Hi guys
I'm Chris Scullion, and I'm the Games Editor for the Official Nintendo Magazine. I'm also the person who wrote the Galaxy 2 review discussed here.
I feel it's important to give a little background on myself first, to hopefully allow people to see where I'm coming from. It's a little long, but please bear with me.
I started playing games when I was three years old, when I visited my aunt in America (Cleveland, OH) and discovered her NES. When I got back home I got an NES that Christmas and since then have never stopped playing. I have owned every Nintendo system since then: NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, Wii, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance/SP, Micro and DS/DS Lite/DSi/XL.
However, contrary to claims from some commenters here who are suggesting ONM are biased and fanboys, I also feel it's worth mentioning that in my lifetime I've also owned a Master System, Mega Drive (Genesis), Mega CD (Sega CD), Saturn, PlayStation, PS2, Xbox and Dreamcast. As well as the current Nintendo systems I also own an Xbox 360, PS3 and PSP and play them all regularly. A quick look at my Gamerscore (tag - scully1888) will verify this. Would I consider myself a hardcore gamer? Yes. A fanboy, however? Absolutely not.
Every since I was young I've been reading magazines like CVG, Mean Machines, Edge, N64 Magazine and the like (some of which will only be familiar to UK gamers). I even got my aunt in America to send over EGM and GamePro every month. I knew that the only thing I wanted to do in life was write for a games magazine.
After studying hard at school, I took an intensive four-year degree course in Journalism, which then got my foot in the door at Future, with ONM. I am immensely proud of this accomplishment, and I'm very proud to have been given a privilege that very few people get: to give other gamers advice on which games to buy.
Why am I telling you all this? Because I hope it will go some way to explaining to you why I get personally offended when people, many of whom have never even picked up a copy of ONM, immediately say our opinion must be biased because of the magazine's name.
I'm not looking for an argument here, and I'm not here to pass judgment on Giant Bomb or Jeff because I find it extremely, grossly unprofessional to pass judgment on other members of the games media. I'm only here to set a few myths straight.
We are not biased in the slightest. Simply put, it's widely accepted that the majority of Nintendo games are extremely high in quality, and that's the simple reason why we give these games high scores. Why is it acceptable for Edge to give Galaxy 2 a score of 10/10 but if we give it a high score the assumption is we're biased?
Anyone who's actually been a long-time reader of ONM will note that we've given some first-party games less thean favourable scores in the past. We gave Mario Party 8 a score of 69%, saying it's "not nearly as good as it should have been" and that "overall, it's just not that fun to play". When DSiWare launched, we gave WarioWare Snapped 60%, saying "the main problem simply comes down to the fact that for a great deal of the time [the microgames] don't really work".
If ONM was really "Nintendo propaganda", as has been claimed in the comments here, and if we really were on Nintendo's payroll, there's no way we'd have been allowed to criticise a Mario game and a game designed to launch a new service. Simply put, we are not biased.
I also object to the suggestion in this article that my editor Neil Long is in some way powerless to ONM's marketing. I am fully aware of the problems Jeff has faced in previous employment and I can fully sympathise with his situation, but that does not mean these things happen everywhere and I feel it's unfair to comment on a company's working environment without having ever worked there.
Most of all though, I strongly object to (and am personally offended by) suggestions that my opinion and my review are worthless because of the name of the magazine I write for. I have 24 years of gaming experience (as explained above) and have said numerous times to our own readers that the day I'm told what score to give a game is the day I leave ONM. Four years after joining, I am happy to say I have never had such an issue.
I would urge anyone criticising us to at least read our review before passing judgment on it. From what I can tell by fellow journalists' impressions it seems that my review is very much in line with the rest of the "unofficial" magazines' opinions, so the fact it may get a high score is nothing to do with bias, it's to do with Nintendo releasing a fantastic game. When you read my review you'll see that there are actually criticisms of the game contained in it, and you'll hopefully agree that the ten pages are used well.
Thanks for (hopefully!) taking the time to read all that, and I hope it at least convinces some of you that I'm a genuine gamer, that I'm not a paid monkey, and that it's only fair to actually read my review before passing judgment and dismissing it as biased.
Anyone who wishes to discuss this further and have a chat is more than welcome to contact me at chris.scullion@futurenet.com
Regardless of my disappointment at the tone of this article, I still regard Giant Bomb as a good site and enjoy listening to the Giant Bombcast (as well as our own ONM Podcast of course!).
Thanks guys! ^_^
Chris Scullion
Games Editor
Official Nintendo Magazine
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