and what happens when they’re not).

(If you want to keep staring into the abyss: https://www.destructoid.com/ana-valens-interview/ )

 

[Dave the Druid]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk1Hvm8WIgM (pretty much anything by Jimquisition is cringe, but this is from my archive of cringe)

What the actual fuck am I watching?

 

[octavius]

Initial scores upon the release.

But do they use the 7-10 scale, or the 1-10 scale?

 

[Falksi]

Here's an all-time favorite of mine from 2010. Kotaku's (then) editor-in-chief, Stephen Totilo, has never played the original Doom so he decides to rectify that. TL;DR version: he somehow manages to get lost in E1M1, killed in E1M2 right after getting the shotgun and then declares that he has now played Doom. Here it is in its entirety. I apologize in advance for this, might just be the worst thing I've ever read:

WARNING: Games Journalism

That's incredible

I can't find the piece now, but some kid reviewed The Immortal and gave it a 2/10, stating "it has lots of cheap deaths and is impossible at times" to then state "the game can be finished in 45 minutes" too

So essentially "I've died a handful of times on the Immortal, but instead of spending weeks/months/years working on those challenges and drinking in the delicious satisfaction which comes with overcoming them, I save-stated my way through it and class it as a 45 minute game. I have now beat The Immortal"

These cunts are hilarious.

 

[JamesDixon]

Or do you want to read about the time a Daily Dot game journalist played through Fall Guys with a butt plug programmed to go off whenever their controller vibrated?

Ana Valens eh? mmm...

Get to know your new favorite journalist​

Journalist, author, and video game designer Ana Valens is someone I very much admire. Valens writes about things other people are too scared of getting wrong. But whether it’s covering ‘hypnoslut’ gamers as a NSFW columnist at The Daily Dot, going long on Tumblr porn for her novel, or offering her perspective as managing editor of We Got This Covered, Valens dissects her subjects with enough close care to serve a pufferfish. After meeting at a Brooklyn bar, we talked about gaming and how women writers exist in it.

Tell me a little bit about you and how you first got into gaming. How has your relationship to the video game community changed since then?​

Hi! I’m a games journalist and critic and an adult game developer. I currently serve as managing editor for the geekdom site We Got This Covered, which was recently acquired by Gamurs.

My relationship to the video game community has definitely changed over the years. I’ve played video games since I was a kid, and I used to read Kotaku and Joystiq (RIP) daily as a teen. I definitely started out as a bit of a gamer, then moved on to more nuanced political beliefs about the games world during my college years.

I’d definitely say I went from left-of-center to a bit of a leftist, with very radically inclined queer beliefs about what games are and what they can be. Case in point, I’m an enormous advocate for supporting the adult side of the games community, and my writing tends to spotlight how kinky pornographic titles can be affirming for queer players (and what happens when they’re not).

(If you want to keep staring into the abyss: https://www.destructoid.com/ana-valens-interview/ )

That's a dude just in case anyone was wondering.

 

[octavius]

Thanks to this thread I realize that I haven't missed any thing useful by not reading any gaming journalists the past 25 years. I think Joel Mathis was the last journalist I "knew".
I learnt a long time ago that word on the interwebs (first Usenet and later the Codex and YouTube) was more reliable than people bribed paid for voicing their opinions.

 

[V17]

Can't believe nobody has posted the Kingdom Come: Deliverance review at Eurogamer yet.
It contains some weird shit like "There's a sense of B-movie-ism compared with a blockbuster like The Witcher 3" and complaining about inventory management.
But the real idiocy of course is them complaining that there are not enough non-white people. Not only that, the author seemingly knew that what he's saying is unfounded, so he ended it in a weasely paragraph saying basically "We cannot be sure that KC:D isn't racist! I'm just asking questions!" and defended his claims by saying that the CEO is a bad guy.

But there's also a big problem. There are no people of colour in the game beyond people from the Cuman tribe, a Turkic people from the Eurasian Steppe. The question is, should there be? The game's makers say they've done years of research and found no conclusive proof there should be, but a historian I spoke to, who specialises in the area, disagrees.

"We know of African kings in Constantinople on pilgrimage to Spain; we know of black Moors in Spain; we know of extensive travel of Jews from the courts of Cordoba and Damascus; we also know of black people in large cities in Germany," the historian, Sean Miller, tells me. Czech cities Olomouc and Prague were on the famous Silk Road which facilitated the trade of goods all over the world. If you plot a line between them, it runs directly through the area recreated in Kingdom Come. "You just can't know nobody got sick and stayed a longer time," he says. "What if a group of black Africans came through and stayed at an inn and someone got pregnant? Even one night is enough for a pregnancy."

It's not conclusive proof but it's readily available doubt to undermine Warhorse's interpretation. What muddies the water further is whose interpretation it overridingly is: creative director, writer and Warhorse co-founder Daniel Vavra's. He has been a vocal supporter of GamerGate and involved in antagonistic exchanges on Twitter (collected in a ResetEra thread). More recently, he wore the same T-shirt depicting an album cover by the band Burzum every day at Gamescom 2017 - a very visible time for him and his game. Burzum is the work of one man: Varg Vikernes, a convicted murderer and outspoken voice on racial purity and supremacy. He even identified as a Nazi for a while.

This isn't to say Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a hotbed of racism, because it isn't. The Turkic Cumans speak a different language and are a hostile enemy, which seems like a limited portrayal but no less so than any other war game I can think of. Then again, I'm white, so maybe I've missed things. And racism can take many forms, one of them being exclusion.

Not only that, he added some more idiocy about the portrayal of relationships in the game, adding that the game even dares to describe the ideal woman of the time in its... CODEX (perhaps this is the real issue). Saying that these two are good enough reasons for him to feel to uneasy about recommending the game. What the fuck.

More apparent to me was the back-slapping laddishness revolving around bedding women. I'm pursuing a love story over here, while over there bedding a noble and having one-night stands. That's in addition to my Troubadour perk which makes me even more irresistible to women and lets me use the "bathwenches" for free, which ties into a key mechanic of keeping yourself clean and patched up. It also means I get the Alpha Male buff (+2 to Charisma) because I've been satisfied and apparently it shows. It literally says that. The game's Codex even feels the need to describe the ideal woman of the time: "a thin, pale woman with long blonde hair, small rounded breasts, relatively narrow hips and a narrow waist".

All of which means that a shadow lingers over Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Instead of challenging the Dark Age it reinterprets 615 years later, the game seems to delight in it. Instead of seeing notes in the margin of a history book, we get what feels like a glossy pamphlet advertising an escape into an oddly romanticised past. And it's that, ultimately, which makes me too uneasy about Warhorse's work to be able to recommend it.

Perhaps less terrible than some of the other reviews linked here, but still quite absurd was the GTA V review at Gamespot.

It was a text review with a video version, so I played the video version in the background of doing something else and listened to a dude rant about how profoundly misogynistic the game about psychopathic criminals was and how problematic it is for like quarter of the review. Weird. And then still giving it 9/10. Being a shallow person, naturally I looked at what the nonsensically white-knighting dude looked like. Kind of weirdly effeminate, but that was par for the course for a game reviewer. Only then I noticed the name and realized that it's a trans woman, which gave it the final cherry on top.

The video is unfortunately not working for me anymore, but you can still notice that there are over 22k comments - people were not understanding, for some weird reason.

 

[Modron]

But the real idiocy of course is them complaining that there are not enough non-white people.

There are tons of non-whites in KC:D they just had the decency to keep their faces hidden.

 

[Dave the Druid]

Here's an all-time favorite of mine from 2010. Kotaku's (then) editor-in-chief, Stephen Totilo, has never played the original Doom so he decides to rectify that. TL;DR version: he somehow manages to get lost in E1M1, killed in E1M2 right after getting the shotgun and then declares that he has now played Doom. Here it is in its entirety. I apologize in advance for this, might just be the worst thing I've ever read:

WARNING: Games Journalism

That's incredible

I can't find the piece now, but some kid reviewed The Immortal and gave it a 2/10, stating "it has lots of cheap deaths and is impossible at times" to then state "the game can be finished in 45 minutes" too

So essentially "I've died a handful of times on the Immortal, but instead of spending weeks/months/years working on those challenges and drinking in the delicious satisfaction which comes with overcoming them, I save-stated my way through it and class it as a 45 minute game. I have now beat The Immortal"

These cunts are hilarious.

I just can't get over the fact that he got lost in E1M1 and had to download a map. Like, never mind that Doom has a map and he just never pressed Tab, how the actual fuck do you get lost in E1M1? It's a straight line with a slight corner at the start. How do you even exist Stephen Totilo?

 

[mediocrepoet]

Pick your poison! Do you want to read about the time a Vice game journalist tested a Nintendo Switch joy-con by shoving it up his ass?

This is the sort of hard hitting investigative journalism we've all been waiting for!

Or do you want to read about the time a Daily Dot game journalist played through Fall Guys with a butt plug programmed to go off whenever their controller vibrated?

Great content for the lifestyle section! I hope she (sic) made sure the butt plug consented, because honestly, I don't think many things would.

 

[Serus]

I need to bring the infamous review a King of Dragon Pass in the 90s in Potato. It got 1/10. I still remember the best of reasons: "the graphic is very bad, it doesn't have any animation". BTW, the part about animation is true, there aren't any. Instead you have 100s of beautifully drawn illustrations for any situation. Other reasons given weren't much better. It was cleat the the reviewer didn't even understand what was going on the game and after a few hours (at best) stopped playing.
It was in the 1990s, in "Secret Service". The problem is that this level of reviewers is the norm today, it wasn't then.

TL;DR: lack of animations = 1/10

 

[Elthosian]

Least casual IGN reviewer: https://www.ign.com/articles/2017/03/27/rain-world-review

Scores one of the best games ever with a 6.3 because he couldn’t master the game’s mechanics. Looks like he didn’t even finish it, typical game journo.

 

[Chanel Oberlin]

I just remembered that time IGN (or was it Gamespot?) reviewed an shmup for the PS3 and complained it was too short and had no ending. Turned out the reviewer played it on easy, which cuts later levels and removes the ending, like many retro games did back then.

 

[Elthosian]

View attachment 39789

That crap got 7.8? They didn’t even remake the GBA version that had the most content. Shit.

 

[Tehdagah]

Pick your poison! Do you want to read about the time a Vice game journalist tested a Nintendo Switch joy-con by shoving it up his ass?

Or do you want to read about the time a Daily Dot game journalist played through Fall Guys with a butt plug programmed to go off whenever their controller vibrated?

What happened with "just go watch porn"?

 

[mediocrepoet]

What happened with "just go watch porn"?

You don't put your controller in your ass? How do you even play?

 

[Dave the Druid]

Great content for the lifestyle section! I hope she (sic) made sure the butt plug consented, because honestly, I don't think many things would.

Well it's funny you should say that because if you actually read the piece it's clear that while the butt plug consented the, probably underage, children she was playing with online hadn't:

"There are, to be clear, an enormous number of ethical issues around inserting sex toys into your multiplayer games. During the stream, I didn’t really think much about why I wanted to keep colliding against other contestants or grabbing them (let alone being grabbed). Then, it dawned on me that I was engaging other players in an interaction that they hadn’t actually been fully informed about. That’s the in-game equivalent of hugging as many people as possible so you can feel your butt plug wiggle inside of you, which is not a great thing to do in public.


This sparked a much larger question about whether Fall Guys is even an appropriate game to play with a sex toy at all. While I’m inclined to think passively playing the game with an internet-of-things sex toy isn’t necessarily a problem, just as playing Overwatch with a dildo isn’t, actively grabbing players and bumping into them is a huge no-go. Use the tech responsibly."

 

[Silverfish]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HByDGHl7PNc (this is unbearable to watch)

Even more brutal than I was expecting. "What is a genre?" Fuck's sake.

 

[ind33d]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HByDGHl7PNc (this is unbearable to watch)

Even more brutal than I was expecting. "What is a genre?" Fuck's sake.

everyone always just called deus ex and pals "RPGs." because that's what they are. do we really need diabetics to navel gaze about a term that is literally meaningless? is hitman an immersive sim? how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

 

[staffofaesculapius]

[...]
Some more choice cuts of Youtube cringe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HByDGHl7PNc (this is unbearable to watch)
[...]

Jesus christ, I stopped at exactly 39 seconds and turned the video off. He doesn't really talk about how he dislikes the name "Immersive Sim" for 24 minutes does he?

 

[Jason Bright]

Or do you want to read about the time a Daily Dot game journalist played through Fall Guys with a butt plug programmed to go off whenever their controller vibrated?

Ana Valens eh? mmm...

Get to know your new favorite journalist​

Journalist, author, and video game designer Ana Valens is someone I very much admire. Valens writes about things other people are too scared of getting wrong. But whether it’s covering ‘hypnoslut’ gamers as a NSFW columnist at The Daily Dot, going long on Tumblr porn for her novel, or offering her perspective as managing editor of We Got This Covered, Valens dissects her subjects with enough close care to serve a pufferfish. After meeting at a Brooklyn bar, we talked about gaming and how women writers exist in it.

Tell me a little bit about you and how you first got into gaming. How has your relationship to the video game community changed since then?​

Hi! I’m a games journalist and critic and an adult game developer. I currently serve as managing editor for the geekdom site We Got This Covered, which was recently acquired by Gamurs.

My relationship to the video game community has definitely changed over the years. I’ve played video games since I was a kid, and I used to read Kotaku and Joystiq (RIP) daily as a teen. I definitely started out as a bit of a gamer, then moved on to more nuanced political beliefs about the games world during my college years.

I’d definitely say I went from left-of-center to a bit of a leftist, with very radically inclined queer beliefs about what games are and what they can be. Case in point, I’m an enormous advocate for supporting the adult side of the games community, and my writing tends to spotlight how kinky pornographic titles can be affirming for queer players (and what happens when they’re not).

(If you want to keep staring into the abyss: https://www.destructoid.com/ana-valens-interview/ )

Always a fun game: try and find a female name in the gaming sphere that you can attach to a picture of an actual real woman.
Harder than it sounds!

 

[Luka-boy]

New editor at RPS, even comes with his own pedobear

Amazing resemblance.

 

[Thorakitai]

I need to bring the infamous review a King of Dragon Pass in the 90s in Potato. It got 1/10. I still remember the best of reasons: "the graphic is very bad, it doesn't have any animation". BTW, the part about animation is true, there aren't any. Instead you have 100s of beautifully drawn illustrations for any situation. Other reasons given weren't much better. It was cleat the the reviewer didn't even understand what was going on the game and after a few hours (at best) stopped playing.
It was in the 1990s, in "Secret Service". The problem is that this level of reviewers is the norm today, it wasn't then.

TL;DR: lack of animations = 1/10

This one?

 

[Morroweird]

Secret Service gave it around 6/10 and said it was dated but had its charm. I remember reading all the multiple-choice text in the tiny screenshots and dreaming for years about playing the game.