Why Videogame Journalism Sucks

[A Black Falcon]

I don't know, I find reviews and previews useful overall... of course they are no replacement for playing a game yourself. Everyone has different tastes, so you'll never agree with a review completely... still, a decent review should be able to tell you whether you'll like a game or not based on its description of the game and how it plays, irrespective of how much the reviewer liked the game, and many reviews do accomplish that... previews? Yes, they're 99% positive. Even so, they often have new information about upcoming games in them, so I read them... I don't want to wait for the game to come out to hear about it, I want to know what's being released about it!

Of course videogame journalism has problems... many reviewers don't do a great job being objective or explaining how the game works so the reader can make their own decision on how much they'd like the game based on that review. And all too often reviewers allow personal opinions to overly influence final review scores without acknowleding that it's going on... but even so, it's not THAT bad... I read quite a bit of videogame news (IGN, Gamespot, Gamespy, Kotaku, Joystiq, etc, etc...), and it's not just because I have nothing better to do. :)

Of course, I enjoy news in general (I also spend quite a bit of time at the CNN and New York Times websites), but general news and videogame news are different things.