Game Reviewing... is it Journalism? Part IV

And now we've reached the final chapter of this vaguely interesting/poorly researched endeavor. I claimed throughout this blog that these reviewers often cut corners and don't deliver sincere reviews to their readers. Well, this may be true but keep in mind not all reviewers are guilty of this and if a rating seems strangely high for a game it may be due to the unavoidable hype machine and really isn't the reviewer's fault. For those that are responsible for their bad journalism there is no sympathy for you... unless of course your employer forced this upon you and well then that just sucks now doesn't it.

When developers (or maybe is publishers) send out pre-release copies of their games to popular reviewers they often times send copies that give the player debug abilities (basically the ability to hack the game and skip ahead through levels, toggle godmode, etc,etc.). Reviewers often times utilize these tools to skip through the game to make a tight deadline or simply because their lazy. This is not cool. The game needs to be completely (or nearly completely) experienced in order to gauge a proper judgment. There is just far too much to take into account.

This is not the only thing that may happen with your favorite reviewers. Sometimes reviewers don't get a copy before release and simply base their review on someone elses' so they can compete... although this doesn't happen very often.

So how do you find a good reviewer to consistently trust? Well usually this would involve tracking down a reviewer that has similar tastes as you and often times these good reviews don't come out until a week or more after release... these are thorough and quality reviews after all. Another good way, the way I usually trust, is to see what the game's Metacritic score is (www.metacritic.com). Metacritic averages all the scores of all the major magazines (local and international) and big websites and gives a nice clean score. It provides all the sources with links and blurbs and has scores dating back to N64. Another way is to trust what your friends say... if you don't have any gamer friends (or friends in general) ask the gamers in your online community (assuming you at least have internet buddies).

So is game reviewing journalism? Well if done right then yes, yes it is.