Games Journalism General

[No creativity]

Your average Kiwi Farms shitposter is more qualified to write about video games than these assclowns.

Anyone that actually enjoys videogames is more qualified than game journos, that's why youtubers are much more influential than major gaming publications. People would rather listen to some random sperg talk about something he loves rather than read what a failed journalist has to write about something he hates.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

https://www.polygon.com/2014/10/13/6957677/bayonetta-2-review-wii-u

I won't guess why the blatant over-sexualization is still there, often more intensely than before. But it causes an otherwise great game to require a much bigger mental compromise to enjoy.

There's no need to guess, the fucking character is written as sexually flamboyant and exhibitionist (and there are MANY male characters doing the exact same thing), you can't have your sex positive cake and eat it too. Fuck these people.

The game is about an obviously sexualized witch fighting angels and heaven itself with dominatrix moves. What has been the thorn in the side of religion and religious people for a long time? What makes them gnash their teeth? Witches, how women dress and their ability to express any kind of sexuality or agency, that's what. That this is the theme is obvious from playing ten minutes of it, they also play it up for humor just to make the player awkward and embarrassed at times. Just look at the intro where her chaste nun outfit gets sliced and there's a bit of butt, a bit of boob, it goes into slowmotion while an anime "ooouuuh" plays with a kissing noise at the end. That's a scene made to make the player look over the shoulder to check if someone walked in and saw what just happened, don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. Awkward and great fucking joke, Bayonetta is straight up hilarious in that Devil May Cry way.

How can people miss that?

-----------

I was trying to find a funny Polygon article but instead found Kotaku covering the same thing. It was about the engine for Horizon Zero Dawn and how it works. These people not knowing how the mechanics in gameplay works fares even worse if it's anything technical involved.

What made the Polygon article great was the author gnashing his teeth that they can't do more coverage like this(Digital Foundry is popular) because the devs don't tell them what to write. Yeah, they don't want to think for themselves and when people on the internet suggested that they learn the answer was no, they can't go to years of computer school now or some bullshit like that. Learning by reading on the internet is just not an option for gamejournos, someone has to tell them directly.

This was one of the things they found amazing, occlusion culling.

Every time you move the camera in Horizon Zero Dawn, the game is doing all sorts of under-the-hood calculations, loading and unloading chunks of world to ensure that it all runs properly. And that’s not even counting the robot dinosaurs.

One of my favorite parts is the GIF above, at around 18:16 in the documentary, which shows how the game is secretly rendering giant chunks of terrain on the fly as you move your camera around.

Impostors, changing something to a usually billboarded sprite if it's really far away, that's something they out by taking a screenshot of the video.

This process, which at this point has become common in open-world games, helps conserve memory, which allows games like Horizon to show you a whole lot of pretty graphical models at once without sacrificing performance. Game development: It’s complicated!

True, but not processing what isn't seen and not rendering a 3d model for what is a couple of green pixels far away, that's neither new or a complicated idea.

https://kotaku.com/horizon-zero-dawn-uses-all-sorts-of-clever-tricks-to-lo-1794385026

 

[UE 558]

I thought Devin Faraci ran that account.

Either way when I first came across it I thought it was satire.

Since you’re a big RDR2 fan, here’s some of his galaxy brained spicy takes that’ll make you want to keep his mother in black on his behalf

Spoiler

Red Dead Redemption 2 sperging.
View attachment 577152View attachment 577153View attachment 577154View attachment 577155

 

[Wargarbl]

"Journalist" Jason Schreier (one of Quinn's OG whiteknights) whines about one of Bethesda's twitter accounts mocking him, reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees at the danger this puts journalists in in a "post GamerGate" world:

View attachment 756244

I haven't seen a soyfaggot put in his place that hard in a while. First he gets absolutely NO SURVIVORS'd by Bethesda directly, then a nobody's reply gets 50% more likes than Jason's apologism while dunking on him. I love everything about this thread. The only thing wrong I see is the dunker accidentally called Schreier a journalist.

 

[Judge Dredd]

There was no Ben Kuchera because I forgot. I guess he got lost in all the re-writes. Will add him when I edit the OP, along with a bunch of other stuff mentioned so far.

I don't know how I've never heard of Michael Fahey, he's like a parody of a games journalist.

It's more of an ace in the hole for when someone is dumb enough to claim that Bayonetta was a product of a man's fantasy. Then it deals critical damage to their stupid ass.

They are the same people who talk about women's sexual liberation. To criticise something sexual made by a woman is kinkshaming. When you mention Bayonetta was made by a woman, they either reverse that standard, in which case games like Lady Killer In A Bind, The non existent Chuck Tingle game, and that book about Nintendo butts are now open for criticism. So they default to a conspiracy theory that Bayonetta was designed by a woman, but she was forced by a sexist man to do it. They can't provide proof so they just block anyone who asks.

Game Journalism is actually a bottom-tier journalism job. It's considered akin to working at a fast food job to any actual journalist. Most video game journalists didn't actually want to write for video games, they wanted to work as actual reporters or journalists but couldn't find work doing that. This is why they insert leftist politics into articles, and why they tend to suck at playing the games.

I don't think they want to be real reporters or journalists. I don't think they'd go to a middle eastern war zone or expose risk jail by exposing government corruption.

Most of these journalists (or at least this kind of coverage) started around 2005-2010. High speed internet was becoming mainstream, there was the rise of indie games due to Xbox Live Arcade, and more importantly "geek stuff" was the new cool. There's a reason 'ironic retro game t-shirt' was as much part of hipster uniform as skinny jeans and black rimmed glasses. Gaming was the subversive yet mainstream medium of the future.

But by 2012 gaming was too mainstream and political activism was the new "in thing". Suddenly they found themselves with no qualifications to move into politics, YouTubers were eating their lunch, ad block and HD video was decimating their profits. Going political killed 2 birds with 1 stone. They could be woke allies and generate traffic through controversial articles. Sure, each time they did this it damaged their long term reputation, but their only incentives were short term. Twitter asspats and most clicks. I remember there was an article about Gawker (owners of Kotaku at the time) which said they had a white board of who/which article had the most clicks that day.

As for game reviewing being difficult and soul crushing.

The main reason Leigh disappeared, is because after leaving the industry, she married some soyboy. Probably from a cashed up family.

I didn't know that. I think I've seen that wedding painting (wasn't it an artist who worked on some popular game at the time?). I think that by the time she formed Offworld she had burned all of her bridges within the industry. I want to say that she was also the one that was paid to promote Sunset before it bombed.

 

[SiccDicc]

Since you’re a big RDR2 fan, here’s some of his galaxy brained spicy takes that’ll make you want to keep his mother in black on his behalf

I dunno, I've seen Devin... I don't think I want anything to do with his mother. I'll just send Tyrone over.

I didn't know that. I think I've seen that wedding painting (wasn't it an artist who worked on some popular game at the time?). I think that by the time she formed Offworld she had burned all of her bridges within the industry. I want to say that she was also the one that was paid to promote Sunset before it bombed.

I think it was the artist behind the portraits in Shadowrun. Harebrained Schemes is pretty pozzed, not gonna lie. Most anything Paradox involved is these days.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Consolevania was on top of the nu-skool journalism in games 15 years ago. That's how long this has been bothering people, that people finally got fed up enough to go to greener pastures should surprise no one.

Screenshot from this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGdsxHcdfwQ it's pretty funny and only 2 minutes long.

 

[NARPASSWORD]

Funny thing is, excessive fanservice can in fact be criticised. I personally think A lot of fanservice is done by companies to please creeps like Billy Usher and Homer in a desperate attempt to get people to like their games (like Fire Emblem).
It's just that journalists are idiotic perverts that will only criticise something as part of their agenda, hence journalists criticism of fanservice only boils down to "OMG SEXISM!".

 

[ADN_VIII]

What I find tragic about Kotaku in particular is their coverage of NieR Automata. For those who don't know, NieR Automata is the brainchild of professional games director and absolute lunatic Yoko Taro and is a mix and match of 3D hack and slash, top down bullet hell, 2.5D platform not unlike Shadow Complex, RPG elements, and 26 different endings.

The secondary protagonist is a combat android called 2B, or in technical terms YoRHa Number 2 Type Battle, with her sidekick 9S, or YoRHa Number 9 Type Scanner. Both have kind of unique takes on what I would tag as an EGL fashion. 2B in particular is designed to look a lot like a sexbot. Incredibly long legs, thigh high black boots with heels, exposed thighs and butt, a boob window on her top, and a voice to match. There's an achievement for looking up her skirt 10 times. I shit you not.

What makes me alternate between choking laughing and genuine pity is how much Kotaku absolutely fawns over NieR Automata. From the way the articles about it are titled and written you'd think that they're about to name it game of the century. All these writers who gleefully try to eviscerate games that have sexualized characters are fellating Automata like it will save their jobs and I cannot help but laugh at them. But then I also feel bad for them, because they're effectively having to suck up to the people they castigate in order to stay in business. But that also delivers strong schadenfreude so I don't feel too bad either way.

 

[BrokenWokenBespoken]

So it’s less the journos themselves lacking ethics and more the heads of these companies not wanting them to have any to prevent their EA/Activsion/Squeenix/2K/etc tugboats from running away

EA and all the AAA devs dont really give two shits if you say a game sucks. They know their rep is in the gutter with the hardcore fanbase but they survive due to the fact they are the UA of video games. Their goal is to minimalize complaints. Not cancel them out completely. Gaming in the west have become a bland Hollywood level of entertainment where under the perfect circumstances it generates no controversy. EA makes generic sports games, Activision makes generic shootan games and Ubisoft makes generic open world and city building games. Japan on the other attempts to experiment to the disdain of journalists as it would require them to think

But Journalists need some sort of bone to remain motivated and once your pay grade hits the 50k/mo the appeal of free coke and hookers fades real fast and they crave self expression which was why reviews got political. It was the only way for them to keep covering games without dying in a fit of Ennui

 

[SiccDicc]

Funny thing is, excessive fanservice can in fact be criticised. I personally think A lot of fanservice is done by companies to please creeps like Billy Usher and Homer in a desperate attempt to get people to like their games (like Fire Emblem).
It's just that journalists are idiotic perverts that will only criticise something as part of their agenda, hence journalists criticism of fanservice only boils down to "OMG SEXISM!".

I feel like criticizing excessive fanservice is fine so long as the reviewer admits they aren't the intended audience for it. Because, let's be honest, what's excessive for one has barely begun for another. The world has a disturbing amount of fetishes and the degrees to which people will enjoy them, with those creeps aside some people get violent over seeing ankles and such. Basically it's all subjective is what I'm trying to say.

Like Valhalla Knights 3 - shut up, I liked the dungeon romp - had those minigames for it which were obviously embarrassing for some, but I didn't mind them and I actually got decent allies out of the questlines from them. I just tried not to initiate them in public. However, I'll never get the Gold Version of the game because it didn't sell enough... never mind they sold more here than in Japan if I remember right from the initial rendition. I feel like the outcry spooked them.

 

[UE 558]

I feel like criticizing excessive fanservice is fine so long as the reviewer admits they aren't the intended audience for it. Because, let's be honest, what's excessive for one has barely begun for another. The world has a disturbing amount of fetishes and the degrees to which people will enjoy them, with those creeps aside some people get violent over seeing ankles and such. Basically it's all subjective is what I'm trying to say.

Like Valhalla Knights 3 - shut up, I liked the dungeon romp - had those minigames for it which were obviously embarrassing for some, but I didn't mind them and I actually got decent allies out of the questlines from them. I just tried not to initiate them in public. However, I'll never get the Gold Version of the game because it didn't sell enough... never mind they sold more here than in Japan if I remember right from the initial rendition. I feel like the outcry spooked them.

I honestly don’t care about excessive fanservice, even if it isn’t the main appeal to games for me. However, I do think turbospergs like Billy D, Homer, and Artefact would be better off focussing on the free expression aspect of it rather than hamfistedly interjecting a disgustingly detailed description of the time they wacked off to futanari lolicon in the KFC bathroom in their editorial about Sony censoring Senran.

Also, they tend to think that minor shit, like Samus’s boobs and ass being slightly smaller in SSBU (even though she still has booty shorts and a tubetop as a costume) is the same as Ed Boon’s woke brigade basically turning all of the female costumes in MK11 into shitty Dark Souls armors

 

[SiccDicc]

I honestly don’t care about fanservice, even if it isn’t the main appeal to games for mez, However, I do think turbospergs like Billy D, Homer, and Artefact would be better off focussing on the free expression aspect of it rather than hamfistedly interjecting a disgustingly detailed description of the time they wacked off to futanari lolicon in the KFC bathroom in their editorial about Sony censoring Senran.

Yeah, they're basically the inverse of the journos they hate so much. For instance that one games journalist that went on this huge tirade about how his dad was a bad man for bringing him to the shooting range as a kid and stuff, it didn't feel like he was making a point about how VR can drum up such memories from its realism but more that "I still feel bad shooting this, so guns are bad and this app is bad for it." They stray so far from the point they have to share something about themselves... must be something in the ego.

 

[AnOminous]

But Journalists need some sort of bone to remain motivated and once your pay grade hits the 50k/mo the appeal of free coke and hookers fades real fast and they crave self expression which was why reviews got political.

On what planet do you live where these sad motherfuckers get paid $50k a fucking MONTH to write the same clickbait every other outrage outlet hires people too dumb for real journalism to shit out? This is irony, right?

Learning by reading on the internet is just not an option for gamejournos, someone has to tell them directly.

That's why they have mailing lists like GameJournoPros where they get their marching orders and sometimes outright copypasta to publish as their own. That's why they'll invariably all come out with what amounts to exactly the same article the same day with the same stock phrases and buzzwords, like nobody has noticed they do this.

 

[UE 558]

Yeah, they're basically the inverse of the journos they hate so much. For instance that one games journalist that went on this huge tirade about how his dad was a bad man for bringing him to the shooting range as a kid and stuff, it didn't feel like he was making a point about how VR can drum up such memories from its realism but more that "I still feel bad shooting this, so guns are bad and this app is bad for it." They stray so far from the point they have to share something about themselves... must be something in the ego.

Pretty much.

If you’re reading this Sophia Narwitz (aka sophnar0747), tell your friend Billy D that telling us about how many times he likes to wank to Bowsette hentai isn’t gonna make us agree that Nintendo is a censorship happy pariah, it’s just gonna make us think that he’s a gross faggot who never smells like old cum and never goes outside

 

[Marissa Moira]

All the games made by the people who did Gone Home are all terrible. Tacoma is about exploring a space station but it suffers from the same shit that telltale games did where they tried to package a movie as a game.

They'll get obsessed about lore and politics and then forget that what made first person exploration games like Riven great is that the player could explore and solve puzzles at will and wasn't forced along a path. They get distracted by the wrong things.

If you read the reviews you could easily tell that what the games journalists wanted was a movie, they didn't want to have any involvement or time investment with playing a game and really just wanted the game to play itself. They honestly want netflix specials and have them be called video games.

It's also funny to see that after gone home was done with being made a fuss over all the games that came next would just cite gone home nostalgia as bumping up the review score of games like Tacoma. The User reviews were less forgiving.

 

[BrokenWokenBespoken]

On what planet do you live where these sad motherfuckers get paid $50k a fucking MONTH to write the same clickbait every other outrage outlet hires people too dumb for real journalism to shit out? This is irony, right?

Vox Media Salaries in New York City, NY, US Area | Glassdoor

Vox Media Salaries trends. 155 salaries for 112 jobs at Vox Media in New York City. Salaries posted anonymously by Vox Media employees in New York City.

www.glassdoor.ca

Polygon's gaming journalism is just an arm of the media giant for example. But their wages are on living level vs welfare cheques from more honest journalism.

Why else would disney sink more than half a billion on Vice despite being a loss header?

 

[AnOminous]

Vox Media Salaries in New York City, NY, US Area | Glassdoor

Vox Media Salaries trends. 155 salaries for 112 jobs at Vox Media in New York City. Salaries posted anonymously by Vox Media employees in New York City.

www.glassdoor.ca

Polygon's gaming journalism is just an arm of the media giant for example. But their wages are on living level vs welfare cheques from more honest journalism.

Why else would disney sink more than half a billion on Vice despite being a loss header?

Not one of those has $50k/month or anything near it.

 

[Medicated]

"Journalist" Jason Schreier (one of Quinn's OG whiteknights) whines about one of Bethesda's twitter accounts mocking him, reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees at the danger this puts journalists in in a "post GamerGate" world:

View attachment 756244

Didn't Schreier just recently shit on Anthems obviously shitty release? Of course if you aren't willing to tow the company line they will treat you like shit. Sounds like he's just trying to spin it as some bullshit PR for himself.

At least take a page from Dorito Pope during ME3, and if you are going to expose a game dev team, do it quietly with a paid editorial that barely anyone knows about.

 

[Terminus Est]

Schreier is such a fag