Game review sites

Hi!

I've not been doing an update the latest couple of days because I've been busy playing local IRL Magic tournaments. I'm not really playing a lot of video games right now besides the ones I've gone through in the last few updates, but I thought I'd talk about one of the reasons why I started this blog, namely the infamous video game sites that you can find on the good 'ol Intarwebz. When I play a game that either really impresses me, or on the opposite really lets me down, I feel some kind of urge or whatever to tell this to the rest of the world. So for a period a number of years ago I would often go to Gamespot and write a review. Two years or so ago though I bought the Orange box by Valve, only to get to play this Team Fortress 2 game a lot of people talk about as a really good game. FPS is my favorite genre by some amount and I think Half-Life is certainly among the top five games ever created. So TF2 has to be great, right?

As it turns out however, TF2 is little more than a mediocre game, pretty much Counter-Strike for children with wacky and colorful graphics. I was not very impressed, in fact I think the original Team Fortress mod for HL is a better game, only the graphics obviously are not up to par nowadays. So long story short I wrote a review at GS for the game, pretty much bashing it even though I gave it like a 5.0 which should be mediocre, but obviously is very bad since everything under 9.0 is bad and not a game you want to buy. After a while my review gets taken down from the site for "trolling" or something along those lines, even though I was perfectly honest. So I stopped writing user reviews at that site and wanted to delete my account. Which the site says is not possible since the "deletion tool" is not currently working. Right.

The problem with sites like Gamespot is that they probably are paid by the game companies to give the latest Call of Duty a 9+ rating (and don't get me wrong I get the Call of Duty games on release day, I'm just not sure they deserve that kind of rating), and that their target audience is 14 year olds. It's pretty sad when an innovative game like Muramasa - the Demon Blade gets around a 6-7 rating and a very negative sounding review, and the latest CoD or Madden game always get 9+ and raving reviews like "AWESOME IMMERSIVE CINEMATIC GAMEPLAY". Muramasa gets pirated to hell and back and doesn't sell well, while CoD sells for new record numbers every annual release. This partially has to do with the consolization of video games which is another topic entirely. Right now I use IGN for game news which is not perfect but fine enough. Nobody reads the user reviews on there though so it feels pretty pointless to bother.

Until next time, signing off