I decided on a DS Lite, btw. Thanks for the advice! Will be covering Infinite Space and Strange Journuu~ in future episodes.
Regarding hating on something because it's popular-I agree that it is juvenile when its done without at least some critical evaluation of the thing itself. However, I'm a busy person and have lots of available media fighting for my free time, and at some point, for the sake of managing information overload, I naturally have-by necessity-set up prejudices by certain criteria that I have found in the past to be very reliable.
Take, for example, my friends on Facebook-most of which for whatever reason are music/theater critics, artists (dunno how that happened!), and thirty something parents. They often talk about the things they think are great. I know which ones I generally agree with and which ones I don't. When the latter group talks up something and the former is either indifferent or annoyed by it, I know that there's a good chance I won't like it.
There's also the notion that most of the things I note as popular in mass media I generally don't enjoy. I don't like romcoms (too formulaic, also I am a heartless being untouched by their stories) , horror fiction (uninteresting), and most pop music (I don't like the current half-assed dance beat derivatives most work from). So I tend, as a filtering mechanism, to write off entire swaths of media so that I can focus and choose more selectively on the areas I do tend to like.
But you spent a lot of time talking about why you like Deadly Premonition, which was appreciated, but you need to apply the same approach to things you don't like, otherwise it just sounds petty and I honestly can't take anything you say seriously.
This is largely impossible because I know that I, as well as Doug and Kevin, aren't going to tread through something we don't like on our own free time just for the sake of issuing a valid criticism-that is something for underpaid freelance writers to do, and that's not us (anymore!).
For example, I don't like the Beatles. I'm not going to go through and listen, multiple times, to their discography just to explain why I don't like the Beatles. I'm going to condense the reasoning, likely based off a smaller amount of negative impressions, down to a few sentences and move on, if that.