Gamespot caught lying about their review time of a shitty game.

[Brehvolution]

i'm writing this epic trilogy of novels, a combined 1500 pages, where the story really opens up and blows your mind around page 1400

you sonsofbitches better not judge me until you read it all the way to the end

What's the pre-order bonus? This is important.

you can call me at my home and i will read it to you over the phone

(long distance charges may apply)

[Van Cruncheon]

i once paid maf 90% of my freelance pay to play everquest for me for 40ish hours, he went mad roundabout hour 39 and after handing me his notes murdered all my pets

seriously, though, i always gave games a good 10ish hours (more if i enjoyed 'em), and it is so not worth the pay. these aren't typically the fun games; rather, they are the dregs of europe and japan. even if you like 'em you usually have three days to play the games and write the review and with a full time job and a family oi you eventually say fuck this, i hate videogames i'mma go shove pop rocks down my urethra instead

[Van Cruncheon]

they are for gays and also a waste of time

[The Fake Shemp]

I reviewed some absolutely horrible stuff. Stuff that I'm ashamed to admit to. I actually reviewed Transformers: Beast Wars Transmetals for the N64, which was originally released only for rental at Blockbuster Video.

I was so glad when I shifted from N64 freelance to Dreamcast. I reviewed some of the worst games ever made, and my opinion of the N64's library is sullied by hours of playtime with absolute garbage like Daikatana 64 and South Park: Chef's Luv Shack.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

I have a terrible confession to make. It's been ten years, so I think the statute of limitations is up.

I reviewed one PSX RPG for Gamespot.com without playing it for a single minute.

CAN YOU GUESS WHICH ONE???

The worst game I ever actually played for a review was definitely Countdown: Vampires.

EDIT: Awesome, the review is still online, I can link it once people get their licks in.

[Eel O'Brian]

my epic trilogy of novels is about a video game reviewer

[Olivia Wilde Homo]

I have a terrible confession to make. It's been ten years, so I think the statute of limitations is up.

I reviewed one PSX RPG for Gamespot.com without playing it for a single minute.

CAN YOU GUESS WHICH ONE???

Final Fantasy VIII

[Howard Alan Treesong]

I have a terrible confession to make. It's been ten years, so I think the statute of limitations is up.

I reviewed one PSX RPG for Gamespot.com without playing it for a single minute.

CAN YOU GUESS WHICH ONE???

Final Fantasy VIII

I've played through Final Fantasy VIII five times.

Which brings up a good point - if you review games for a living and are not yet tired of life, why not try writing strategy guides?

[Eel O'Brian]

i am mystified as to why someone would want to ruin their hobby in such a way

[Howard Alan Treesong]

i am mystified as to why someone would want to ruin their hobby in such a way

In my case, I was 19 and utterly naive! I can't speak for the rest.

[The Fake Shemp]

I keep eyeing Daikatana 64 at my local game store. For what's its worth Willco, you are the man for reviewing all those horrible games.

It's horrible, don't do it!

I remember Daikatana 64 specifically, because I was sent a copy of it months in advance - even before the PC release. I believe Kemco asked us not to publish the review until the game hit rental stores first, but my review popped up on the Interwebs before I could even proofread it. And at the time, the PC version had not yet been released.

So here I am, trashing this shitty console port of a shitty PC game, and people began to run with my review to slam the PC game that had not yet been released. This caused a shit storm of backlash from the publisher, because my review wasn't doing Romero any favors. Fun times.

Also, after my Chef's Luv Shack review (and my review trashing one of the shitty Turok games along with the South Park racer), Acclaim refused to send Imagine any press material whatsoever unless they were given word by my editor or the EIC (Frank O'Connor at the time) that I was not touching it.

[demi]

I'd buy Daikatana for the collection

[Eel O'Brian]

i am mystified as to why someone would want to ruin their hobby in such a way

In my case, I was 19 and utterly naive! I can't speak for the rest.

i guess i have a hard time with the concept because, although i have always loved comics and other weirdo nerd shit, i've never felt particularly compelled to write about/for them

[Howard Alan Treesong]

I got in trouble with Victor Ireland for slamming Magic Knight Rayearth, but I stand by my review, despite it being a low-range outlier. MKR was an August 1995 Saturn game - basically, a 16-bit port-up job with tons of Japanese voice - released in the US in December 1998. WD removed all the voice (and charm) and gave it a terribly unfunny localization. They added voice to the character diary entries, which is like, I dunno, removing the voices from the cutscenes in Mass Effect 2, but adding narration to the planet mining.

It was a good, not great game released three years too late and butchered by Working Designs. I was not kind to it, but then again, neither was time.

[demi]

The correct answer to Patel's question is Eternal Eyes

[The Fake Shemp]

The saddest story I have to share is when I positively reviewed Asteroids Hyper 64, one of the guys from Syrox practically sent me a love letter. Turned out that he pretty much developed most of the game by himself, and was very upset that it was getting mixed reviews at the time. The visual image of some poor guy slaving over a console port of an old arcade game that nobody cares about, only to watch the online press say it sucks, was kind of depressing.

[Eel O'Brian]

i read that as "Paternal Eyes" and thought to myself "boy did this thread just take a strange turn"

man, i'm tired

[The Fake Shemp]

 

[Howard Alan Treesong]

DAVID F. SMITH!!!!!!

[Howard Alan Treesong]

The Reverend David F. Smith

Nobody pisses off game publishers like dsmith!

[The Fake Shemp]

Ehh, you deal with the harsh backlash. I just wish more negative reviews were funnier so everyone can have a good laugh.

My stuff got edited on the regular for being "too harsh". Like I said, Acclaim flat out refused to let me near their stuff after a few reviews and I had a falling out with a couple of people because of my lack of "tact".

I remember inquiring to our PR contact at EA about doing a feature on The World is Not Enough for the N64, but they wanted to dictate that we'd run week-long coverage for both platforms that would equate to Daily Radar sucking off Electronic Arts - and just because we wanted to do a preview piece!

So I told them to go fuck off, I'll go review some piece of shit cartridge instead and a week later, IGN had practically built an entire channel just for The World is Not Enough coverage.

[Van Cruncheon]

the reverend

[Howard Alan Treesong]

oh man, I remember twine.ign.com ... that and McGriddles were the first site-wide skins

It was hilarious, then ... commonplace, now :'(

[The Fake Shemp]

Yeah, I remember calling in for a staff conference and everyone laughing at IGN for doing what EA asked us to do.

"What sellouts!" "They're digging their own grave!" "Nobody is going to think they have any integrity!"

... Little did we know. :'(

[The Fake Shemp]

Not that Daily Radar was much better, Penny-Arcade went after my editor (Michael Wolf) directly, and I think I choked on my lunch when I got an advanced copy of the film side's review for Blair Witch Project 2, which they proclaimed was the best sequel ever - and better than The Empire Strikes Back.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

Not that Daily Radar was much better, Penny-Arcade went after my editor (Michael Wolf) directly, and I think I choked on my lunch when I got an advanced copy of the film side's review for Blair Witch Project 2, which they proclaimed was the best sequel ever - and better than The Empire Strikes Back.

AND The Godfather: Part II!

That was such an amazing review.

[Van Cruncheon]

Now that I've got your attention

What's the shittiest game you've played for a review?

jesus, where to start? when i was reviewing for cgm, tom chick and steve bauman basically sent me the dregs of europe to review. i penned some pretty brutal reviews, only slightly tempered by the fact that i knew the devs were working for like 5 rupees an hour. there was some game called tsunami 2265 that didn't even have working collision detection, and quite possibly the worst western take on animu ever. i was so pathetically earnest that i blew well over 15 hours trying to beat the game, even though it was so fundamentally buggy that i couldn't. the number of grey-green medieval rts titles that i was forced to play for days pretty much made me hate the genre until age of empires 3 came out.

best moments were getting flamed by surreal software for giving drakan a low score, and cgm getting a bunch of hate mail because i mocked star wars tards in my kotor review. oh, and having the first mean review of lionheart put to print.

[The Fake Shemp]

Not that Daily Radar was much better, Penny-Arcade went after my editor (Michael Wolf) directly, and I think I choked on my lunch when I got an advanced copy of the film side's review for Blair Witch Project 2, which they proclaimed was the best sequel ever - and better than The Empire Strikes Back.

AND The Godfather: Part II!

That was such an amazing review.

It was the day I was so ashamed of the site that I almost didn't cash my paycheck.

Almost.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

Now that I've got your attention

What's the shittiest game you've played for a review?

best moments were getting flamed by surreal software for giving drakan a low score, and cgm getting a bunch of hate mail because i mocked star wars tards in my kotor review. oh, and having the first mean review of lionheart put to print.

OMM still wins the Drakan wars. They got hate mail, too. Really kind of depressing to think the developers had drunk their own Kool-Aid and were convinced they'd come up with the second coming of Lara Croft.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

How about this one... "topping the SoftTrend charts at #2." ..."means the chart starts with #2" Can you sink any lower?

Yes - your mother's a cunt.

[close]

[Van Cruncheon]

The saddest story I have to share is when I positively reviewed Asteroids Hyper 64, one of the guys from Syrox practically sent me a love letter. Turned out that he pretty much developed most of the game by himself, and was very upset that it was getting mixed reviews at the time. The visual image of some poor guy slaving over a console port of an old arcade game that nobody cares about, only to watch the online press say it sucks, was kind of depressing.

maf has a great story about when he reviewed some eidos olympics game in 2000ish for gaming-age, gave it a D-, and a pr gal mailed him back with nothing but ""

[Van Cruncheon]

yeah, erik destroyed that dude from surreal for all posterity

[Howard Alan Treesong]

"Did you know we've got Europeans here in America?  We call them fags."  

[Van Cruncheon]

also, statute of limitations time:

i PAID maf to play everquest for me and take notes for 40ish hours while he was working at staples. he handed me the notes, said NEVER FUCKING AGAIN, collected his $300, and probably spent the evening pissing on me in effigy.

[The Fake Shemp]

[Howard Alan Treesong]

By the way, the game I reviewed and never played was Knight & Baby, a.k.a. Guardian's Crusade.

Re-reading it is hilarious - watch as the thin line between "writing a professional RPG review" and "regurgitating press releases and strategy guide factoids" is blurred beyond all recognition!

[demi]

By the way, the game I reviewed and never played was Knight & Baby, a.k.a. Guardian's Crusade.

Re-reading it is hilarious - watch as the thin line between "writing a professional RPG review" and "regurgitating press releases and strategy guide factoids" is blurred beyond all recognition!

7.1 sounds right, but I really loved this game. Shame you didnt play it.

[The Fake Shemp]

Yeah, that's why I can't take previews from magazines or online media seriously. All we do is regurgitate press material and try to placate the publisher. If the build is bad, we usually add something like, "So and so was [not great] in the early build we played, but with however many days until release, there is plenty of time for them to smooth out the rough patches!"

Perfect example of this is the preview for Aliens vs Predator in GameInformer last month, and their review this month. How does such a positive preview go to bargain bin material in the course of thirty days?

Answer:

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Advertising money!

[close]

[Howard Alan Treesong]

It was finals week and I had agreed to write it months ago and then Activision delayed it right into finals week and FFFFFFUUUUUUUUU.

By the way, the producer of Alundra 2 and Guardian's Crusade went on to co-found Mastiff Games with Bill Swartz.

[Great Rumbler]

Now that I've got your attention

What's the shittiest game you've played for a review?

there was some game called tsunami 2265 that didn't even have working collision detection, and quite possibly the worst western take on animu ever. i was so pathetically earnest that i blew well over 15 hours trying to beat the game, even though it was so fundamentally buggy that i couldn't.

[youtube=560,345]kaFGNDo505I[/youtube]

[Van Cruncheon]

i think steve bauman had previews right: his advice was to treat it more like an interview and get the devs to discuss the why and wherefore behind creating the game, rather than relate experiences with alpha product with forced positivity. they became a lot easier to write when i focused on the personalities behind the game and got them to tell amusing anecdotes about the game's design and development. that's not to say i didn't expand lists of bullet points and describe perfectly obvious screenshots from time to time as well

also, best uncredited work i've done: writing TONS of smart-aleck captions for screenshots for opm, dcx, and cgm. i also wrote up more snarky top ten lists and sales chart comments than i can count. i swear game informer owes me royalties for cribbin' my thang!

[Stoney Mason]

From first hand experience I can tell you most devs know when they are working on a shitty game. A pretty large percentage on the engineering side never really know if the product is a fundamentally good or bad and a large percentage honestly don't really care. A job is a job for them. But anybody on the production or design side always knows.

On a very small percentage you have a group that has busted their ass working on a shit product and either don't know it (relatively small) or the company is so broke that they hope beyond hope that with all the shitty product on the market that sells or reviews decently, their product will be one of those. When it doesn't happen they are bitterly dissappointed. The latter happens a lot more often than you think.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

i think steve bauman had previews right: his advice was to treat it more like an interview and get the devs to discuss the why and wherefore behind creating the game, rather than relate experiences with alpha product with forced positivity. they became a lot easier to write when i focused on the personalities behind the game and got them to tell amusing anecdotes about the game's design and development. that's not to say i didn't expand lists of bullet points and describe perfectly obvious screenshots from time to time as well

[Van Cruncheon]

in fact, i wrote the smart aleck captions for your review of grandia in opm, patel

[Howard Alan Treesong]

God, Grandia. I HAD BLOCKED THAT, THANKS A LOT. I didn't finish it but I did give it 30 hours. 

30 hours spent playing the English-language PlayStation version.

[The Fake Shemp]

Yeah, I wish more media outlets would follow that philosophy, Prole.

Also, modern day freelancers don't have any room to complain. When Prole, Patel and I were writing reviews, the awful third-party garbage we played was often fundamentally broken. We're talking unpolished turds that could crash or create a myriad of technical glitches. It wasn't bad enough that a game wasn't terribly good, it was usually incredibly glitchy and mind-numbing to the point where it would sap all enjoyment out of the gig.

Nowadays, these freelancers usually have to review shovelware that is derivative and boring at worst, but competent more often than not. Back then, people relied on reviews not just to determine whether or not a title was worth buying, but whether or not it was even playable - literally.

[Van Cruncheon]

patel: i was assigned to edit and place your review when it came in, and i remember your email was pretty incoherent. (and lacking in captions for your screens )

i enjoyed my occasional weekends at the opm offices, but i always got the feeling gary steinman and mark macdonald didn't particularly like me. dan peluso, che, and kraig were always great, though! i think dan might have been the most legitimately nice person i'd met in the biz.

[Van Cruncheon]

oh god, rainbow six playstation

alright, i can't deal with flashbacks like that, good-bye thread

[Howard Alan Treesong]

Just to bring the thread full-circle, Grandia is the game that made me realize you didn't need to finish a game to properly review it, because after I finished my review, someone told me my score was unfairly low because "the game gets really good 40 hours in."

....

[Ichirou]

Saturn version of Grandia was so awesome.  PSX version had a crap frame rate, horrible error-ridden translation, and voices that sounded like they'd been recorded using a cheap cassette player.

Game was great from the very beginning, IMO.  Probably better than any FF game or spin-off since FFVI. It was fucklong, admittedly.

Still consider it a miracle that we got a US version of that game in any form, though.

[Howard Alan Treesong]

Yeah, I saw the Japanese Saturn version when it came out and it was like 2 points higher than the adulterated, mislocalized mess we got on the PlayStation.

[Ichirou]

I remember when Grandia first came out in Japan (way back in '97), it was easily the best 3D-looking game the Saturn had.  The towns were all fairly large, the dungeons were big (and just kept getting bigger as the game went along), but what was most impressive to me was what GameArts did with the sound.  I still remember being impressed when I noticed that if I walked closer to the harbor I could hear the sound of seagulls and waves getting louder.  Same thing when you saw the rail cars in another town at one point.  I just thought that was such a cool touch.

I played through the Saturn version in Japanese and I also picked up the PSX version and I remember how incredibly SHITTY the PSX version ran in comparison.  Lower-res textures, the frame-rate must've been like 10FPS most of the time...bleagh.

I remember how pretty much every RPG in the PSX era had horrible localizations until....'99?  FFVIII was the first PSX RPG I played through and thought "Wow, looks like they actually went to the trouble of proof-reading this!"

...wow, I just checked Wiki and FFVIII and Grandia came out in the same month?  Really no excuse for the shitty localization, then.

[Akala]

By the way, the game I reviewed and never played was Knight & Baby, a.k.a. Guardian's Crusade.

Re-reading it is hilarious - watch as the thin line between "writing a professional RPG review" and "regurgitating press releases and strategy guide factoids" is blurred beyond all recognition!

[Stoney Mason]

There are some games that take a little while to get going but it's never something where it takes an insane amount of hours. If it is then the game is simply flawed and that should be taken into account as part of the review.

JRPG's for me are notorious for starting out a bit slow but then getting better as they go along. WRPG can have the same issue.

On a personal note, Fallout 3 for me started off fairly slow and I wasn't enjoying it very early on but once you actually start digging into it it becomes really great. Bethesda games in general especially suffer from this.

[Great Rumbler]

I liked Grandia.  :'(

[Ichirou]

I liked Grandia.  :'(

Me too, man.  It was a great game, definitely one of my top ten favorite RPGs.  The PSX port was really fucking weak compared to the Saturn version, though.

fwiw, my top ten is probably (in no particular order):

Panzer Dragoon Saga
Grandia
Chrono Trigger
Final Fantasy VI
Sakura Taisen
Sakura Taisen 2
Persona 3
Phantasy Star IV
Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter
Lunar 2: Eternal Blue

[Trent Dole]

I liked Grandia.  :'(

Is there a way to say 'I wish somebody would make/hack a playable translated version of it for the Saturn' without sounding like a twat? Because I'd really like to play it with the roving guy being named Gin instead of Java and so forth.

[Eel O'Brian]

i just don't have the patience or time for that anymore

with games, you get an hour or so

movies/tv, about a half hour

books, about fifty pages

time is short and non-replenishable, and i don't want to waste 10 precious hours of it finding out what percentage of your game doesn't suck ass

[Cormacaroni]

By the way, the game I reviewed and never played was Knight & Baby, a.k.a. Guardian's Crusade.

Re-reading it is hilarious - watch as the thin line between "writing a professional RPG review" and "regurgitating press releases and strategy guide factoids" is blurred beyond all recognition!

I like this sly parenthetical statement, hinting at mastery of the game:

'The game's magic arrives in the form of "Living Toys," a collection of 70 (or is that 71?) companions, each with its own effect. '

I must know if this was also from the press release, or whether you just made it up!

[Ichirou]

I liked Grandia.  :'(

Is there a way to say 'I wish somebody would make/hack a playable translated version of it for the Saturn' without sounding like a twat? Because I'd really like to play it with the roving guy being named Gin instead of Java and so forth.

Oh, fuck, yeah, I'd almost forgotten that every single reference to alcohol got turned into coffee.  There were even barrels of coffee and every bar was a coffee shop.

[Beezy]

I'd love a Sega Saturn Grandia 1 translation. It's the only one besides Xtreme that I haven't played.