I wrote:You guys have a tendency to overrate the less known games, and that's a terrible attitude to have for anyone who aspires to criticism.
This is an important aspect of understanding the psychology that is at work behind many of the inferior value judgements you see people making about games. Basically, what these people do is that they add the fun they get out of tracking down and obtaining a game to the fun they get out of actually playing it, hence why they overrate it (zinger admitted as much in a thread in the Staff forum, when I called him out on his crappy list of favorite videogame music). This is something inconceivable for me, and if you can't separate things like this in your mind, you are next to useless as a critic. At the end of the day, it's the same sort of mental deficiency you see in people who can't separate their enjoyment of playing a game to watching its cutscenes (or listening to its music or whatever). It is a lack of analytical capacity, and analysis is what criticism is all about.
Note that here I am talking about genuine videogame lovers, like Recap, Josh, zinger, Macaw and the like. There are also tens of thousands of losers online who are simply namedropping obscure games to impress their hipster loser friends, but that's a whole other psychological issue. Recap, Josh, zinger and Macaw are not trying to impress you: they GENUINELY enjoy the obscure game more (compared to the hipsters who in reality have probably not even played it) because of all the effort they have put into finding out about it, tracking it down and acquiring it, and simply lack the level of introspection necessary to separate these two fundamentally different pleasures in their minds. Macaw is the worst in this regard, and Recap probably the best, but all of them are afflicted with this deficiency to a degree, and this sort of thing is rife in specialist sites like gamengai, Shmups, Assembler and the like. And though most of these people are beyond help in this regard (with Macaw being the archetypal example), others can improve at least a little if they are aware of it, so spread this post around if you want to help them. I'd make an article out of it, but I don't see what else there is to say on the issue, so it'll remain in the forum for now.
