Friday afternoon tidbits

It's hard to believe it's been 8 years since 9/11. I don't have any commentary, sincere or snarky, nor do I want to say anything about it in relation to video games. Not even, "Really puts it all in perspective!" Just a terrible anniversary to have to mark every year.

-I mentioned in my review of The Beatles: Rock Band that the future of the franchise lies with the Rock Band Network, and not tributes to past bands. Why do I think so? Because of things like this: local rockers the Bon Savants are beta testing the RBN, and video-blogging their efforts. Tell me this isn't going to be an incredible way to hear new music.

The Bon Savants, by the way, are very good and you should listen to them.

-I also really enjoyed Ian Bogost's trenchant, contrarian take on Beatles Rock Band. The comments show what can happen when you take aim at a sacred cow (though it should be said that most are thoughtful in their own right, which is what happens when you've got dudes like Iroquois Pliskin calling you out). I think a lot of people disagreed with the broad brush Ian used to paint the older generation, which is fair, but his point was sound: it is precisely this older generation that pivoted from peace and love to grabbing everything for themselves at the expense of others (giving us gems such as "Get your government hands off my Medicare!"). Is it everybody in that generation? Of course not. But who else is highjacking social progress in this country?

Okay, so the argument does pertain only slightly to the Beatles. Fair enough.

-Two last links about The Beatles: Rock Band. First, John Teti's perceptive takedown of Seth Schiesel's New York Times review. I am very happy to see game reviews getting column inches in the Times, but I am less happy when they are as silly as Seth's was. He means well, I know, but Teti correctly notes that the tack he took in this review was to denigrate the entire medium of video games in order to convince his readers that this one really is good.

Beyond which, whenever I find myself typing in a review that a game is "one of the most," "one of the best," or "important," I delete it and write something else. That way lies madness, not to mention looking like an idiot in retrospect. Sean Sands at Gamers with Jobs notes that, at the time, no one predicted the impact that Guitar Hero would have: "...in November of 2005... No one in our forums was even talking about this odd and expensive game full of cover bands and fairly simplistic gameplay. On the cusp of a cultural phenomenon, no one saw it coming."

And now that everybody knows how important and popular music games are, now we're going to anoint the 800th music game as the most important of all time? It's never that easy. This is selling low and buying high.

-Although she doesn't mention me, I'd like to think I had something to do with moving the gears that resulted in Meghan Watt weighing in on Game Informer's Metacritic article. For the record, although I didn't contact Meghan for comment when I wrote my piece, I did ask OXM editor-in-chief Francesca Reyes to respond. Though she agreed to get back to me, it never happened, and ultimately I felt I had to run the piece as it was, especially after Kevin Gifford's "Game Mag Weaseling" column remarked positively upon the same GI piece.

-In Crispy Gamer, Kyle Orland answers a question I've had for a long time: how PR companies decide what outlets get which games to review. It explains quite a lot about the difficulties we've had in the past getting some companies to respond. PR people from Boston, or with Boston ties, are almost always excited to get covered in the Phoenix. Others may need some convincing.

There does seem to be a quid pro quo involved, too. I understand not wanting to send a first-person shooter to a reviewer who's previously said he hates the genre, sure, but it's infuriating that PR companies may decide to punish reviewers who run negative reviews. I've said it before and I'll say it again: ultimately everybody is better served with honest and tough reviews. If an outlet has a reputation for being hard on games, then wouldn't a positive review from them mean that much more? Won't the median quality of games go up if critics and gamers are demanding more of them? It seems basic to me.

Of course, it takes just one influential publication to trade scores for early access to throw that out the window. And there's more than one.

Hey, that was the longest links post ever. Maybe I should start cutting these into individual posts.

Friday afternoon tidbits

Seeing a couple of movies this weekend: The Hurt Locker and Harry Potter. Which will be better? I can't even begin to guess.

-Kyle Orland imagines what life would be like if game characters used Twitter. Pretty funny, and an excellent opportunity to link to my own game-related Tweets.

-Also on Crispy Gamer, Scott Jones envisions a world in which great authors reviewed video games. The Hemingway excerpt almost made me choke.

-While I was on vacation, Clint Hocking responded to the Far Cry 2 perma-death phenomenon that's sweeping at least two blogs. He's a hell of a sharp guy, and argues forcefully once again that it's the elements of gameplay themselves that create meaning, and not a designer-imposed narrative.

-Ryan Stewart's review of Guitar Hero: Smash Hits is worth reading on its own, but he does himself one better with a visual summary. His Guitar Hero Venn diagram neatly categories each song according to whether it is fun, good, hard, or any combination of the three. And, yes, "Back in the Saddle" is terrible.

-This one's been making its way around the intertubes, but in case you messed it: Jeff Atwood explores the devolution of the ads for Civony and Evony, from the initial generic Lord of the Rings rip to -- well, see for yourself.

-The sports blog Deadspin took a page from their Gawker media compadres Kotaku and posted "If They Were Athletes: The Robots from Mega Man 2." Curt Schilling as Air Man is too perfect.

Let the weekend start... now!

Checking in with Crispy Gamer

Two weeks ago, I remarked upon the launch of Crispy Gamer, a new site that intends to counterbalance the fawning and uncritical coverage you allegedly find at the bigger game sites. There's no question that the industry could use more even-keeled, incisive journalism -- which is not to ignore the valuable contributions of legit journos like N'Gai Croal, Brian Crecente, Geoff Keighley, and many more. But for all the individuals doing solid work, there's still not one place readers can go to find high-quality journalism coupled with insightful game reviews. You have to mix and match your favorite writers from around the web, if that's what you're looking for. Or you have to wade through a bunch of filler.

The first thing Crispy Gamer did right was to assemble some excellent writers, and besides the initial "Game Trust" they've now also posted a review by erstwhile Gamespot scribe Alex Navarro. It's an all-star cast. They've also lent their aegis to Kyle Orland's illuminating "Games for Lunch" project. They've got the right people and the right idea. What I wonder is whether they have the right attitude.

This week, Crispy Gamer debuted a column titled "I Call Bullshit," pitching itself as "a 1,000-watt spotlight on anything and everything in the videogame industry that, you know, just doesn't smell right," and pledging to reveal the "hard, cold truth about the videogame industry." The first few paragraphs are snarky and self-congratulatory, as though the necessary corrective to the supplication of mainstream sites is macho chest-beating. Does the game industry need to be told some hard truths? Yes. Is the way to do that to be insulting and dismissive? Doubtful. If anything, it may only serve to create a bunker mentality among the PR class. Which, granted, may be a step up from the "profound contempt" they seem to be operating with now.

But then the piece goes on to call bullshit on issues that are well past their sell-by date, like the Mass Effect sex controversy and Xbox 360 hardware reliability. The former issue is dead and buried at this point, and this article adds no fresh perspective to it. Microsoft's ongoing inability to address their manufacturing troubles is a legitimate concern, but also one that has been well covered from one end of the web to the other. The world was not desperate for a hero to finally stand up and point out that Xbox 360s break. And, again, this wouldn't be a problem if the column illuminated the problem, instead of merely reiterating it.

Some of the complaints are ironic. An item about the New York Times' struggles to correctly identify industry figures and the names of video games is interesting, because you'd certainly expect the newspaper of record to show more professionalism. But coming as this does in a column that includes sentences written in all caps and questionable grammatical formulations like "Bullshit = called," the criticism loses some of its punch. The article also calls out "fresh-out-of-the-Photoshop-oven screenshots." But if you wait for the second rotating feature to load on the Crispy Gamer homepage, you'll see that it's promoting "exclusive screenshots" for LittleBigPlanet, Starcraft II, and the especially bullshotty Dark Sector. For a site that prides itself on not feeding from the PR trough, this is an interesting juxtaposition.

I know Crispy Gamer loaded up on content prior to their launch, so that could explain some of the staleness of this column. If future installments occur closer to real-time, stopping some of these runaway PR nightmares in their tracks, it'll be a worthwhile feature. But if it's going to remain nothing more then carping and namecalling, then guess what?

I call bullshit.

Crispy Gamer puts its money where its mouth is

Although many of us had suspected it for a long time, the circumstances surrounding the firing of Gamespot's Jeff Gerstmann only confirmed people's darkest fears that advertising was corrupting editorial integrity at the bigger enthusiast sites. If Eidos can bully one of the most respected sites in the industry into softening a Kane and Lynch review, what chance is there to find fair and unbiased coverage?

Crispy Gamer thinks they can break the game publishers' stranglehold. The site, which launched today, promises credibility and accountability in everything they write. How? "Crispy Gamer will not accept ads from game publishers. Read that line again: Will not. Credibility starts when the emphasis is placed on the reader and not the bottom line."

That's a bold way to do business. One wonders if the Publishers Clearing House ads currently adorning the margins will bring in the clicks the way, say, a Burnout Paradise ad would. If they can attract the readership, though, there's no reason they won't make money. To do that, they've assembled what looks like a stellar roster of writers, including some of my favorites like Tom Chick, Gus Mastrapa, and Kyle Orland. Crispy Gamer calls its contributors the "Game Trust," which to my mind is a little overblown, but at least conveys what they're going for.

They're also bold enough to do what most reviewers only dream, and that's to eschew numerical scores altogether, opting instead for a simpler "Buy It/Try It/Fry It" rubric. To this point, there aren't enough reviews up to say whether these pieces are really going to be as independent and iconoclastic as they claim. Most seem positive, including an effusive BioShock review. I will say that I'm not encouraged to "Buy" Assassin's Creed when the review's subhed calls it flawed, and then scanning the text reveals phrases like "may not quite live up to the hype," "an amusing story clumsily delivered," and so on. Still, I'm intrigued enough by their mission statement to keep tuning in as they flesh out their content.