Really glad to see someone do a detailed review on these. I tried one four or five years back and couldn't get into it. It doesn't sound like this would do much to change my mind, so you've potentially saved me some money. Good stuff.
I keep eyeballing Rise of the Tomb Raider every time it comes up on sale, because I really wound up liking that Tomb Raider reboot. But with Dishonored 2 and Mafia 3 in my back catalogue, I'm sure it wiill go even cheaper by the time I would actually get around to playing it, so it doesn't make much sense for me to pick it up quite yet.
Good to hear you're still tinkering a bit with Grandia. Looking forward to hearing more about that. Can't blame you for dropping Sonic Adventure 1 & 2. I tried a demo of one of those, and boy... it's kind of rough in this day and age.
@joystickjunkie: If Giant Bomb was strictly about games journalism as an objective medium, I'd agree with you. But it's not. It's also about personalities and entertainment. It's also not my site. If this is the way they want to present indie games, it's Jeff's business. But as a consumer, I'd sure love to see these games being given a fair chance by games enthusiasts and journalists saying "we're going to give this thing, good or bad, a shake in half an hour. Join up if you want." That doesn't seem like advertising to me, because if a game's shitty, it just means more people are going to see how crap it is. Sure, maybe there's an initial run on the game so people can play with the GB crew, but maybe it also casts a light on bad game development when everything blows up. Or hopefully the opposite, when good games are being discovered.
Maybe that's not how games were reviewed and looked at objectively when the site started or before then, but as I mentioned, the world of games has changed. I'd like to see Giant Bomb change with them. If they choose not to, that's fine, but this feels like the video equivalent of the guy who loves to say, "I don't mean to be a jerk, but..." If the intent is just to show off empty lobbies, then why bother?
@shiztoid: A simple call to play a game near launch isn't advertising, and as I've mentioned in another comment in here, trying to play a game with a userbase isn't somehow pushing a game and giving it some sort of positive advertising. Well, unless the game actually happens to be good, in which case awesome, more people are aware of a good game. That's not a bad thing.
One more point I'll make is that games journalism is evolving with the games they cover. If the rules about what's considered "advertising" need to change so the consumer has the best information going forward on a game, then that's a thing that should happen. And does. This is just another case of that.
@pudge: Getting into PS+ is what, a one in a... however many games come out a month chance? They can't all be featured that way. And yeah, ideally we'd all love games to be polished and 5-star material right off the bat with such great gameplay that it's going to inspire the masses to never stop playing, but they're just not going to be that. Being fair to those games and readers doesn't need to be an either/or situation. You can still be honest in a quick (probably very quick) look at a game like this while still providing them with a slight bump to show the game as it could be.
I'm gonna have to bow out of this conversation. It's getting circular and I'm honestly not sure what else I can add that I haven't stated already. I'd love to see games like this given a fair chance. This isn't that fair chance. That's my opinion. If you disagree, that's perfectly fine. But this isn't the coverage I'd like to see and it's fair to say that.
@eccentrix: I don't kow how else games are supposed to get coverage if they're not actually covered. Throwing coins in a fountain? And by that logic, covering any game would be marketing for the developers. I'm not asking for positive coverage on these games. Just timely and well-planned coverage, preferably with an ideal situatio to showcase what the strengths or weaknesses of these games really are, rather than crapping on them for not having players when the games have had no chance to develop a player base.
@illrepute: Or maybe that person is theoretically a naive (for good or bad) developer who hopes maybe a major games coverage site will take five minutes to look at their stuff on a timely basis, hopefully giving them a small bump in viewership of their product. I get that can't always be Giant Bomb and maybe in some of these cases the games were featured on other sites. But maybe instead of doing this a week or two after the games are released, they make an effort to stick to a scheduled indie hour or something devoted to playing five or ten minutes of games like this. Because this? This is a really shitty solution.
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