Re: Game Reviews: Spoiled By The Internet

I don't normally post here, although I read this group almost every
day. Seems to have one of the most heavily trafficed groups within
Usenet with legitimate posts.
As someone who has been computer gaming for a long time (not
console gaming), and as someone who used to get subscriptions
to Computer Gaming World and PC Games, and still has quite
a few back issues (and I also subscribed to some other mags for the
Commodore computers), you are pretty correct in your assessment
of game review, with one big exception.
Computer Gaming World had at one time a contributing writer
(don't know is this person was an editor) by the name of
Scorpia, and had a column in a lot of the earlier issues called
"Scorpion's Tale," where she would not only review the games
(she played RPGs and adventure games), but also gave
some hints through-out her reviews, and she could be
critical, sometimes very critical of some of the games
(the one Might & Magic game comes to mind).
Her thing was that she ALWAYS played the games to
completion, and didn't use ANY hints.
She also (and she WAS a "she") offered hints and
solutions if you were stuck in a game by sending her a S.A.S.E to a
post office box in New York City. This predates the internet by many
years. I did just this several times and always got a reply back.
She was a very private person, and supposedly only the editor/
publisher knew who she was and actually saw her, as well as
maybe one or two others.
She got fired from the magazine when Ziff-Davis bought it.
A lot of the Computer Gaming World issues are on-line at
cgwmuseum.org.
Just throwing this out there.



On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 14:34:20 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

>
The other day
>
  [Good god, it was over a month and a half ago!]
          
              we had a discussion about old video game magazines;
Computer Gaming World, Strategy Plus and the like. Archives to these
were passed around, and -dutifully- I took a look at some of them, for
nostalgia's sake. It was something to read (my new-to-me) laptop
served particularly well in this role; it' sucks as a general-use
tablet but for reading PDFs of thirty-year old magazines its 16"
screen works gangbusters!)
>
Anyway, if there's one take-away I've had from reading some of those
old magazines, it's this: video game reviews are _so_ much better
nowadays.
>
Maybe it's just that the reporters are no longer restricted to certain
word-counts. Maybe it's that we've all just gotten better at
understanding what makes a good game or not. Maybe our expectations
are better, and video-game reporting isn't seen as the lowest-tier of
journalism anymore, so better writers are attracted to the industry.
>
But, man, those early reviews were _shoddy_. It didn't seem to matter
what magazine either; they were all universally shallow. Two-thirds of
each review just unquestioningly rehashed the game's box-copy, and
then the reviewers gave their opinions. There was almost no analysis
or deep-dive into what was actually good or bad about the games; at
most we got stuff like, "It was fun" or "it seemed a bit hard to
play".
>
Now, look; if you've been here at c.s.i.p.g.a you probably know I
should be the last person to criticize somebody else's reviews. My
monthly 'what have you been playing' lists are endless verbal diarrhea
with little in the way of useful content. Then again, I'm not getting
paid for these reviews (nor am I putting particularly much effort into
them, or having them go past an editor's canny eye). Still, the stuff
I write often has more depth to it than the stuff you'd read in
video-game magazines of the 80s and 90s.
>
There's a lot to dislike about modern video-game journalism, and I'd
be remiss to suggest there aren't still a lot of shallow,
publisher-serving reviews out there still. But on the whole, the bar
has risen dramatically over the past thirty years; we're more
suspicious about where a journalist's editorial loyalties lie, and in
general just expect a broader understanding from reviewers about how
games work, and what makes them good or bad.
>
In the more innocent 80s or 90s, we'd accept the word of any schmuck
they took off the street, even if he couldn't write well (and some of
them really couldn't), so long as his words were under the masthead of
a reputable magazine.
>
So thank you, Internet. For once you actually didn't make things
worse.
>