" @Icemael said:

" @jozzy said:

" @Icemael said:

Almost irrelevant, for fuck's sake. The reason being that the point of video game criticism (and any criticism, really) is, well, criticism, not beautiful writing. As long as the criticism is good and the writer gets his points across clearly (which this IGN reviewer does), things like "crude writing" barely matter. "

I do not agree at all, a reviewer should be able to critique a game in such a way that it's not a chore to read. A reviewer should be able to do both. "

If the criticism is good, the text is easily readable (and the text in this IGN review is, aside from that one long-ass sentence, very easy to read) and you're actually interested in what's being criticized, a review can never be a chore to read. "

Way I see it, in a field saturated with people competing for a job, it should be those that are both masters of the English language and excellent critics of the video game industry that get paid for this kind of thing. "

IGN is getting more clicks/attention because of this poorly written article than if it was a perfectly structured one. I hate to sound like i'm defending IGN but ultimately, it is a business and clicks are all that matter. Well done Internet, well done.

"It's all over Reddit, and the reviewer called out Reddit...and then Reddit shot back.    Can't spell ignorant without IGN, and seeing as how IGN is owned by FOX...I am not surprised. "

" @Jimbo said:

" HELLO I AM 8 AND ON MY SUMMER HOLIDAY I PLAYED DEAD SPACE 2 AND TEHN I ATE A APPLE AND LOTS OF COOL STUFF!! THEN I HAD A SLEEP THANK YOU.  9.0 "

Lol'd.  Thank you. "

Sure it isn't written well. But I don't think that is really important. Its not a scientific journal. Its a video game website.
 
But yeah, its not good

I'm kind of a hobbyist reviewer who puts in his own time on a silly little website that gets next to no views as of yet (it's kind of unfinished), but reading this review makes me want to strangle myself to death with my own entrails. How come this in-articulate, garrulous divvy gets paid?   
 
It definitely seems he is a biased, almost manic supporter of Dead Space in the first place, and maybe they should have given this particular game to a less fanatic player? It's like giving Pavarotti his favourite burger to review.

" The very first sentence from the article... 

Dead Space 2 is an amazing game. I'm going to write about its scary moments, cool kills, and how much I dig the main character's internal struggle, but Dead Space 2 is about more than this.

 

I have never seen a reviewer actually tell me what they're going to write about. "

I thought this review was very poorly written but worse things than this have come out of games journalism.

I am sorry if this has been posted in this thread before (I have not read every page) but I think it worth seeing. 
 
  

There's a lot of internet based game reviews with bad grammar. Society in general has pretty bad grammar. It's most likely due to people writing like they were speaking to someone, and not like they were y'know... writing. Like this sentence! 

" @Icemael: thing is. Again. The dude WRITES for a living. People give him money to do so. The writing of that review shows a complete lack of effort overall. It reads like something written in 4th grade. Which is bad enough, but your point about how it doesn't need to be beautiful prose to be a good review is wrong on several levels. First. It's hard to take stuff like this seriously.
 
I like dead space 2. It was scary. When the scary things happened I was scared.  "

" Next, it is a chore to read. There's no flow. Print out that review and read it out loud. If you're still in school, take it to a writers craft teacher and just ask them to take a quick look at it. The writing in this is like driving someone who drives with two feet. 
 
Dead Space 2 is an amazing game. I'm going to write about its scary moments, cool kills, and how much I dig the main character's internal struggle, but Dead Space 2 is about more than this. When I beat it for the first time, I sat on the couch with my heart racing and dissected the journey I had just taken. Then, I started my second playthrough, and when that was done, I jumped into a new game for the third time. Dead Space 2 is just that good.      
 
How can you defend this? "

" When you're taking someone's opinion on how to spend $60, you'd hope they would come across as educated beyond a highschool level, such that they might have an educated opinion. "

" Someone who is, essentially, paid to play videogames and then tell people if he liked it is being defended? What separates him from any one else on the internet? What makes this ok? Why is mediocrity being defended? He certainly isn't a talented writer. His critiques aren't very compelling. He used the phrase "X is pretty much the best Y ever". "

" If you ran a website, and paid people to write for the website, you'd feel good about how you spent your money and how you present your site with stuff like this: 
 
Isaac's losing his mind in Dead Space 2. The guilt is tearing his very sanity apart. That's heavy stuff and it makes for a really engaging story. Isaac doesn't let anyone else in on the fact that he's coming unglued, so as a player I get to see who he really is and the facade he presents to the other characters. Isaac's internal conversations and hallucinations are among my favorite parts of this game. "

" HELLO I AM 8 AND ON MY SUMMER HOLIDAY I PLAYED DEAD SPACE 2 AND TEHN I ATE A APPLE AND LOTS OF COOL STUFF!! THEN I HAD A SLEEP THANK YOU.  9.0 "

Yeah that was pretty damn bad.

  @Groovetron3050: I don't think it has been linked and if it was, I missed it. Regardless, thank you, it's fantastic and exactly how I feel about this thread and many others like it :)

I generally don't expect F. Scott Fitzgerald level prose in video game reviews, but... yeah, that was pretty bad writing.

" @Icemael said:

" @takua108 said:

" EDIT: For all of you morons saying that most of the criticisms in that image are trivial... WRITING ENGLISH SENTENCES IS WHAT THIS PERSON DOES FOR A FUCKING LIVING! The man gets paid to write English sentences summarizing his experiences playing video games. Read Giant Bomb reviews sometime and notice how they rarely (if ever) have anything anywhere near this level of erroneousness about them.  (Chrome tells me that "erroneousness" is a real word, and I feel awesome for assuming it is.) "

Most of the "errors" aren't errors, just things that could have been written more elegantly. And that type of flaw is acceptable, because he's a reviewer, not a fucking poet --  

as long as the criticism is good, the quality of the writing is almost irrelevant. "

call of duty black ops was a pretty good game I liked some parts of the story a lot and other parts were really hard to follow but the end result was a story that was pretty different from the other call of dutys and thats pretty cool its good to see the series trying new things because the over the top action movie style of the modern warfare games is getting old and they need to move on. i didnt think that treyarc could do as good a job making a story for a call of duty game as infinity ward did because i didnt really like world at war very much but i was surprised that they pulled through pretty well and i even kind of liked the zombie mode in this game when i thought it was really stupid in world at war because what the hell are zombies doing in my call of duty game?!?! i should probably also say that i didnt play much world at war infact i just played it like once at my friends girlfriends house with his little brother. the multiplayer isnt really an improvement over modern warfare 2 it does some things differently like letting you buy your perks and weapons and stuff with cod points instead of unlocking them at a certain level like in call of duty 4 and modern warfare 2 but you still cant buy some things unless your at a certain level anyways so its not like they completely got rid of the old system but yeah the new system works out pretty well. i liked making a sick giant bomb logo with the emblem editor and it was cool to get higher level to unlock more layers also i bet my giant bomb logo is better than yours!!! at first i didnt like some of the killstreaks at all such as guard dogs which completely suck and are op and stuff but then i got used to them and theyre ok i guess now. the maps are mostly pretty good their interesting and varyed but everyone just wants to play nuketown and firing range all the time! and even tho there good maps to play on sometimes it just sucks that everyone wants to play them all the time! at least its not at bad as when the game first came out and you had to keep playing the same levels over and over again so you were literally stuck on nuketown forever cuz everyones dumb but now you get to play a map twice in a row at most before it makes you pick a different one which works out ok i guess. the game was pretty good overall and i liked it a lot and im now ok with treyarc making cod games in the future but im still not sure they should call the next one modern warfare 3 but they probably will and its not a big deal i guess but i would recommend this game to anyone who liked call of duty 4 and modern warfare and wants something a little new and doesn't mind some things being very different from what there used to and if this is how you are then you will probably have a good time playing this game but if you didnt like those games then you probably wont like this one lol obviously 4/5  --- That was almost physically painful to write, so I hope I've made my point. (Edited to remove a few more commas that I missed.) "

I expect a middle-school writer to do better than that. If I were that writer, I'd be embarrassed especially because he's employed to do that.

The fact that people now think that this writing is acceptable makes me wish that I was born about 100 years ago. I will remind you that people born in that time dealt with two world wars and didn't have video games.

I love that this is a 7 page long thread about grammar.  Maybe there is hope that the people of the internet will learn the difference between "then" and "than".

 The second game is a guy who's lost everything to these monsters and really has nothing left to lose so hell yes he'll put his life on the line and shoot out an airlock if it means killing seven Necromorphs at once. Isaac is stronger here and I feel stronger playing as him.     

" Firstly, I feel the need to point out that I'm kind of a noob at this and this criticism has left me a little... lost? But I shall plow on ahead none the less. My main complaint is with the authors style of writing constantly using words such as "cool" and "heavy" it's the kind of writing an moron could come up with. And his use of slang is frankly ridiculous. I'm not really sure what to think about Dead Space 2 when this person writes... it's all dumbed down. Is it IGN that is terrible or is it their staff?   On a different note, however I would like to have some advice on how to improve myself as a GB member and to not be an asshole. "

The issue at hand is not grammatical correctness, and all the jackasses who think it is can shove their heads through the nearest window. The issue at hand is that, when writing a review intended to educate the public at large on the merits of a certain product, one needs to be certain that the writing one does is readable for the public at large. If, when reading your review, a large portion of your readership finds itself lost because of your inability to formulate a coherent sentence, then mayhap said review should have spent more time in the incubator.

This has been all over Reddit the last 24 hours. Personally, I think the word choice is a little... conversational. If this were a transcript of a podcast, for example, there'd be little out of place here. Dude liked the game. 
 
However... When you're paid to write for a living, you should be expected to know how to do it well. Reviews are purchasing advice, right? An outline of features with some personal opinion? This is the exact opposite. I would expect to read something like that in an amateur blog by a guy in his free time, not a staff review from a professional writer.

I see this review as a good thing. I'm trying to make it as a game journalist, and if this is the level of writing that big sites like IGN are letting through, then I've got nothing to worry about.

" @KaosAngel said:

"It's all over Reddit, and the reviewer called out Reddit...and then Reddit shot back.    Can't spell ignorant without IGN, and seeing as how IGN is owned by FOX...I am not surprised. "

IGN is owned by fox? I can never tread foot there again "

This thread is convincing me that the video game journalism industry desperately needs me.

 "But I have lots of favorite parts to Dead Space 2."
 
That's an actual quote from the review.

OH GOD NOT HERE TOO. 
 
FUCK OFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

I usually love reading reviews, but that was a bit painful to read. 
He did get his points across though...  I just wish it was written a bit more eloquently.

For an aspiring writer, IGN has certainly set the bar low enough that I wonder why someone goes to college if you can get paid writing like that.

Everyone has there bad days in the office I guess but that is a very poorly written review by a professional. 

Too many personal things in it, for me. I was told when you're writing that you should avoid referring to yourself. Overall it read like a john doe user review.

There seems to be a few misconceptions here. 
 
First off--this Greg guy is not a journalist. The man is a product reviewer. I know "journalism" and "journalist" get bandied about because it's hard to succinctly describe what it is, but very little journalism happens at IGN or any other website/publication. (Whew! Talk about a cumbersome statement!)  And "product reviewer" or "game critic" doesn't sound as fancy, of course.  If you want actual (albeit often badly researched) journalism, go read the Washington Post, or something.
 
The other misconception by the fine folks in this thread is that they could do it better. Well, if you can do it better, go do it... better. Get a job in the industry and make big bucks off of your tight, poignant  writing. Go out there and be the voice for a new generation! Or go back to your English 112 class at State U and smugly think to yourself how you can do it all better. And once you convince yourself that you are the best, go and comment on threads at "professional" (I use this word loosely)  sites about how everyone just can't match up to your abilities and understanding of writing.
 
Also, News Corp. owns IGN, not FoxNews. Get your political goose-stepping out of here, boys.
 
We should also not forget how much writing these people have to do. I'm not saying the writing at IGN is ever great (I cringe at the "better" writing there), but when you have to write a lot, with a higher word count than is actually necessary, you're going to phone in a few. Not everything is going to be aces. Heck, maybe nothing will be aces... but that's just the way it goes.  They need people who get off the pot and shit out a review/preview, great or not. A lot of you here seem to be stuck on the pot.
 
And to finish this meaningless rant-a-thon, I think a lot of nitpicking has to do with English majors, or self-professed English experts feeling... nay, WANTIN to be heard. (And because they can't get jobs! Ha!). Writing doesn't have to stick to a formula. As long as it easily consumed and enjoyed by the reader, who cares if a tense is out of place or a causal tone is inappropriately struck? Sure, this Greg fella failed in spades at his review. The opening is term-paperish, and he slangs it up too much, but you can gather from the review that Greg really likes the game. He really, REALLY likes the game. And he didn't want to waste time writing a more thought-out review so he could get back to it... OR he was just tired and phoned it in so he could move on with his life. 
 
Regardless... chill out, dudes.
 
(And yes, you may tear apart my writing at your leisure.)

I've read worse, I know I've written worse. Better then some of the usual crap IGN have on their site.

" So if I understand this correctly, he still gets paid to write about games while countless people, who aren't being paid, dissect each and every little thing he says in order to put him on blast. There is a winner and a loser in this situation and Greg Miller is not the loser.  If you feel that strongly about it, leave a calm, polite comment on the page and move on. "

Maybe I'm reading a little too much into this, but did I really hear Brad riff on this review a little bit on this week's Bombcast?  

"I... I effin' love the ess out of Dead Space 2; I don't know if you noticed. ...Dead Space 2 is an amazing game, and I'm going to talk about why. ... ... Too soon?"

You all need to get a life.

" Maybe I'm reading a little too much into this, but did I really hear Brad riff on this review a little bit on this week's Bombcast?  

"I... I effin' love the ess out of Dead Space 2; I don't know if you noticed. ...Dead Space 2 is an amazing game, and I'm going to talk about why. ... ... Too soon?"

"

" Also, remember that he is writing for gamers. Expecting them to have a sophisticated handle on the English (or any other) language is a little silly. "