Oh, look, someone doesn’t enjoy the game reviews racket anymore. Well, not so much the act of reviewing games but all the drama that surrounds game reviews. Nasty message board threads, podcast after podcast wherein professionals discuss until their throat is sore what makes a good review and how to “properly” review a game, and so on. No more, no more, no more!
Look, if you want to read the 901-word rant, be my guest, but allow me to summarize for those of you who, I don’t know, would rather be playing the games than reading about this gentleman’s meta take on the industry surrounding your repeatedly tapping the A button.
• Game reviewers are desperately trying to be “relevant” to greater popular culture. They want to be taken as seriously as movie and music reviewers. The problem is game reviews are inherently so niche they’ll never be mainstream. :-(
• Because of this, game reviewers are driven mad by trying to appear “proper,” at the expense of the reviews making much sense for their target audience: gamers.
• As such, reviewing games isn’t nearly as fun as you thought it’d be when you were 14
• “Being clever does not make you a good critic; it just makes you entertaining to your five friends.” Please note that I don’t even have five friends, so if I ever come across, in any of my posts, as trying to be clever, it’s for no one’s entertainment but my own.
Now I’d ask the y’all what makes a good video game review, but I already know the answer: tell the people if the game is fun or not. “This game is a whole lot of fun, check it out.” Done and done.
Also, I hope you enjoy my new art style.