Giant Bomb is one of the top computer game news and reviews sites on the net, and I make sure to check the news daily to keep up to date, perhaps this is sad, but what can I say, I enjoy my hobby greatly. The news articles are fair and balanced, and the reviews are most often very accurate and not willing to follow hype and review trends that other sites fall prey too. However there is a blight on this shrine of computer games, a dark fissure widening to encompass every news post and every review. While the very utterance of their name brings a chill to my spine, I will put aside my personal discomfort and say it but once; Fan boys.
Why anyone would forbid themselves good games because of the platform they appear on is a mystery to me. I can only assume that this strange need to ally themselves with one console manufacturer over all others comes from a simple lack of funds. When I was younger, I had a SNES and loved it to bits, I also wanted a Mega Drive (Genesis for any American readers) but there was no way that my mother would buy me two games consoles, so I convinced myself that I had the superior platform and engaged in friendly banter with my Mega Drive owning friends. However I never pretended that I didn’t want a Mega Drive, and that is where me and the un-named ones differ.
Now before I continue I would like to say that I don’t own a PS3. This is mainly due to the fact that at the moment, there are not really enough games that interest me on the platform, and so I can’t justify the cost to myself. However I fully intend to own a PS3 at some point in this cycle of consoles, and I look forward to both Metal Gear Solid 4 and some of the unique features that the console itself provides. I feel that I needed this to be known before I started talking examples, as some of them look at the PS3 in a negative light, and I would hate to be lumped in with those who may not be named.
Recently, two games have been getting much attention from the “intense” PS3 fan-base, Heavenly Sword and Lair. Both games have been very highly hyped, and some have even labeled Heavenly Sword as a “Killer App” for the PS3, a term which is a very lofty role for any game, and something that very few games ever live up too. Examples of killer apps in the past include the first Halo for the Xbox and Brain Training for the Nintendo DS games which, as suggested have greatly boosted the sales of their platforms. However it turns out, that Heavenly Sword has not lived up to expectations, getting a metacritic.com score of 80, with Lair being even more widely disliked with a score of 55. But rather than accepting that the games are actually not all that good, the troops start marching to battle. Suddenly every website which gives an honest, but bad review is called biased, and the drums of war start beating.
In situations such as this, reason is of no use. If someone is dead set on liking a game, they will often convince themselves that it is good. I have no doubt that there are people out there forcing themselves to enjoy Lair, and telling themselves that a game that takes 5 hours from start to finish like Heavenly Sword is fine. However if the games were on the opposite platform, they would be the first to laugh at them. The most confusing part of the “Console War” is when a game goes from exclusive to multi platform. You could almost hear the PS3 troops interest in GTA:IV drop when it was announced it would launch on the 360 on the same day. I have subjected myself of baffling posts where people have said Sony has “betrayed their fans by letting [Devil May Cry 4] be released on the 360″. Now when it comes to posts like that, it is all to easy to spot the zealotry at work, and I often wonder if the people posting these things truly believe what they are saying or if it is simply a game they are playing to wind up others. Either way, I have decided to avoid such things all together and instead stick to reading only news posts and reviews, and then scrolling down no further, it is the only way to stop my sanity from shattering.
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