I guess I am not the most suitable person to write about game
journalism because I don’t have much to do with it. I don’t buy games magazines
and I very rarely visit games related websites. There are a few reasons for
that but most of them come down to fact that – as I wrote in my first entry in
this blog – I’m a casual gamer. I do not fancy paying £6-8 for a magazine to
read about games that I’ll probably never play.
Sure, someone could argue that
I could read them anyway, because who knows, maybe I’d like some review and I
would like to give the game a try? But here comes to play second reason why I
don’t read reviews – they tend not to focus on qualities that I value in games.
I don’t care too much whether game has brilliant graphics or gives us a wide
range of weapons etc… For example – I didn’t choose to play The Witcher 2:
Assassins of Kings because most of gaming portals/magazines scored it 9/10 nor
because critics prised its combat mechanics, customization and environments… I
played it because it was based on one of my favourite books and I wanted to get
the feel of the world that I imagined while reading Andrzej Sapkowski’s novel.
For me the most important questions were: ‘is it a good representation of The
Witcher universe?’ and ‘does it capture the mood of the books?’ Unfortunately,
but not surprisingly, none of the reviews that I found while working on my
presentation project did answered these questions. I encountered the same
problem when I was interested in buying Star Wars: The Force unleashed game. As
a fan of the movie I was curious how the game relates to the George Lucas saga
and does it have the ambience of the galaxy far, far away, however, most of the
reviews focused on graphics and on possibility of throwing things at the
enemies. And that’s why I think the new game journalism is something really
interesting. As I was reading through articles from Guardian’s ‘Ten unmissable
examples of New Games Journalism’ I found that non of them focused on the
technical aspects of games and instead of saying what you can do they rather
said how it feels to do it. My reaction to Ian ‘Always Black’ Shanahan’s
article ‘Bow, Nigger’, where he describes the situation that happened to him
while playing Jedi Knight: Jedi Outcast was ‘Oh my god! That’s exactly how I
remember this game! That was awesome!’ and it did make me want to play this
game again!
And that is what a good review should do in my opinion. It should
help you to decide if you want to play the game or not. Because if game gets
3/10 in some magazine it means nothing more but ‘person who reviewed this game
didn’t like it’. And who cares? For me it still can be the most amazing game in
the world! In NGJ there’s no scores ranking.
It does not say ‘you should/shouldn’t play this game because…’ Instead, it
focuses on the experience of playing particular game. I believe it’s great way
of writing about games and if gaming magazines would featured that kind of
reviews I would pay this £6-8 to buy it.
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