f13.net

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/02/21/ign-layoffs/

Gamesssss journalism.

To be fair, all these websites were pretty bad. Where will we get our gaming news now?

AskMen.

Kotaku.

Since all 3 of those sites sucked monkey ass, I'm thinking this means little to nothing except that some geeks will be looking for "real" jobs.

Not from G4, which was also shut down. Not a great loss to lose one fluff tech lite show and one gaming show supported by 22 1/2hrs of Cops.

Though it's too bad TechTV ever merged with them in the first place, really. That was a pretty good channel.

As far as those websites, I don't think I used any of them.

Kotaku is pretty much a bad rss feed of NeoGaf.

And NeoGaf itself is fucking terrible.

I remember when IGN/vnBoards were the shit thanks to Mythic essentially using them as their 'official/unofficial' game forums.  The traffic allowed other boards to grow, and after DAoC died, so too did VN.

GameSpy was pretty rad back then too, IMO.  Can't say I've actually keyed in their addys in the last...5 years?  They were still around?

I hate gamespy because the gamespy client and matchmaking services were so bad. RIP The AllSeeing Eye.

Fixed that for you. The IGN/vnBoards were total shit filled with cock-smacking Internet vermin full of their own shit-stained self-importance. And fuck Mark Jacobs for ever giving them any legitimacy because he didn't want to run official cesspools boards.

I went to AskMen for the first time today and saw a picture of David Cameron on the front page then closed it quickly to never return.  

Forbes :awesome_for_real:

Remember when Horizons was a thing and they made that shithole their official forum?  What a delightful fuck you to their idiot customers.

 :Love_Letters:

OH GAWD HORIZONS  :ye_gods: :why_so_serious:

Hell, if we're gonna rehash shit, let's throwdown some Wish up in here  :drill:

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/85916/midwife_m.jpg)
BABIES NEED SARCASM

Horizons is still a thing BTW.

http://www.istaria.com/

Ooof.

I tend to follow certain writers. The two sites I actually read/watch/listen to stuff from are Giant Bomb and Polygon. A bunch of the old people I liked from 1UP have moved onto development/PR/whatever IN the industry.

I get my gaming news from f13.  :why_so_serious:

Dude, step the fuck off Wish.  I will cut you.  :x

Thanks to those boards I STILL remember a lot of the names of people from my server. No official forums have ever come close to those imo. Of course, I never ventured outside of my server forums, so they might have gotten worse as you went.

Everything that wasn't the server-specific forums was a wretched hive of scum and villany.

Yeah, I'm kinda sad to hear about Gamespy if only for sentimental reasons.

Good riddance. LCD garbage 'journalism' and Haemish covered the forums.

The IGN editors were some self-important pricks which was displays nicely during the ME3 ending uproar when they made a video basically talking about how gamers were entitled whiners who needed to suck it up. While it may be true in general that wasn't what that particular case was at all.

Yeah, I liked them back in the day.  Not so much for their reviews, but they had a lot of funny misc stuff on their site, comics and so on.  Plus the whole "PlanetQuake/Halflife/etc." network was a source for a lot of my news on specific titles.

Actually I realized that I'll have to fall back to MobyGames to get info on who-is-who in the industry now.  IGN actually was pretty decent for that.

I was also thinking Forbes.

Or you know, here and shit.

I was actually being serious :awesome_for_real:

http://www.forbes.com/games/

I like their game reviews (other than their recent Colonial Marines debacle).

1UP had some solid articles from time to time.

GameSpy and UGO were terrible.

I was also being serious. I like Forbes.

Me too. ^_^

Looks like you need to do more than regurgitate press releases to be successful these days.  Who knew? I've found The Verge and Polygon to do some shockingly decent longform pieces at least.

My hope is that if more established business news organizations start to look at gaming and game reviews as a business item (like Forbes), we'll get rid of some of the ham fisted pretenders looking for handouts while pretending to be journalists.

Well money talks. When bigtime games now have 9 figure launch sales then respectable media outlets will take notice and can't be easily bought with free sunglasses off like the gaming mags of yore.

Remember when Gamespy was the shit and the place for multiplayer matchmaking? Played medieval total war 1 multiplayer through it and they had that digital store also direct2drive I think. Never really contemplated how utterly steam crushed which I guess goes to show how utterly forgettable their poor operation was.

Random Baldurs Gate 2 Co-op games on Gamespy...

Mind you I'm glad they're dead, thought it happened years ago.

Well, that'll fuck over about three-quarters of publishers. Actual journalists rather than fanzines with delusions of grandeur might mean their reheated annual map-pack "blockbusters" start getting 80s & 70s rather than BEST GAME OF ALL TIME 101%

Bring back Amiga Power! A magazine that once gave a game 2% rather than 1% because then it'd be read as "No, this game really is terrible" rather than a comedy score.

Yeah, it'd be nice if we could finally slay the "anything that gets less than 85% or 8/10 is shit" thing and eliminate the publisher asskissing for preview/review copies.

The movie industry is terrible but even they're not as bad as videogames in terms of critic access.

You'll have to slay the American school grading system first. 7/10 = 70% = a C = a pretty crappy grade is pretty much instinct for most people.

One thing that can make publishers more innovative instead of less iterative is the presence of a true critical organization that's not tapped into their hype payments.

The other is declining sales in video games as a whole that don't provide the consumer with value. The critical reception would help govern that, rather than just relying on early adopter mistakes.

The world only really needs one video game website total. They all get the same preview builds and go to the same dog and pony shows.

But.. but... DORITOS! And MOUNTAIN DEW!

(http://pixelperfectmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/kLHUo.png)

Yep.  To the point my professors in college had no idea why people would get so pissed if they got a "c."   While after a few years out in 'real' life you realize being 70% correct is reasonable, the prior 12 years of instruction drilled-in to you that you're a failure and won't get anywhere without 80-90%.

The only people who should be professionally critiquing are fellows in the same field. You get a LOT of critics that way, but at least their opinions are relevant. Those that can do can critique. The rest should get into the field or move on.

Where does that leave forum denizens? Well, there's a difference between critiquing and ranting  :grin:

Since most of them are rival studios, do you really think they'll give unbiased reviews?

No, and that's why the argument is not important. You don't have to be part of the business to be objective. Do you think Mel Kiper can't critique football talent because he never played football professionally? Yet, he's the most sought after analyst in the USA.

Being in the business can often mean you're too close to the problems, and too willing to forgive things the end-user will not. Also, you're likely to hammer people for things the end-user won't give a shit about. Listen to the a director's commentary in a DVD. They talk about wildly different, and often boring, aspects of filmmaking we couldn't care less about as movie consumers. Should only directors be allowed to critique work? No, because they aren't the only people that consume it.

Depending on the situation, profession, and level of ambition, I suppose 70% is "reasonable". I wouldn't want a pilot, musician, or doctor who was a 70-percenter.   :eek3:

Chances are, you have had at least one of those in your life. Or 7 out of 10.

Musicians fuck-up all the time when playing live. They're just really good at picking back up so you don't realize it.

Pilots?  Yeah, talk to some. Lots of errors/ problems you just don't hear about them.

Doctors? Wrong choices out the wazoo. Bias and being overtired contribute, but some just make mistakes.  Here's a chilling wiki quote for you

I prefer amateur reviews, especially by people I've been able to read for years.  It's one of the big reasons I read this site.  If nothing else having read threads here for years I know enough about most of the regular poster's tastes in games to have a fair shot at being able to convert their reviews and comments into useful information for me.   Professional reviewers enter and leave the field, move from site to site, and are kind of locked into the scoring system for their current employer.  All of which makes it hard for me to build up a reliable catalog of their tastes.

Your doctor probably is. So's your pilot. Bell curve hits everyone. If med school is only for the smart and dedicate, you're STILL going to get a normal distribution. Which means, grade inflation aside, there's a lot more C-student doctors than A-student ones -- at least for their med school grades.

I mean, what's a 70th percentile doctor? It's one who is better than 70% of the rest of doctor's in America. That...ain't bad.

The exact point that was being made before you jackoffs derailed the thread was that percent scores aren't being used as a distribution.

The one point that can't be disputed though is that 50% of the doctors practicing today graduated in the bottom half of their class.  Why do you think they call it practicing anyway?

Practitioners.  :awesome_for_real:

Which of course has nothing to do with practice. Oh wait.

There's also the old joke about -- "What do you call someone who failed out of vet school? Doctor".

That's not true for adventure games. But your point stands...

A better joke is "What do you call someone who came last in their class at Med School? Doctor"

So to go back on topic...

Yeah, all these sites have sucked for years. However, I actually liked PlanetBaldursGate, used Direct2Drive once or twice years ago, and actually relied on Fileplanet for a number of years (mostly before Steam).

GameSpy-driven multiplayer can die in a car fire, though. :oh_i_see:

Anyone trotted out any "Nothing of Value Was Lost" memes yet?

Indeed, nothing was lost. At all.

(http://i.imgur.com/n8iGVCs.jpg)

100? Really?

I mean, it might be good (I have no idea), but a perfect score? :oh_i_see:

That 100 score was worth every penny that was paid for it.

None of those 100s are from outlets that were shuttered, just to point that out. And the game is averaging 86.

I thought the point was the despite a bunch of shitty sites getting closed, there are still plenty of shitty sites out there.

Metacritic takes a 5 star rating and calls it 100, because they are dumb.

That's far. It also includes one that a lot of people seem to like, Escapist. I wasn't so much discrediting the point, but pointing out that what I said.

But, I'm still not a fan of going LAWL GAME "JOURNALISM". Some people very well may have liked the game that much! That doesn't really discredit the opinion, nor mean they were paid.

While this is true you're still talking about someone hitting 98%+ of the notes if you can't tell they're screwing up.

I'll always go to, say, the user's reviews on amazon.   That has saved me from more than one bad purchase.    If something has less than two and a half stars?  It'd take something big for me to buy it.

When I last checked the stats for D3, they were 3:1 against it.   Most of those people weren't screaming and banging the table about an always on connection or Error 37 either.   They were a cluster of problems with the actual gameplay.   Yet, you won't find that in any semblance of a professional review.   Personally, I think that this has to do with feelings getting so attached to something that when these gaming companies put it out, they expect to be amazed by the reviews.  When you're Blizzard, that expectation can be tremendous.

So, yah, money does talk.  For good or for shit.

I just got turned on to a hilarious new review podcast. http://teamcoco.com/video/clueless-gamer-conan-obrien-reviews-tomb-raider

Look out Yahtzee.

u got turned on by a podcast....  :awesome_for_real: it better be on awesome heavy breathing going on...

to != by. just fyi.

@_@ my eyes must've skipped over it sorry to imply wrongly man.