I've had a subscription to the Official XBox Magazine ever since I moved into my current apartment, about 2 years ago. My mom got it for me when I moved because she's awesome, but she didn't realize that OXM wasn't awesome. Apparently she got a good deal because when I get the magazine, it doesn't come with the CD of extra content that usually accompanies it. This is actually fortunate because usually the CD just includes demos that I can download myself anyway...sometimes it has "exclusive gamerpics" and shit, but if I don't care about my gamerscore then there's absolutely no chance of me giving a shit about tiny squares of color to accompany it.
I used to only read the magazine for the reviews, but since then I've found that there are way better, more immediate sources for reviews...and ones that are way more in sync with MY sensibilites as a gamer, and the best source is actually the website I'm using right now. Now I just read OXM whenever I'm on the toilet, not that taking a shit makes me want to read about XBox games, it has more to do with the fact that reading anything somehow faciitates my shitting experience, and I'd rather read some guy getting WAY too excited about Fallout DLC than the ingredients on shampoo bottles.
Maybe I've been too harsh so far. USUALLY I actually enjoy reading the magazine (I can't help but think that's mainly because it's free) but there's always stuff in it that bothers me. For one, OXM...you just can't convince me that you're completely unbiased. You constantly say that the "Official" in your title just means that the magazine comes with the aforementioned CD, but still...you chose one console and one only and that happens to be the XBox.
Also, the language used in the writing is very stale and unimaginative. If they're talking about Left 4 Dead, they'll say something like "Is there really anything better than shooting zombies in face with a shotgun and yelling to your teammates to give you painkillers?" If they're talking about Fallout 3, it'll be a little different, saying something like "is there really anything better than shooting GHOULS in the face with a ROCK-IT LAUNCHER and COMPLETING SIDE-QUESTS?"
Reviews never give a good clear picture of why to stay away from a game if it's bad, or why a game's enjoyable if it gets a good review. The scoring is from 0 to 10, in .5 increments and I see way too many perfect 10 scores, and the other most common seems to be 6.5. This scale is supposed to be very precise but it seems to be applied so arbirtrarily...almost like the hype of the game ultimately dictates what number gets slapped on it. I imagine everyone around the office was going "oh yea, Fallout 3, that game feels like a 10...I can just sense it, man" at one time, then some unlucky bastard gets to write 4 pages to try and justify this, when they obviously see clear flaws in the game.
They gave Dead Space a 6.5 I believe, with only maybe 5 paragraphs along with it explaining that they didn't like looking in containers for health. Around this time there were commercials for Dead Space that got my little brother really pumped for the game, he'd constantly ask "hey have you played Dead Space yet?" After I read the review I felt oh-so-informed and confidently told him that OXM gave it a bad review so I wasn't really interested in it. He laughed and said "so...you're not going to try it? that's stupid" Yes, that is stupid little brother. From then on I was very skeptical about reading opinions from this magazine. They then gave Mirror's Edge at least a 9.0 and I was baffled. I had only played the demo but I was positive this game was just a well-polished piece of shit. And no, I wasn't expecting an FPS, I was expecting a good game.
I'm not expecting OXM to approximate my own feelings of a game in words and numbers, I'm just saying as a source of information that is supposed to guide my wallet towards worthwhile games and away from lackluster ones, OXM sucks. But easy fix, right? Just avoid the reviews, get my information from a great site like GiantBomb that looks at games with a much more scutinizing eye. But I still have to take a shit every now and then, and I'm still curious about what this publication has to say. Plus, the point of this blog is my beef with one article in particular, not with their reviewing process, so I've been way off track so far.
The latest issue of OXM has a four-page article titled "Loud, Dumb, and OUT OF CONTROL." This blurb of text sums up the spirit of the article:
"Dismissive attitudes and dangerous assumptions make non-gamers as destructive to our hobby as a clueless chimp with a chainsaw. Here's 23 of our pet peeves about ignorance that you can help fix."
I thought it was going to be talking about politicians who speak out against violence in games and stuff like that. But the tone of this list seems to be that people who don't play games "just don't understand" and it sucks how not everyone in the world can relate to the excitement of skipping school to complete more side-quests in Fallout. I'm gonna ressurect the word "angst" and apply it here.
Most of the entries in the list are pretty much the same thing. Here's #21:
"Learn the Language of Gaming: A grace period for learning is understandable, of course - we're all beginners at the beginning, right? But if you can't muster enough patience to sit through a five-minute tutorial, don't whine when you forget the controls. Don't complain when you end up having a conversation with a clearly non-interactive crate instead of the glowing, obviously interactive computer right next to it. And exactly how many times do we have to remind you which screen is yours in a multiplayer match before you memorize that simple, binary piece of information? This isn't calculus."
The whole article is written like that. It's unfair towards people who don't shit themselves in anticipation of what Cortana will say to them next. I think of my interest in games as a blessing and a curse. It's clearly a handicap in most situations. In other ways it's greatly enriched my life. I don't apologize to people for getting excited about Megaman. But I also don't speak to them so condescendingly and get angry when people don't know the basic rules of gaming. These are rules that have basically become instinct from a life-time of experience. Clearly I have a leg up over people who are new to it. If my girlfriend can't understand why you need one stick for body movement and another for camera movement, then big deal...we have sex instead. It's good that other people can tolerate the geeky things about me, I applaud them for it, and that's really all I ask of them.
And this article is nothing more than preaching to the choir, and sharing pain. Clearly if you subscribe to magazine that focuses completely on games, let alone only the games on one particular console, then you are not part of the non-gaming crowd. And if I showed this article to a non-gaming friend, trying to give him/her some insight into the oh-so complex innerworkings of the gamer's psyche and shared frustration, I'd get fucking laughed out of existence. And I'm gonna take a wild guess here and say that whoever wrote this doesn't have any non-gaming FRIENDS. If they were friendly towards anyone outside of the gaming world, they wouldn't passive-aggressively publish this overzealous nonsense that demeans anyone who doesn't agonize over whether to give their avatar a cute hat or not.
Other than that, OXM...keep doing what you do best, which is helping me shit.
OXM is too much
I've had a subscription to the Official XBox Magazine ever since I moved into my current apartment, about 2 years ago. My mom got it for me when I moved because she's awesome, but she didn't realize that OXM wasn't awesome. Apparently she got a good deal because when I get the magazine, it doesn't come with the CD of extra content that usually accompanies it. This is actually fortunate because usually the CD just includes demos that I can download myself anyway...sometimes it has "exclusive gamerpics" and shit, but if I don't care about my gamerscore then there's absolutely no chance of me giving a shit about tiny squares of color to accompany it.
I used to only read the magazine for the reviews, but since then I've found that there are way better, more immediate sources for reviews...and ones that are way more in sync with MY sensibilites as a gamer, and the best source is actually the website I'm using right now. Now I just read OXM whenever I'm on the toilet, not that taking a shit makes me want to read about XBox games, it has more to do with the fact that reading anything somehow faciitates my shitting experience, and I'd rather read some guy getting WAY too excited about Fallout DLC than the ingredients on shampoo bottles.
Maybe I've been too harsh so far. USUALLY I actually enjoy reading the magazine (I can't help but think that's mainly because it's free) but there's always stuff in it that bothers me. For one, OXM...you just can't convince me that you're completely unbiased. You constantly say that the "Official" in your title just means that the magazine comes with the aforementioned CD, but still...you chose one console and one only and that happens to be the XBox.
Also, the language used in the writing is very stale and unimaginative. If they're talking about Left 4 Dead, they'll say something like "Is there really anything better than shooting zombies in face with a shotgun and yelling to your teammates to give you painkillers?" If they're talking about Fallout 3, it'll be a little different, saying something like "is there really anything better than shooting GHOULS in the face with a ROCK-IT LAUNCHER and COMPLETING SIDE-QUESTS?"
Reviews never give a good clear picture of why to stay away from a game if it's bad, or why a game's enjoyable if it gets a good review. The scoring is from 0 to 10, in .5 increments and I see way too many perfect 10 scores, and the other most common seems to be 6.5. This scale is supposed to be very precise but it seems to be applied so arbirtrarily...almost like the hype of the game ultimately dictates what number gets slapped on it. I imagine everyone around the office was going "oh yea, Fallout 3, that game feels like a 10...I can just sense it, man" at one time, then some unlucky bastard gets to write 4 pages to try and justify this, when they obviously see clear flaws in the game.
They gave Dead Space a 6.5 I believe, with only maybe 5 paragraphs along with it explaining that they didn't like looking in containers for health. Around this time there were commercials for Dead Space that got my little brother really pumped for the game, he'd constantly ask "hey have you played Dead Space yet?" After I read the review I felt oh-so-informed and confidently told him that OXM gave it a bad review so I wasn't really interested in it. He laughed and said "so...you're not going to try it? that's stupid" Yes, that is stupid little brother. From then on I was very skeptical about reading opinions from this magazine. They then gave Mirror's Edge at least a 9.0 and I was baffled. I had only played the demo but I was positive this game was just a well-polished piece of shit. And no, I wasn't expecting an FPS, I was expecting a good game.
I'm not expecting OXM to approximate my own feelings of a game in words and numbers, I'm just saying as a source of information that is supposed to guide my wallet towards worthwhile games and away from lackluster ones, OXM sucks. But easy fix, right? Just avoid the reviews, get my information from a great site like GiantBomb that looks at games with a much more scutinizing eye. But I still have to take a shit every now and then, and I'm still curious about what this publication has to say. Plus, the point of this blog is my beef with one article in particular, not with their reviewing process, so I've been way off track so far.
The latest issue of OXM has a four-page article titled "Loud, Dumb, and OUT OF CONTROL." This blurb of text sums up the spirit of the article:
"Dismissive attitudes and dangerous assumptions make non-gamers as destructive to our hobby as a clueless chimp with a chainsaw. Here's 23 of our pet peeves about ignorance that you can help fix."
I thought it was going to be talking about politicians who speak out against violence in games and stuff like that. But the tone of this list seems to be that people who don't play games "just don't understand" and it sucks how not everyone in the world can relate to the excitement of skipping school to complete more side-quests in Fallout. I'm gonna ressurect the word "angst" and apply it here.
Most of the entries in the list are pretty much the same thing. Here's #21:
"Learn the Language of Gaming: A grace period for learning is understandable, of course - we're all beginners at the beginning, right? But if you can't muster enough patience to sit through a five-minute tutorial, don't whine when you forget the controls. Don't complain when you end up having a conversation with a clearly non-interactive crate instead of the glowing, obviously interactive computer right next to it. And exactly how many times do we have to remind you which screen is yours in a multiplayer match before you memorize that simple, binary piece of information? This isn't calculus."
The whole article is written like that. It's unfair towards people who don't shit themselves in anticipation of what Cortana will say to them next. I think of my interest in games as a blessing and a curse. It's clearly a handicap in most situations. In other ways it's greatly enriched my life. I don't apologize to people for getting excited about Megaman. But I also don't speak to them so condescendingly and get angry when people don't know the basic rules of gaming. These are rules that have basically become instinct from a life-time of experience. Clearly I have a leg up over people who are new to it. If my girlfriend can't understand why you need one stick for body movement and another for camera movement, then big deal...we have sex instead. It's good that other people can tolerate the geeky things about me, I applaud them for it, and that's really all I ask of them.
And this article is nothing more than preaching to the choir, and sharing pain. Clearly if you subscribe to magazine that focuses completely on games, let alone only the games on one particular console, then you are not part of the non-gaming crowd. And if I showed this article to a non-gaming friend, trying to give him/her some insight into the oh-so complex innerworkings of the gamer's psyche and shared frustration, I'd get fucking laughed out of existence. And I'm gonna take a wild guess here and say that whoever wrote this doesn't have any non-gaming FRIENDS. If they were friendly towards anyone outside of the gaming world, they wouldn't passive-aggressively publish this overzealous nonsense that demeans anyone who doesn't agonize over whether to give their avatar a cute hat or not.
Other than that, OXM...keep doing what you do best, which is helping me shit.
magazines really aren't info sources as much as entertainment. The main features of mags are the editiorial type pages
"magazines really aren't info sources as much as entertainment. The main features of mags are the editiorial type pages"Game Informer's recent world exclusives on Bioshock 2 and Assassin's Creed 2 would beg to differ.
"SmugDarkLoser said:You could find info about both of them online before half the people even received thosed Game Informer mags.....GI is also one of the worst examples you could pick, both them and OXM are complete shit."magazines really aren't info sources as much as entertainment. The main features of mags are the editiorial type pages"Game Informer's recent world exclusives on Bioshock 2 and Assassin's Creed 2 would beg to differ."
"SmugDarkLoser said:This is the one thing that magazines sorta kinda do well. But even with exclusives they just get leaked, or people scan the magazine onto the internet which kind of defeats the purpose."magazines really aren't info sources as much as entertainment. The main features of mags are the editiorial type pages"Game Informer's recent world exclusives on Bioshock 2 and Assassin's Creed 2 would beg to differ."
"It's the same with the Official Playstation and Nintendo Power magazines; they all went to fucking Future Publishing.Basically Future is Ziff Davis' pawn shop where they publish all their old magazines, but instead their staff seems to half-ass every issue."Haha, what about Game Informer? Aren't they actually owned by GameStop?
OXM.. i never buy that, most i do is read the cover then go home and download the demo's it advertises.
I still subscribe to OXM and I am disliking it more each issue. I agree with your opinions, sir, and good job at making a hefty blog out of it. It is a shame to see print magazines suffering like this, but it seems that GI is the last remaining video game magazine that anyone gives a crap about. I must admit, they have some of the slickest and content-packed entertainment magazines i have seen.
"Snapstacle said:Yes, the magazine is owned by Gamestop. Thus it's the highest circulation video game magazine in the market today. Mostly because they give away a subscription to it when you get a discount card. This massive install base and financial backing is probably why they are able to pull off so many exclusives first looks. A lot of normal people who don't frequent video game web sites are going to have Game Informer sitting on their coffee table or at work."It's the same with the Official Playstation and Nintendo Power magazines; they all went to fucking Future Publishing.Basically Future is Ziff Davis' pawn shop where they publish all their old magazines, but instead their staff seems to half-ass every issue."Haha, what about Game Informer? Aren't they actually owned by GameStop?"
While their reviews are intentionally weighted to give high scores (a 7 is average and anything lower is various degrees of bad) they usually are decently honest. As long as you adjust the scores down they are usually in line with what Giant Bomb, IGN and Gamespot are saying. For example Ready 2 Rumble: Revolution got a 1 which on an adjusted scale would probably be a negative number.
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