Determinance screenshot

Repost- Psychonauts

The following appeared on my abortive old blog The Hard Line last year.  I recently re-read it, and thought you might find it interesting.

The industry is in a bad state. Nothing original is being made and Eeyay workers have long hours. Everybody knows that. Games journalists who jump on creative games and herald them as the next coming are not, despite what they think, helping.

Everyone who has ever reviewed Psychonauts desperately want you to buy it so that more games like it will be made. They think they can get you to buy it by giving it ninety percent. Unfortunately, Psychonauts is not a ninety percent game. It’s a seventy-five percent game trying something interesting. I’m sure giving it ninety has got a lot of people to buy it, but they’re now pissed off with having a sub-par game they were promised was good. How about reviewers tell the truth – that it’s a mediocre game doing something interesting – and talk about it a lot, rather than deceiving people.

Eurogamer, a good site apart from their us-against-the-world complex, awarded Psychonauts best new game of 05, and I’m quite sure they knew they were being precocious children while they were doing it. But hey, we’re an online magazine, we can do left-field stuff, it’s our right. In fact, it’s not just our right, it’s our duty! If you want to praise Psyconauts do it by reviewing it five times, or by putting an advert for it on every page, or by creating a new award that it actually should win, like Best Game With A Static-Egg Transition of 05.

Journalists are stuck in a system where a medium score will prohibit sales, but a high score will be dishonest. But that system’s there for a reason: the score should be an absolute, a rating of how much you will enjoy this game and for how long. A reviewer has a thousand other words to describe everything else.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 4:47 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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