Be Excellent To Each Other

I remember loving Eurogamer. It would tell me about amazing games and it seemed to be full of passion for the field. Is that just nostalgia?

Over the last couple of years I've become more and more frustrated with the site. To begin with it was just a niggle in the back of my mind, but it has grown and grown.

How do I loathe what Eurogamer has become? Let me count the ways...

• An ever growing lack of enthusiasm. 8/10, 8/10. 8/10, 8/10 by the numbers we don't care THEN 8/10, strange unique but flawed game? THEN 8/10, incredibly generic big budget title? THEN 8/10.
  
• Increasingly confusion about what gaming is about. The PS3 vs 360 fight offs they do have a great use to owners of multiple platform but the spirit of them is all out of whack. It'll devote one line to the game play differences, the different DLC or some other factor that actually matters, but spend PARAGRAPH AFTER PARAGRAPH detailing how the PS3 is using textures 3% larger than the 360, or that the 360s inbuilt Anti-aliasing means that the frame rate is on average 2 frames a second higher. Which brings me to...
  
• Digital fucking Foundary. All this nerd off must pull in a bunch of fucking hits, but at what fucking cost. I know the summer is light for gaming but get some people to write some joyous pieces about the love of gaming to cushion this stuff. Read the titles in this feed
  http://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry
  It's empty and dead.

But this cemented my understanding of what is really wrong. Excellent-games-journalist-but-forum-enemy Stewart Campbell recently said this on his forum:



Which is pretty much the most insightful criticism of Eurogamer I've read for yonks. Every-Single-Highlight-of-Eurogamer-Reviews is by a freelancer.

The eurogamer core staff only care about which version of their favourite FPS/3rd Person shooter has a higher resolution. The Cunts.

So when did Eurogamer die for you?

I have to say I really like all the techie and nerdy geek stuff, but then again I am a nerdy techie geek who plays nothing but World of Warcraft.

They know their audience!

Nearly all 'major' games are soulless and boring these days anyway, hence increasingly soulless and boring writing about them.

They are still better than most shit games sites.

Really, the RPS guys need to kidnap the best people from EG, and set up Rock Paper Console.

iPhone games.
XBLA games.
DS games.
WiiWare games.
The indie-scene.

We are eurogamer, we'll pretty much ignore them.

(Boy i didn't realise how much I wrote. Whilst balancing this laptop on one leg. Urgh can't keep this up. Stupid foot.)

I can't remember the last time I was actually entertained by any games journalism, online or not.

Which makes it hurt all the more.

(agree on the shotgun - i read that site despite not having a win-pc for decade now)

I can... Amiga Power, 1993.

I can't think of a better website offering EG's amount of coverage. I rather like if. And they do publish good stuff, by staff and freelancers - John Walker's Scribblenauts review being the best review of anything I've read in ages.

i agree. These days i only regularly read Rock Paper Shotgun.

The very same thing happened with Terrorizer magazine.

I still really enjoy Terrorizer and I'm wicked underground.

The only problem with RPS is the (tiny minoity) fucking imbeciles that inhabit their comments/forums.

See how any mention of either Bioshock or Fallout 3 ignites the comment thread with stupid cocks whining.

I did like when OLL (*) joined up with eurogamer for a season and instead of every game getting 7/10 they gave them all 8/10 instead

(*) = One Life Left - a videogame radioshow and podcast - http://www.onelifeleft.com

Ha ha, yeah that was ace.

Dan Whitehead.

Or more seriously: It hasn't really. I just wish the front page wasn't so shit.

OMG THIS GAME SUPPORTS X360 PAD ITS DUMBED DOWN SHIT FOR CONSOLETARDZZZZZZZZ

I think that anyone who hasn't typed in a program from Your Sinclair's early issues do not have the right to call anything dumbed down.

But they were all about as shit as Totemball.

But they weren't dumbed down.

RPS commenter's aren't that bad. In fact the vast majority of them are pretty damn good.

The Gamasutra network sites Gamerbytes (for downloadable stuff on consoles) and IndieGames (for indie games) are pretty good for bloggy news on their respective areas.

But they were shit.

Thinking back it I'm amazed at the enthusiasm I used to have for games. That I'd sit there for a full day just typing in reams of code in the vain hope that some shitty, interminable maze game would offer sufficient thrills to tide me over until the next time I could get near an arcade machine.

RPS comments are a mixed bag, but there's a higher ratio of excellent to nobbish than on most sites. It's not wonderful, but it's actually worth scanning them, which is better than most other sites.

I used to do those from Big K, does that count?

I'd go to fancy dress as Video Kid if I thought anyone would have an effing clue who he was.

I've never liked them.

It was started by an upstart, and it's always been mediocre at best.

Malc

It was the piece about Pathologic on Rock Paper Shotgun for me, and I don't even do PC gaming anymore.

Ooh, speaking of RPS, they have just got a lovely new look.

When they started reviewing soft furnishings (wait a moment? - Ed).

I T ' S T O O W I D E .

IThinkIt'sTooThin.

Also: The site is going very, very slowly

I gave up trying to see it after 30 seconds of looking at a blank white screen.

I had to make my browser window wider to see it all. I've never had to do that before.

Why would your browser window not be maximised?

Mine isn't as I'm generally watching a DVD or something and there's no "always on top" option under views

So it doesn't use up the whole screen.

Because to have it so would make me rage.

All bad reasons!

Only if your desktop is tiny.

Above about 1400 pixels of horizontal resolution, many websites will render more than the recommended 60-80 characters per line. Above that figure, your eye has to work harder when moving from one line down to the next, slowing your reading speed. Try it -- this is affecting you, even if you don't realise it consciously.

And those that don't (i.e. the content doesn't expand beyond a maximum width) will be wasting desktop space with massive empty borders.

There are a few exceptions (e.g. big tables of stuff) but most websites look a bit odd when maximised on a decent-sized monitor. The other exception for me is on my tv, where I'm sat far enough away to zoom most sites up a bit, so their width usually suits a maximised window even though it's 1920 pixels wide.

Huh.





I was just pondering yesterday what a new digital distribution service would need to be a success. I think to be anything other than just a niche service, the would need to combine a decent selection of games, good pricing, universal no DRM, and good exclusive content. It certainly won't be easy.

Don't be that guy.

Hmm, call me old-fashioned but I'm not sure if a reviews site should dally in the marketing and selling of games. I have a vague idea there could be discomfortable conflicts of interest in actuality or mere accusation - lord knows why.

Also - I wonder what site sponsor and best buddy Shopto will have to say about it.

Hmm, a new challenger for Braids "most crap review" award.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/katam ... ver-review

Basically being marked down for not being a "didactic condemnation of the developed world's rampant consumerism"

Sigh.

And it's not even by Dan Whitehead!

Dan Whitehead's review of Braid.

I read Eurogamer practically every day (hey, it works well on my N95) and it's just all over the place.

Dozens and dozens of games go unreviewed - they don't do their '360 roundups' any more to give several games a page each. A huge review of a new game - and within an hour or two of being posted it's pushed to the bottom of the screen by no less than THREE SEPERATE ARTICLES about different aspects of Left4Shit 2 that could have easily been combined into one big article.

Not just Eurogamer, but far too much attention and love is given to a) British devs who are trading mostly on their past glories (Molyneux, Rare, Codebastards) and b) whiners like Jonathan Blow or the guys who did Clover.

Worst of all, the reviews are so woefully generic and middle-of-the-road you come away having not really learned anything about the game that you couldn't have from the press release. IL-2 Sturmovik, for example, was previewed by sim reviewer Tim Stone who looked at all the things people interested in a flight sim care about. It was then reviewed by Dan Whitehead, who struggled to burble anything beyond the fact he thought it looked right. NFS: SHIT was given a review which focused more on the upcoming nature of GT5 and Forza 3 than the game, and the fact that (in the reviewer's unqualified opinion) it wasn't as good as GRiD. When someone who actually knew his stuff reviewed Madden 10, the majority of comments were dumbfounded readers who were re-experiencing quality games journalism again like having their first beer and fag after a month's detox.

There's also the self-indulgent articles (the 'Natural Born Killers' article, where a Fallout 3 player writes the sort of tale 12 year old boys did in English class - meticulously detailed dismemberments and violence), the advertiser-sponsored articles (the Colin McRally retrospective which was both redundant and full of errors - Colin 2 came out on Dreamcast, says EG) and the terrible 'submit questions for an interview' in which genuine questions are ignored in favour of daft ones which clearly make the devs uncomfortable and wish they hadn't turned up (again, Colin's in the DiRT 2, two questions about whether you could run over people and animals). Oh, and the anti-sports bias - in the space of a week they'd called cricket, the Tour de France and track and field 'boring'.

Thing is, I think they realize they've got something of a captive audience and so can get away with whatever they like.

If someone could point me in the direction of a better alternative, I'd jump like a shot.

http://www.inverty.com

No, not really. That's the thing, I don't think there is anywhere better. Eurogamer may well be best major games site on the Internet.

I find joystiq both funnier and quicker with nyowz.

Isn't that American though?