Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm in the process of writing something of an open letter to the games press. Basically, it's about how our profession is in the toilet and what can be done to fix things. Can it all be blamed on online? Or did we finally burn our readers' trust once too many?

Anyway, I wanted to include a 'hall of shame' box out detailing some of the lies, breeches of trust and general shittiness perpetrated by game publications (you know, stuff like Dr3vergate, Rise of the Robots, all of Official PlayStation magazine).

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Look, back in "the day" it wasn't unusual for magazines to look favourably on publishers that used to spend alot on advertising or who they had a good working relationship with. There are examples of all the great and good magazines giving high ratings to games that were in retrospect bloody awful.

The games publishers have their own agendas as do the magazines. You might argue that Amiga Power bucked the trend but from a magazine publishers point of view AP is a great example how not to run a games magazine. Yeah you can be "honest" but any modest gains in readership will be offset hugely by lost advertising. The trick is to be just honest enough to try and keep everyone happy.

These days the games industry is far bigger and more powerful. More money is involved. If your magazine was on the blacklist at a tinpot budget software house like Alternative it wasn't the end of the world. Annoy Team 17 and you might feel pleased with yourself. Piss Sony/Microsoft off and you might as well shut up shop. It's a different world.

Yeah, don't bother unless you want a bunch of American cunts to come and shit on you with straw man arguments before running off guffawing and patting each other on the back.

Headhunter Redemption: Official Xbox Magazine (UK)'s review stated that 'the occasional bike chase breaks up the on-foot action' when, uh-oh, Headhunter Redemption didn't include any bike based gameplay. Its predecessor did... it appears that whoever reviewed it assumed that it would have some bike action, but never played far enough into the game to find out. As the original game's missions were bracketted by bike miss action, this means that the reviewer never actually played further than the first mission.

Also, are breeches of trust a kind of old fashioned trouser woven from pure trust fibres? *runs*

It doesn't mean it's right, does it?

Anyway, apparently they're not so stingy with review copies, as Snappy Gamer is apparently still getting them, despite not updating for 6 months, and not having an actual review for a year. (ZING!)

Sonofa! It's actually down now, the hosting has lapsed. And I still got Age of Empires III ULTIMATE COLLECTION EDITION!!1 the other day.

But I'm very busy at uni now, so updating the site just isn't possible.

Remember Renegade 3? The Renegade series was heavily advertised in the 8 bit magazines. Now look at this expose by Dr Ashens:



You'll see from the reviews the magazines probably didn't even play the game! Sinclair Users reuses the same screenshot several times.

Awesome. Any idea how I can find out who reviewed it? I fully intend to name names.

Erk. Are you the same guy who blasted my Resident Evil 5 review for calling zombies 'puss bags', by any chance? (Tragically, I didn't reply with "No need to make a fus." I still kick myself to this day.)

Really, I'd be careful where you tread here. Unless you don't care about alienating yourself from the games industry, of course. If that's the case, swing away!

The problem is, you're not going to get anyone on your side from the games journalism side of the fence, because most of the cunts seem to be happy with the way it is.

No! I'd never do anything like that, I was just having a larf!

But yeah, about a year ago I wrote an article that is essentially the same as what you've set out in the OP, and within three days it had over 100 comments, mostly from yank games journos sticking up for their shitty corrupt world. Unfortunately, as I say, Snappy Gamer is down now, so I can't link you to it!

Well, I live in Australia. Our 'industry' consists of Yahtzee, bored PR reps and the paid puppets on the 'Official' console mags. (I wrote an article entitled 'PSPGo F*ck Yourself' and never heard a word from Sony, for instance. And I write for one of the biggest publications in the country.)

What was scary about that was the sheer amount of self-delusion on the journos' part... the whole 'every one knows we're lying cunts, so no-one bases purchasing decisions on what we say' argumnent came out more than once. Try telling that to little johnny who got Driv3r for christmas instead of an entertaining game... like Pong.

It wouldn't be the end of the world in terms of review copies, though; back then if you were blacklisted and had to wait until release day to source a copy, your review would end up being a month later than your rival magazines' reviews. Nowadays, review embargoes are often so close to the release date that the worst that would happen is your review goes up a few days late. Plus, if you're not beholden to the whims of publishers then there's always a chance that you could get hold of a game a little early and publish a review before the embargo, eg. MW2, where the review embargo is lifted on release day (I assume 8am GMT based on the time Eurogamer will be putting up their review) but plenty of people have already got hold of copies, legit or otherwise.

Why is there a review embargo on MW2 anyway?

Have you ever read 200pence's site? He's written about all these gates, or at least linked to them. There was even a thing about how you shouldn't be a games journo because you get paid naff-all and are totally expendable.

I like your moxie, but this is nothing new.

It's pretty easy to ignore the shit.

I thought this happened in all reviews tbh.

Alienware for example. If any one dared criticise their computers for being buggy or sloppy then you would never recieve any more review units.

Back in 2005ish when they revealed the Alienware ALX SLI (the original predator 1) they sent a review unit to someone in a publication. The chap was honest and basically said that when he recieved it the water cooling unit had leaked due to improper installation, and the GPUs (2 7950 GX2) had "NVIDIA TEST UNITS NOT FOR RESALE" stamped on them. At which point he said that whilst their quad SLI arrangement was incredible, Alienware did not have the actual units to be able to begin production and thus it would be risky to order one whilst Alienware were still trying to obtain them.

Alienware threw a massive sulk, demanded the review unit back and that particular review publication was never sent another one.

There's an example on Eurogamer right now that demonstrates my concerns with "professional" reviews. Have a look at the Dragon Age review:



Granted, Eurogamer were good enough to publish a correction and to be fair this might still be an honest and fair review of the game. But when a review gets something as fundamental as the control system wrong you do have to question the overall quality of the review.

Personally, though, I don't pay much attention to the mainstream gaming press and haven't for about 10 years or more. Not really because of the "scandals", but more because I can make my own mind up on whether or not I enjoy a game and I really don't need somebody else to tell me why Generic FPS 32,768 is the best game ever - and with the secondhand market for games and widely available demos this is actually an affordable option, meaning that I'm not going to miss out on something that I'd enjoy just because some reviewer didn't really play it and gave it a 4/10.

Independent reviews and review sites appeal to me much more, not least because they'll tend to cover a lot of games you might have missed out on.

I don't buy game mags because I can't justify the £6 a month or whatever they cost, when a third of it is rumours about games, another third is previews about stuff they now have screenshots of, and the last third is the actual reviews.

I don't read online games mags because I have BeeX to tell me which games I need by who is playing them online a lot. And before that the Board of Biffo forums.

I think the problem is that I can go for weeks without gaming though, so I'm only an occasional gamer.

The sequel is unbelievably buggy though.

FTFY - otherwise you'll just be part of the huge problem with games churnalism today. If your not doing research and investigating then your a fucking blogger* Which is fine and dandy and what not, but regurgitating press releases and ctrl+c, ctrl+v'ing the blog to your left isn't journalism.

* Like myself**

** when I get the increasingly infrequent chance.

Yup, and that correction is in the wake of nearly 200 comments saying 'it's not as bad as he's making out', 'look what other game sites - Eurogamer sites in other languages included - are giving it' and 'so how long did you actually play it?'

Plus, a lot of people still haven't forgiven the Fable 2 10/10 review.

I only read Eurogamer as it works pretty well on my phone's browser and so can keep an eye on things, but I find their reviews extremely hit and miss.

You can add the PC version of GTAIV to that aswell. Most sites copied and pasted the 360 review and changed the words to PC, then went on to rave about how amazing it was and better than the console version. I fell for it, then the cracks began to appear. Oddly noone had mentioned that even the most amazing computers could not run it properly, even SLI 295GTX systems could not unveil the highest settings. When people asked Rockstar they basically made the excuse that the highest graphical settings are reserved for future PC systems. Eh? so what they had said was that their game would not work properly yet until 5 years down the line when PCs were fast enough to run their junky code. And it didn't just end there either. Dual core systems had hardly any hope of acceptable framerates and they negated to mention that it needed quad core until people had brought it.

Every time I look at my PC games mag (that I no longer buy) and see them raving about it before giving it 10/10 I go cold. Fucking disgrace.

Graphics shmaphics.

Here we go. As an example I will use the IGN brown nosed review.

The game scored 9.2. However, on careful inspection in the review the following is said -



So basically they're saying that even with the settings toned down the game was still unplayable? This is what I just don't understand. How can you score a game that doesn't work properly and needs a machine that only 10% at max of PC users own? Surely you should downscore the game if it's not playable? It seems not

Even at the end of the review they said this -



Thing is I have seen the game at high resolutions and they no way compared to something like Crysis.

And the worst part of all? The game was not reviewed until two days after it had released. Noone reviewed it a couple of days prior to release as per usual with a PC title. So nigh on everyone that decided to buy it did so based on previews where the preview said that performance would be top shelf.

Fucking disgusting IMO but a clear case of what money buys you.

Dim. I agree. But what you don't realise is that even at the lowest resolutions the game still wasn't playable. Do you see what I'm saying bro? Even when I had swallowed my pride and lowered everything down it still slugged along like a juggernaut going up a hill. I mean check the IGN comment there, that even when they lowered all the settings down on a (at the time) top spec rig they were still having big issues, yet still went on to score it a fucking 9.2?

That's GTAIV though. Shit. Utter. Fucking. Shit.

Infact GTAIV on the PC reminds me of that ep of South Park called Cartman land.

So much fun, at Cartman land, but you can't come !

GTAIV on PC is an amazing game, but you can't play it !

FTFY

Get the issue, save the world.

I still have horrible memories of having a PC manual in my hands, describing all the cool stuff in the game, taunting me because I couldn't get it to work.

I do sometimes get a pang of this while reading a manual (after buying a game on my lunch break or watching it install) but I can't imagine ever putting myself in that situation where I have a game in my hands that I can't play because my machine won't co-operate.

Are you being serious?

Right. Go find Quake. Yes, the first one, released 13 odd years ago. Install it, and then change the resolution to the highest setting*.
Oh noes, it has a crap framerate! I can't get my game to work 'properly'.

Is there any point at all in demanding that games developers cripple their games as you'd ask them to, just so that the owners can claim it runs on some fake max settings, rather than the maximum it was designed for?

Yes, it's crap that the minimum requirements are so high, but complaining that you can't play on maximum settings is a little pathetic. If you want, they could hide some settings so you appear to play it on maximum.

PC devs don't tend to target a maximum, but a recommended level, and let the maximum settings be however it rolls out, whether or not technology has reached that level or not. It's just that with todays utterly absurd hardware market, that level is rarely breached. It used to be quite frequently (Quake was far from unique in this respect)

GTA4 was crap on consoles as well, mind, but had one heck of a hype machine behind it.

* - Disclaimer. I haven't tried this for three or so years, but I'd be surprised if it's changed.

I think that if a game is poorly optimised it should be criticised for it.

But the criticism should be "It doesn't look good/run well" or "The recommended specs are not accurate", not "The specs are too high".

That way, the review wouldn't get less accurate over time either.

GTA IV was excellent, you wrong-minded fools.

In a world where San Andreas hadn't existed, yes. As it stands, GTA IV has one of the best realized settings in gaming ever, but with a mediocre plot and average shootery.

Or in other words: when I fire up GTA IV, it's to explore the wondrous city, not to play missions (because I'm out of those, now). And I feel virtually no compulsion to pay for the various DLC missions.

I was yes.



I think you misunderstood. Basically there was no computer on the market 'good' enough to be able to see the maximum setting, let alone use it. Even with the most powerful GPU set up on the market the very high setting was not an option. I don't have an issue with settings being there that a computer cannot run, as you say it happens all the time. So if there wasn't one on the market how did Rockstar test their game properly? Infact, don't answer that because it was clear that they hadn't tested it at all. And if they had they were even bigger cunts for releasing it.



As I said, I think you may have misunderstood what I was saying. As I said before, if those settings were not useable by anyone then hidden or not what's the point of them even being there? My reasons for that train of thought are that the game was simply very poorly coded/ported or whatever and thus their "higher settings are reserved for future systems" was a complete cop out. How do they know that future systems will be able to run it at the maximum given what you said about Quake?

The fact is that the game could end up never running properly on those settings. But then, you can hardly expect them to be honest and say "look, we couldn't be fucking bothered rewriting major portions of the game just to make sure it worked because we just wanted your money" can you? hence my reason for bringing this into teh thread. Money talks, bullshit walks, and people would to anything to be on TV (c) the Word.



Dude, that's exactly what they did do. They hid settings that even the fastest computers could not run (and I mean, the fastest commercial £7000 computers).

Had they made those settings available then people would have seen even more so how poor the game was. When the truth was discovered (someone poked around in the INI file and discovered a way of hacking open the higher settings) and people discovered just how poorly coded the game was they made their excuse about stuff being reserved for future systems. Why would any one even care? It's hardly like you're going to reinstall it ten years down the line on a Octocore Bazillion Intel and say "wow, this is awesome !" is it?



But even their reccomended specs fell woefully short of what you actually needed. My system surpassed the min specs by a country mile, yet even with everything turned to minimum could not run the game at a level/framerate that I could have sat in front of for more than about 30 mins without getting a really rubbish headache. So to that ends it was unplayable. Then they said that the fault was with Nvidia's drivers, and to update to the latest ones because Nvidia had made changes that were strictly to benefit GTAIV. And guess what? it made no difference at all. In the end people got tired of their excuses and bullshit and just decided to take it in the ass and forget about it.

So in short it was a dishonest game, by a dishonest company, met by dishonest reviewers. And it was all done for money.

Hmm, I think that's a bit harsh. I mentioned in the original post that the 'Hall of Shame' bit was for a box out -- it's not the meat of the article. Box outs are supposed to make for light 'n' breezy reading. So ner.

A freelancer who used to work for us gave Supreme Commander 0/10, because it wasn't very playable on his state-of-the-art PC. The editor upped the score to 5/10. THQ threw a hissy fit anyway ('your professionalism has been called into question' was my favourite quote from the email) and we ended up getting accused of accepting a bribe from EA. So there *is* a precedent for that kind of thing, but it usually ends badly. (It's much easier to copy and paste the Xbox review; usually without bothering to change the screen shots.)

Considering how corrupt the entire games journalism industry has become, reviews? I trust not a one. It's like Amiga Action laid eggs and the larvae hatched into what we have now.

The discussion about how GTA4 couldnt run at top resolutions reminds me of the same reaction about how FarCry1 wouldnt play at top settings when it was released (2004?)

I dont have to play games at top settings to enjoy them. Need For Speed Most Wanted is a 2005 game and I never played that at its highest settings and completed it, but with the PC I built last year (Quad 6600, Radeon 3850 etc) it ran like a dream.

So box outs and "light and breezy" pieces don't need the most basic of fact checking?

If you are attacking a journo specifically for not checking the truth of his piece without checking the authenticity of that story in your piece then aren't you exactly what you are condemning?

If your criticising this practise then you need to be above reproach.

I know I'm sounding harsh, but I'm only holding you to the same standards you require.

No matter how bad games journalism is, it can't be as bad as the journalism in the Daily Mail.

Look, I wasn't intending to run the story based solely on Pundabaya's post. But at the same time, ringing an overseas journo to get his side of the story seems like overkill for a throwaway box out. There is a happy medium, y'know.

"A full and thorough" investigation can form part of a defence to a claim of libel, you know.

I like the way this thread is teetering on the brink of the 'PC Gaming bad' pivot. I'm going to start a thread about the virtues of anal sex and count the posts until someone complains that Sonic the Hedgehog on PC was terribly incompatible with their soundcard.

I can answer. It's bug tested - naturally within driver limits, and at a resolution so as to get it running well enough to test - but not performance tested. Performance is only properly tested around the target specifications.

Also bear in mind that a pc dev house worth anything will usually have a few pre-release graphics cards with immature drivers. For a fair few obvious reasons, card manufacturers supply dev teams with often very early models of cards.



They don't, why would we worry that games can't be run at the full settings when what we have provided is (supposedly) competitive with the systems that are out. Whether or not the maximum will ever be reached is of little concern, as the maximum is never the target for PC developers. If it does - excellent. If not, we've (hopefully) still released a game that works as well as can be expected on todays machines.



My guess here is that you've managed to misinterpret the intentions. Not to say that the intentions were honest.

A few plausible reasons:
- Publicity shots. Graphics sell, so having a non-public build with no hope of ever getting a great frame rate but better visuals has a use. (Keep the marketting types happy, as if yuo didn't have enough to do without them)
- Incompleted features, which So basically incomplete features that aren't fully implemented. If you look, pretty much any game has incomplete features that are only partly culled. They could, after all, be fully implemented in a patch. It's highly plausible that they tried to put in a fair amount of stuff to please the PC gamers who want a technically much better than console version, but didn't have enough time to properly finish them.



I don't know overly much about GTA4 PC, admittedly (I have no desire to buy it, after all), but driver issues can and do often catch developers by surprise. The headaches which this can cause are less than fun, particulary when you're looking in your own code to find the bug, when it's something wrong in the drivers. It's possible to change your own code/data so as to not hit the driver issue, but obviously doing so costs. With a game as big as GTA4, they may have incorrectly banked on NVidia understanding and fixing the problem, and kept the planned release date.



The amusing thing is, of course, that the console version was in many areas seemingly poorly coded, but it being a standard platform, they were able to get the performance level such that it wasn't overly noticable.

But GTA being poorly ported is hardly new. The PC version of GTA3 ran poorly.

That the PC sales of the 3D GTAs have only made up a tiny fraction of overall sales certainly didn't help the conversion from an already unsteady game. That Take Two have been in a fair amount of financial trouble, and have been generally fairly reliant on console sales of GTA4 may also have had something to do with the limited PC development.

I have no argument against it having been released in a dodgy state due to money concerns (Indeed, given TTs state of health, it surprises me very little). The thing I question is whether it's right to allow for a fair amount of future proofing. My answer would naturally be yes, so long as it runs at more realistic settings, you've always a fall back, which is what you'd have anyway if the future proofing had been cut. It may be that the hardware capabilities never allow it to be run at maximum, but there's little point in lowering the maximum, unless you have good reasons to believe it may be costly in support terms.

To be fair, I think we have the members here to turn a thread about Sonic PC into one about anal sex too.

Did you go in Knuckles deep, did you?

*Tap tap tap*

Is this thing on?