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Unread postby icycalm » 27 May 2009 19:30

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Unread postby El Chaos » 28 May 2009 02:25

Nice read, icy. I'll try and get some friends to contribute to the news section.
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Unread postby Bradford » 28 May 2009 14:39

I just wanted to say that the most recent essay was really beautifully written, particularly the first part; the "indictment", you could call it. Content aside, the writing itself might be your best on this site. The quality of the content speaks for itself — I really enjoyed the essay.
You know he knows just exactly what the facts is.
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Unread postby icycalm » 28 May 2009 16:24

Glad you enjoyed my latest tirade, guys. By the way, Bradford, your "Narrow-minded Experts" article was linked on StumbleUpon yesterday, and got an extra 900 or so views. Whether any of those people learned anything from it, of course, is another matter.
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Unread postby icycalm » 22 Jan 2010 22:23

Worth reading, to see in practice one of the points I made in the second article.

http://ramraider.blogspot.com/2009/07/e ... ll-on.html

This is the editor of Euroidiot, writing a long article that basically says nothing, yet still somehow managing to end on an optimistic note, that things will "get better" and in fact are already "better" than what they used to be, lol.

Fucking imbeciles.

Keep scribbling dude!
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Unread postby icycalm » 17 Apr 2010 19:56

Campbell still not getting it:

http://www.eurogamer.net/forum_thread_p ... _id=179087

Rev. Stuart Campbell wrote:Having spent the last three days hooked on the incredible Espgaluda 2 http://wosblog.podgamer.com/2010/04/12/ ... -argument/ , I've been looking into what other shmups we might be able to hope to see on the iPod in the near future, and it dawned on me that this vibrant genre has had almost no coverage of any kind on EG. There have been loads of fairly high-profile shooters released in recent years, yet not a sniff of a mention of any of them, far less anything so heady as a review.

Espgaluda 2 (iPod) - nothing
Espgaluda 2 Black Label (360) - nothing
Ketsui Death Label (DS) - nothing
Ketsui Extra (360) - nothing
Raiden IV (360) - one tiny news mention a year and a half ago
Raiden Fighters Aces (360) - a single video trailer
Dodonpachi DOJ Black Label Extra (360) - nothing
Mushihimesama Futari (360) - nothing
Death Smiles (360) - nothing

Now, few of these have had official European releases, but EG has reviewed plenty of games on import, and several of them (Espgaluda, Ketsui, Mushihimesama) are region-free and will run on PAL systems anyway.

And even when shooters DO get PAL releases they still don't get covered. Throughout the previous generations PAL-released shooters were ignored too, with the sole exception of Raiden 3. All these UK-released PS2 shooters, most of them excellent and released at mid-price, got zero coverage, not even tiny news paragraphs:

XII Stag
Psyvariar Complete
Castle Shikigami 2
Gigawing Generations
Homura
Ibara
Steel Dragon EX
Gunbird Special Edition
Mobile Light Force 2
Samurai Aces
Dragon Blaze
Strikers 1945 1+2

And it's not like there's nobody who can cover them - Simon Parkin's Raiden 3 review shows a perfectly good knowledge of the rest of the genre, and he still writes for EG.

Are there really fewer people interested in shooters than Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure or Panzer General: Allied Assault? Is it really too much to hope for the occasional break from hundreds of pages of God Of Gears Of Modern Warshock and tedious frame-rate comparisons between identical PS3 and 360 versions of the same game, and have maybe just one shmup review every few months?


What's the point of asking people to review games WHICH THEY DON'T WANT TO EVEN PLAY, LET ALONE REVIEW? Even if they obliged you, how could their reviews possibly not suck? How hard can this be to fucking grasp? THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT THESE GAMES. THEY DON'T FUCKING ENJOY THEM. THEY CAN'T EVEN PLAY THEM FOR FUCK'S SAKES! WOULD YOU WANT CRIPPLES REVIEWING SUPERBIKES?

Meh. The idiot just played a butchered port of a masterpiece on his fucking ipod piece of shit and instead of thinking "This is awesome! Imagine how much more awesome would the original game be running on the original hardware, on a real screen with a real controller!", first thing on his mind is to go to some fucking forum and whine to some fucking losers about why they don't write about games they don't like.

How much more of an idiotic loser could he be?
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Unread postby icycalm » 24 Apr 2010 00:40

http://www.merseyremakes.co.uk/gibber/2 ... -to-games/

Good writing dies at the end of search engine optimization.
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Unread postby icycalm » 24 Apr 2010 00:45

By the way, the little ad clip that plays at the end of the talk completely contradicts it. It praises the fact that "consumers" now have the power to respond — but in what way is that the solution? THAT IS THE WHOLE GODDAMN PROBLEM!
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Unread postby icycalm » 14 Jul 2010 13:47

http://gamejournos.tumblr.com/post/8091 ... t-dont-you

Typical low-level theorizing, meaning about the best you can expect from a journalist-type person. He spends a trillion words pointing out the gross offences of contemporary game journlolism, but makes no attempt whatsoever to uncover THE REASONS for these problems. He simply blames it all on people being BAD, and comes up with the triumphant conclusion that all that needs to happen IS FOR PEOPLE TO STOP BEING BAD. And then we all hold hands and the world becomes a happy place — journalism in a nutshell.

Not to mention that he himself commits PRECISELY THE SAME FAULTS for which he blames the journlolists. Look at this, for example:

Ben Paddon wrote:But it’s not unfair to say that game journalism needs people with a passion for delivering gaming news and reviewing games honestly, truthfully and, above all else, in an entertaining manner.


ABOVE ALL ELSE WRITING ABOUT GAMES SHOULD BE ENTERTAINING. BECAUSE THAT'S WHY WE READ GAME ANALYSIS: NOT TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON, BUT TO HAVE A FEW CHEAP LAUGHS.

This, though, is exactly the same mentality that turns people into Tim Rogerses or Brian Crecentes — i.e. into clowns. That turns them, in other words, into precisely the same kind of people this idiot is raging at.

And he tops off his pathetic little pseudo-analysis with this little gem:

Ben Paddon wrote:That site doesn’t exist yet. Hopefully one day that will change.


That site has existed for going on five years now. It's just that you have not yet come across it, because you've been spending all your time scouring Kotaku, Destructoid and Games Radar in order to make points that could be made with 1/100th of the effort you have put into them.

On the other hand, even if you had come across that site, I can easily tell that you would be incapable of recognizing it, so whatever.
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Unread postby icycalm » 22 Jun 2011 15:05

http://insertcredit.com/2011/06/20/jour ... ame-redux/

Just started reading this. No idea how much I will read, but I am half-way through Brandon's first piece and it is reasonable. I.e. not stupid. That's the most I can say about it. Apart from the implicit half-apology he offers for the NGJ fiasco, he doesn't seem to have anything else to say. Which is not surprising since I've said everything already.
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Unread postby icycalm » 22 Jun 2011 16:23

It's times like these that make me think I must be God. Or at least A god. Definitely a prophet or fortune-teller at any rate.

http://insertcredit.com/2011/06/20/jour ... chapter/3/

Patrick Miller wrote:Because goddammit I love this but it needs to grow up. Because I need to grow up,


Did I read these people or what?

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/on_new_games_journalism/

I wrote:Enough! Whether videogames are really growing deeper, more meaningful and more profound is irrelevant to these people -- they must and will be shown to be doing so in order to assuage the bad conscience of these men-children! These people have at last come to crave some degree of seriousness and profundity in their lives, some depth of feeling, some measure of spirituality; as human beings it is almost a biological necessity for them, and definitely a sociological one (this is the origin of their bad conscience -- the pressure to "grow up"), and since they have not bothered at any point to take an interest in, say, history, literature or philosophy -- fields of human endeavor which would have quenched the thirst for depth and spirituality of even the most spiritually thirsty human being, leaving him now with the opposite need, a need for frivolity, shallowness, playfulness, in short, a need for games -- the only place they can look for spirituality now is in the only place they know. And if they can't find it there, if it turns out that it simply doesn't exist there, that will in no way prevent them from miraculously discovering it -- by inventing it.


They should be thanking me for the free psychoanalysis.

I am seriously thinking of sitting down later today for a couple of hours and tearing their manifesto apart paragraph for paragraph. Just to make sure they stay dead. If I do this it will go on the frontpage.
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Unread postby icycalm » 23 Jun 2011 15:15

http://insertcredit.com/2011/06/20/jour ... t165772253

Harry wrote:icycalm is going to fucking slay you.


I wrote:I am actually considering whether it's worth doing that right now. On the other hand, this manifesto is so pathetic, and everyone (except Leigh, of course :) sounds so miserable and dejected after their whipping bout with Real Life, that if I did it I am sure I'd feel like I was pushing a bunch of crippled dudes down the stairs. Still, Nietzsche DID say that that which is falling "should also be pushed", so perhaps I should swallow down my sympathy for these guys after all (well, for Brandon, Tim and Eric-Jon, at any rate, for no one else means anything to me) and do it anyway. Perhaps I should even send it to Brandon for publication, to see if he REALLY means the hilarious spiel about his readers being his editors and suchlike.

If I DO NOT end up doing it, though, I'll leave you with this thought, which by itself rips this pathetic manifesto to shreds and dooms this site for ever (well, the feature-part of it anyway): The older manifesto was only about a million times better than this one.
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Unread postby El Chaos » 25 Jun 2011 15:37

Man, I really didn't want to get involved in any way with this drivel, but I couldn't stand it anymore.

I wrote:I wanted to nitpick a number of stupidities in this thing, like "the game made me OCD as hell" (it made you "obsessive-compulsive disordered as hell?" Fuck, learn to write, goddammit!), but seriously... you don't care about games, and it shows. You just use them to get more hits, just like recycling this site instead of starting a bunch of blogs. Whoever really cares about games, among other things, wants them to be compared to as many other similar games as possible, get as detailed information about their ruleset and technical excellency as possible, and maybe just one paragraph about what you fucking "feel" about it.

Good writing about games takes an impressive amount of hard work, dedication, deliberation, experience and actual love for games, and, like science, it's meant to improve over time. It DOES NOT take writing about "lost love and feelings of deep nostalgia, or abandoned innocence" or any other unimportant, unrelated crap, you clown.

And I don't say this as a writer 'cause I've never really wrote about anything, I say this as a gamer and as a fucking SANE PERSON.
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Unread postby icycalm » 29 Jun 2011 14:59

I've posted a bunch of comments, which would have gone in the article that I ended up deciding that I am not going to bother writing, on the second page of that manifesto's comments section. So far they've left them up and no one has replied, lol. The staff is fucking terrified of replying to me -- i.e. of giving me any more fodder to use against them. They simply have nothing to say for themselves -- which should have been obvious already just from reading their articles, but here is more proof anyway, if any more is needed.
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Unread postby icycalm » 09 Aug 2011 14:44

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011 ... nalism.ars

This sorry episode is indicative of a larger problem with our business: those that write about games are supposed to be part of a marketing program, and any attempt at breaking a story that isn't handed to an outlet is met with outright hostility. If you get a scoop about a game before an exclusive reveal at another publication, you're going to be called out for "shoddy journalism." Having a story before you're allowed to have it makes you a target.

We experienced this firsthand when we broke the news of Rock Band 3's keytar peripheral. After we ran the story we were contacted by the PR company handling the Harmonix account, and threatened with all sorts of nastiness if the story wasn't removed.

We held firm, because we knew the story was accurate, but what I was unprepared for was the anger from other writers who had signed nondisclosure agreements that prevented them from writing about the peripheral until the NDA expired. From their point of view I hadn't played fair, and in many cases outlets which had signed the NDA didn't pick up our story for fear of angering Harmonix. We had stepped out of the marketing plan for the game by running a scoop we had dug up ourselves, and boy, did we ever hear about it.

Game Informer will still have the first details of the game, and that will remain exclusive until the rest of the gaming press is granted access to the title, which will be playable at PAX Prime. Neither Game Informer nor Gearbox was hurt by the early news of the game's existence, but the power of a Game Informer cover and story can't be underestimated within the industry, and publishers are going to do everything they can to protect the marketing deals they've made with the magazine. If you threaten that relationship with honest-to-goodness reporting, apparently you're nothing but a shoddy journalist.
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Unread postby icycalm » 13 Nov 2011 15:21

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/moder ... a64/723925

Based on a true story:

http://gamejournos.com/post/12253058992 ... thoughtful

No doubt that dude is going to be elevated to some kind of game journalism luminary, like that Gerst or whatever dude, even though the only thing he's got going for him is that he merely wrote a mediocre/submediocre review of a game and was just simply a tiny wheeny bit more honest with the score than he normally is. That's all it takes in this racket to make a name for yourself these days. LOOK AT THE ETHICS ON THIS GUY! HE GAVE THAT GAME 0.5 POINTS LESS THAN EVERYONE ELSE! 0.5 for fuck's sakes.
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Unread postby icycalm » 06 Jan 2012 06:47

Hey dudes, how about we try a little experiment. You all check the forums at least once or twice a day, and many of you dozens of times, so why not contribute something, so that you'll have a little more to read on every visit? I say we each try contributing at least one piece of news a week. There are nearly 90 members now, so one piece of news a week would make it 90 newsposts, which basically beats every blog on the internet apart from Kotaku, Joystick, et al (though it does get pretty close to the smaller blogs like Siliconera, Andriansang, etc.) And most of the stuff they post is filler anyway, not to mention that the general level of knowledge and taste here is much higher than there, so the end result should be a lot of fun!

So how about it? I mean what's the point of milling around here when there's not really that much action? Granted, the most valuable stuff is in the theory forum, etc., but stuff like that is by its nature rare. It's like having a nice meal of finely cooked meat or fish or whatever, but without any like rice or vegetables or even bread to go with it. There is such a thing as too much substance! A few videogame pics and videos of cool new stuff would go a long way towards making all our visits here that much more enjoyable!

But don't take me wrong: I by no means want to force anything on anyone. You all paid to be here, and if all you want to do is look around, then there's nothing wrong with that. I am just making a suggestion which, if followed by even half of you, will make the place a lot more lively. Think about it. You give one solid, interesting piece of news a week, and you get 89 back. And if we manage to establish this sort of culture now, imagine what will happen when this place has several hundred active members! (Which, mark my words, will happen, and far sooner than you'd think.)
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Unread postby icycalm » 07 Jan 2012 19:38

Continued from here: http://culture.vg/forum/topic?p=17228#p17228

Recap wrote:And seriously -- you should reconsider linking to websites like Andriasang. Stealing 4 Gamer's material without mention is only one of its lame practices.


We sort of talked about this sort of thing a long time ago, in the Ruliweb days, when we apparently were on the opposite sides of the fence than today. Back then you were linking Ruliweb even though you knew all about its lame practices, and I was trying to keep my forum free from links to websites with lame practices.

Now, I don't know why you've decided to change your policy, or perhaps I misunderstood it in the first place and you haven't changed anything. But I know why I did. First of all, it is hard enough getting people to contribute anything even WITHOUT any site restrictions; if I asked them to keep googling until they found the original sources of materials no one would ever contribute anything. More importantly, even I can't be bothered to do that anymore, I'd rather invest the extra time playing games or writing stuff instead, so it's either "link the first site that you come across" or "never post any more news". Obviously, I'd rather post news, which is why the new laissez-faire linking policy. Moreover, why link 4 Gamer, or any other "legitimate, original" source in the first place? Because they are good at controlling and monopolizing the source of free promotional information, and stamping their ghastly watermarks all over it? Fuck them -- fuck them in the ass is what I say. Indeed, we should be supporting any site that rips "their" shit off without linking them ON PRINCIPLE. Not to mention how fucking terrible it is to navigate the Japanese sites, with their tiny text and tiny thumbnails circa 1994. At least navigating Andriansang is a breeze (as much as that is possible in a blog format, anyway), and the images on their frontpage are nice and large and so good, solid gaming information has a greater chance to grab my attention over filler stuff like plush dolls, pseudo-interviews and the like. (And the site loads much faster than Siliconera, which is why I stopped checking that, not to mention that Anoop is not a retarded weeaboo like Spencer Yip, even if his site caters largely to weeaboos).

At one point I thought of banning any links to non-official sites, which is the only 100% legitimate way to run a news forum in light of how things work in the videogame world, but this would again have killed the news forum. I mean, at the end of the day, I'd end up being a hypocrite by only linking official stuff, while STILL of course checking out all the usual copy-pasta/racketeering blogs because, after all, I want the information.

So. There are more important things to think about and work on than whether some worthless little pseudojournalist makes a living out of copy-pasting stuff. Let him get his extra hits and earn his pitiable little living. That's all he's going to get out of the artform when all is said and done, since he isn't even getting any pleasure out of playing and writing about games. And isn't the convenience of checking two or three relatively simple to navigate blogs instead of scouring thousands of individual sources worth enough to all of us to allow this little miserable charade to continue? And aren't we even being a little hypocritical at this point, by railing at the journalists for allowing the news racket to destroy videogame criticism, all the while reaping the benefits of this destruction by setting ourselves up as the only real critics in the artform, with zero competition?

So, like I said, I really have no idea whether I misconstrued your original stance on the matter, or this new stance, or whether you changed your stance at all. To be perfectly honest, I really just don't care about your stance on this, since as you can now see I have finally fully formed my own and I am very happy with it. In the long term the issue is not important anyway, but in any case I appreciate your comments giving me a chance to clear up for everyone how I feel about it, and how I intend to handle it.
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Unread postby Recap » 07 Jan 2012 22:30

or whether you changed your stance at all


I didn't:

http://postback.geedorah.com/foros/view ... 3453#p3453

Indeed, I've changed so little my mindset all these years, it's almost scary, in a way.

Regarding the particular matter of Ruliweb/lame sites linking, I wrote:

I link Ruliweb only because it re-uploads the scans to its own hosting service and I can always be sure they won't be down anytime soon (aside of being easier to find), but believe me -- I hate it. They (its posters) rarely mention the original source, much like Jeux-France, Go Nintendo or many others. But hey, at least Western visitors of Ruliweb can't make any money for these bastards.




This is worth addressing, though:

Moreover, why link 4 Gamer, or any other "legitimate, original" source in the first place? Because they are good at controlling and monopolizing the source of free promotional information, and stamping their ghastly watermarks all over it? Fuck them -- fuck them in the ass is what I say. Indeed, we should be supporting any site that rips "their" shit off without linking them ON PRINCIPLE.


"Free promotional information"? C'mon now. "Free promotional information", as you put it, is distributed through the companies' official websites. The material we get through major news websites such as 4 Gamer is not "free" at all. It's always part of an agreement between the video-game companies and the news sites, as I'm sure you're aware of. Is that a "monopoly which destroys video-game criticism"? Most likely, but that's beside the point --even if it's a minor point in the grand scheme of things--.

And much like with Neo Arcadia and whatnot -- beware Adriasang's misinformation bits. Maybe you'll "care" when you start finding them out.
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Unread postby icycalm » 07 Jan 2012 23:00

Recap wrote:Is that a "monopoly which destroys video-game criticism"? Most likely, but that's beside the point


That is the whole point for me, Recap. Sites like 4 Gamer are doing the artform harm, and everything would be much better if they simply ceased to exist, HENCE I feel no remorse about preferring and linking sites that rip them off -- i.e. that harm them. If only there were more of those, perhaps 4 Gamer and its ilk would cease to be financially viable, and would disappear.

Not that any of this matters to me very much anymore, but even if we investigate the principles underlying my actions, I believe I still hold the high moral ground on this issue, as in all others.

Recap wrote:And much like with Neo Arcadia and whatnot -- beware Adriasang's misinformation bits. Maybe you'll "care" when you start finding them out.


I occasionally find some, here and there, but dude, misinformation is unavoidable even with the best intentions. Just check all those posts in this forum, where someone for example compares GC Biohazard 4 and the new 3DS one, and calls the graphics of the 3DS game "at least on a par" with the GameCube game's, EVEN THOUGH HE HAS THE SCREENSHOTS AND THE VIDEOS RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM. People are blind and deaf idiots, man, and I am sure that if I put enough effort into translating and checking Famitsu's or 4 Gamer's stuff I'd find enough stupidity and bullshit there too. Is there MORE stupidity and bullshit on Andriansang et al. than on their Japanese equivalents? Perhaps, though at the same time I feel that they get right a lot of stuff that the Japanese press misses, so it probably balances out in the end. And in any case, I don't go to these sites for anything other than screens and videos -- I don't even pay any attention to release dates anymore! -- so any misinformation found in those would be coming from the game's publisher, I guess.

So none of that stuff matters to me. All I want is a game's title and some graphics, so that I can place it on my radar, and then some months or years later I decide, based solely on the name and graphics, whether to give it a try. You simply have your face too close to the screen, which is why all these little tidbits matter so much more to you than to me. And that's fine! I love it that you have your face so close to the screen, it's what makes your commentary so much more valuable to anyone else's. But it also accounts for the differences in our viewpoints on the relative importance of the matters we are discussing. I am through with the news game. I grappled with it for a couple of years, between 2006 and 2008, when I still thought that the way forward for my site was through increasing its traffic. But then I deconstructed the whole news racket, realized it was a racket and that nothing really important took place in it, and now I no longer care either way. So Andriansang got the name of some SRPG illustrator wrong, and so what? Or some release date of some game I won't end up playing until two years after release anyway. How could I possibly care about misinformation like that when like 90% of my brain activity today is devoted to issues discussed by Nietzsche or Baudrillard? I mean it's laughable. So like I said, I played that little news game for a while, and learned enough of its ins and outs to sympathize with your viewpoint of the situation, but I just can't be bothered anymore to expend any brainpower to find out what low-life subhuman moron copy-pasted what promotional material from what other low-life subhuman moron. It's just not interesting to me any more, and I have absolutely nothing to gain from it.
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Unread postby icycalm » 08 Apr 2012 19:24

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/20 ... e-of-time/

More pointless, puerile navel-gazing from the latest SAVIORS OF VIDEOGAME JOURNLOLISM at Forbes. HEY LOOK, THESE DUDES ARE NOT IN ANY WAY BURDENED BY THE VIDEOGAME NEWS RACKET!!! True enough. But if they are uneducated, uncultured imbeciles who know next to nothing about videogames, how is that going to matter worth a damn?
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Unread postby Agentx » 09 Apr 2012 01:53

People play games because they want to play games? Wow, he has a real command of the obvious! What I want to know is... how did this start? Why did he start churning these articles out... and why does anyone care? I guess it is not outright offensive, but at the same time it's not remotely interesting, insightful or even amusing. It's fucking nothing.
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Unread postby icycalm » 09 Apr 2012 19:45

The second page is better. Amidst cringe-inducing analogies about chocolate-flavored narratives and vanilla-flavored dungeons or whatever, he sort of manages to allude to the earth-shattering revelation that games are not supposed to do what novels do and vice versa, but to see this infantile muddling published with such pomp on a publication as prestigious (for whatever reasons, right or wrong) as Forbes is depressing. Worst of all, like I said, is that it's obvious that no one involved is a gamer, SO WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF PRETENDING TO WRITE ABOUT GAMES?

Oh but videogames make good money nowadays, I forgot.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 Dec 2012 15:58

1355112444910.jpg


From Amiga Power September '95, when videogame journalists were still smart, cool dudes, and I was growing up reading them.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 Dec 2012 16:13

Of course by September '95 I had long ditched the Amiga and had moved into PCs. In fact that was precisely the month I started college, and had brought over with me a newly built 486DX2-66 to play the hottest thing around at the time: the rather disappointing Command & Conquer. So I wasn't reading Amiga magazines, is what I am saying, which is why I missed this the first time round. But even if I had come across it, I am sure I wouldn't have paid any attention to it. Everything was still so rosy in the world of videogames back then, that the idea of spending any time bitching about anything instead of, you know, PLAYING GAMES, would never have entered my mind. And here we are today, a couple decades later, having an entire demographic of people who bitch all day about games without even playing them. See SICKNESS in your dictionary of choice.
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