What's up with game journalists? Step 1: We are better than you, old EGM.

There has been a lot of talk on 1up.com and other crappy forums on how there is a "new game jounralism".

John Davison (who made EGM boring) seems to be leading the charge to garner his collegues some respect within the industry of journalism.

Fact is, it aint never going to happen. I honestly don't care if my game magazines aren't littered with litterary refrence and social context. I just want to be excited about games.

All Davison does is bitch about Nintendo and hype PSP (I'll own both, I'm not biased).

Check out his blog: http://www.1up.com/do/my1Up?publicUserId=5345401

He tells us why EGM and all of his mags are so good. When in fact, they kind of suck. And it is more than just the internet being around, it's just the industry got too full of itself, IMO

THere is a theme of how good journalists are better than good harcorps gamers of old. I disagree.

Essentially, there is a patter of deflating the "EGM Myth", of past.

It continues with Jeremy Pariah's blog, where he cuts up EGM1 (and neglects to mention how sweet that magazine got a little later on;

http://1up.com/do/my1Up?publicUserId=5379721

Again, more old EGM bashing. Talking about how he might shame dan Shoe for showing how lame it once was. I think it's lame right now, personally.

More EGM bahsing can be found from Chris CJ Johnson's blog; EGM Files

http://homepage.mac.com/chris_johnston/C1662594604/index.html

Just total bashing, telling us how much the mag we all enjoyed as children and young teens totally blew. Wow, thanks.



I think the big thing here is the insecurity of the "journalists". They keep wanting to tell us how much EGM sucks, but we and they all know that it (and Gamefan, to a lesser extent) will be the ruler they will always be measured by.

It doesnt matter how good the quality of the writing was, it was the intent of the mag. EGM was just so much fun to read back in the day. It had a certain magic to it.

Yeah, the magzine started to suck around the time internet got huge, but it was alos sold to ZD media around the same time. I think gamefan held the "hardcore"ness together well into 2000, until it went bust, so don't give me that internet shit.

What I am trying to say here is that magazines were cooler when they were run by the hardcore, smelly, dirty, true gamer. Not theses pretentious college grads.

I'm sure I have a lot to say about this, I'll be back after I eat dinner to figure out what that is.

It's penis envy.

Everyone's got a big dick and wants to prove it.

But at the same time, afraid to whip it out and actually do a comparison test.

i know how horrible EGM was written. I know it had bad layout. I know a lot of things about gaming mags most men shouldn't.

But the explosion of anti-old-regime EGM attitudes amongst the elite journalists is bothersom.

Instead of actually trying to make mags more interesting, they are merely telling us why the old ones were not as good as we rememberd.

go to www.ukreistance.co.uk to see a cool little parody on this.

I just liked the unwashed stylings of Martin Alessi and Ed Semrad more than the pretentious ramblings of Jon Davison.

after i saw this in a particular magazine: "Metal Slug 3 could have been the Game of the Year 10 years ago" (my reaction : ) i stopped reading game magazines. There all just idiots

I dunno man...it's a really slippery thing, trying to apply traditional journalistic standards to writing about video games. The EGM of old actually used to be very good about pulling it off...writers like Ed Semrad and Steve Harris actually knew the games very well, and didn't feel the need to pepper their articles with lots of cool pop-culture references or cutting-edge slang to get across to the readers. This may reflect the sea change around video game culture itself, rather than any kind of specific change in the people covering them. Writing about video games was pretty virgin territory when that magazine began, and video games was at best a very niche market. Now it's bigger than anyone ever imagined it could get, and you have uninformed chuckleheads from magazines like Maxim being quoted on the back of the game package.

Nowadays though, you really have to feel like the pool has been pissed in by the kind of talentless hacks at IGN and other sites. It's so beholden to advertising revenues with so much money flying around, journalistic integrity when it comes to reviews pretty much takes a backseat on a regular basis. Some kind of authoritative voice needs to rise though, because as it is, just about ANY game can garner a positive review from someone out there.

I don't know, do we need a "Rolling Stone" to come along and develop a new game culture based of taste for good games, as apposed to what is popular? And as a result, making what they say is good, in fact, popular.

Is there too much pandering (as there always was) in todays magazines? Yes

When you have 6 pages devoted to giant screen shots of Halo 2 (with very little text), something is wrong.

Start telling what the little shits to play. Give game slike Gradius V respect.

Buro Destruct said:

I'm sure I have a lot to say about this, I'll be back after I eat dinner to figure out what that is.

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My comments about the DS last week prompted more responses than I anticipated, both within 1UP and elsewhere. Although now branded a pariah and a Nintendo hater in some quarters, I'm fully prepared to eat my words when or if the appropriate time comes. I really do hope that the killer app for DS will emerge (and more importantly I hope it gets released in the U.S. and not just Japan) and that the Revolution surprises us rather than makes us roll our eyes when we see it at E3. The reason I've been so hard on Nintendo lately, and particularly the DS, is that I just expect so much more from them. For a company that's responsible for establishing the foundation of the industry, Nintendo's misinterpretation of the way gamers are changing is something that makes me sad. There's evidence that they are genuinely keen to change this with their next generation box though, so let's hope it's more than just bluster. There have been very few special gaming moments that compare to the first time I saw F-Zero, or Super Mario World, so they'll always own a little piece of me.

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A) I realize this is a blog.
B) I realize he's somewhat of a "figure" in gaming journalism.

But right here is the issue, game "journalists" have undeserved egos. No offense fucko, but I'm not interested in hearing about your wetdreams of yesteryear playing F-Zero in your room on a Satuday morning. As a journalist, your job is to inform me, the READER, of what games are good, and what games are not, based on a series of ideally objective standards and rules. "The reason I've been a little---" shutup, who fucking cares? I'm not your buddy, I'm even goddamn interested, just give me the straight-shit on games and game companies.

We'd like to think the gaming community is a vast "family" people sharing a singular hobby, and at one point it might've been, but like black culture, counter-culture, reality TV, and women's equality, its been infected by commercialism and turned into a flash-profit market. Too bad, so sad. Doesn't mean all of a sudden you're entitled to be a whiny girl, your job as a JOURNALIST remains the same. Not eveyone can be Hunter S. Thompson, least of all some backwoods INTERNET journalist. Your words aren't even good enough to run through a printing press for crissakes, they're just as flimsy and transient as the gigacycles of instructions per second memory banks on which they reside.

BTW, I stopped reading EGM years ago, around the time the PSX was entering its final generation cycle. It sucked then, and it sucks even more now. Even Play, which was an excellent publication, has declined radically into a pit of tedium and insipid "hipster" bullshit.

Loopz said:

Writing about video games was pretty virgin territory when that magazine began, and video games was at best a very niche market. Now it's bigger than anyone ever imagined it could get, and you have uninformed chuckleheads from magazines like Maxim being quoted on the back of the game package.

Nowadays though, you really have to feel like the pool has been pissed in by the kind of talentless hacks at IGN and other sites. It's so beholden to advertising revenues with so much money flying around, journalistic integrity when it comes to reviews pretty much takes a backseat on a regular basis. Some kind of authoritative voice needs to rise though, because as it is, just about ANY game can garner a positive review from someone out there.

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AGREED. Though it was tried not too long back with Manci Game Magazine that lasted all of ONE issue. Magazines overall just really can't compete anymore with everyone with a computer and access to the Net who creates websites devoted to such and such. With the exception of PLAY Magazine and even that is starting to wane for me, I don't even bother with magazines anymore personally. Just like the Video Arcades of my youth, it's more or less dead and buried, and lives on only in my memories {sans the old dude from The Road Warrior}

Pill said:

Is there too much pandering (as there always was) in todays magazines? Yes

When you have 6 pages devoted to giant screen shots of Halo 2 (with very little text), something is wrong.

Start telling what the little shits to play. Give game slike Gradius V respect.

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Games like GRADIUS V do get respect, it's just from the "fading light" types of guys like Dan Halverton {or however, it's spelled} at PLAY. Other than that, the biggest problem is everyone wants to be seen as the guru of gaming, instead of just covering the respective title, and/or upcoming title and going over why it's an impressive feat of programming and a person encouraged to actually try it for themselves. Instead, anything not 3-D and/or over hyped automatically gets trounced on and given a horrible rating, and the average dipshit won't even bother renting it let alone buying it. Before MANCI GAMES even reared it's head, there was the one ill fated issue of GAME GO! {that I will always have in my collection} that covered the Retro games of yore. And for a single issue, it was damn good. Thing was, even when that came out, it was sadly destined to fail. The average gamer isn't like most of the people on this board who are obssessive compulsive die-hard gamers, who don't think much of running up their VISA's to have a NEO:GEO collection... or going nutso on Ebay for Famicom, MegaDrive, SFC PC-Engine, etcetera.

90% of the "Buyer's Market" are just average jerks who buy something that looks cool, and they themselves don't really care about pride flowing off the pages of the publication they read... hence a part of the reason, all these contemporary game journalists/reviewers run around acting like they're the only people with a voice and are somehow cooler than everyone else. Yet the irony here is that the 90% gamer/reviewer precentile, are the very condom leaks that used to rag on most of us old schoolers as being "Geeks" and worse because we were still playing video games in High School, and were pumped up about GRADIUS III, Chrono Trigger, or Gunstar Heroes, or whatever. Now it's they who more or less make or break the industry.

I wanted to start up a fanzine devoted to older games from FC up to Dreamcast, but I've never had the time {and have even less now} and with MANCI having crashed & burned, there's really little to no point.

MERCENARY X99

LOL...its funny how that Jeremy guy tries to shit on old school EGM by whipping out EGM #1. News Flash! Most magazines suck in their first issue, they havent found their identites yet.

That toolbox has 106,000 posts...

That = nerd.

Bullshit, EGM died when ZD publishing bought them out. Nowadays EGM is full of writing mistakes and these people call themselves professional writers. Shawn Smith could own their ass any day of the week, no wonder there sells are in the toilet.

I don't know what's the big hoopla about Integrity in journalism...

Fuck game journalsim. All journalim has lost it's integrety...

1. Dan rathergate (spoiling the career of the last great journalist)
2. Jeff Gannon
3. The laughing stock called fox news
4. Armstong "show meh ta money and I'll dance for yaz" Williams
5. The Bush administration making up fake newscasts and distributing it to real networks
6.Datline NBC's infamous Model Rocket engines in Gastanks

That's just the scandals. I could get into how the media is not "fair" or "balanced".

By the standard of the "traditional" media, the SONY hype monkeys have nothing on the partisain media.

At least we expect the gamming media to have no integrity.

EGM only sells coppies because the clercs force it down your throat.

We are living in the times of 'Propaganda for Profit'
Allowing truth to seep through nowadays would be costly to today's influential spinmen.
-BB

God I can't believe I spent more than 10 minutes reading that Garbage.

I hate blogs. (I really do )

It's The Reverend all over again.

French magazine used to have a very good moment from the late 80's to the mid 90's. They used to cover the import scene with tons of games for PC engine, SFC, JPN MD and others. But with the rise of the 32 bits area it seems that we stopped import and only covered the euro market. At this moment I stopped read magazines.

BTW, I would like to know if you had the same comments on US game magazines. Some magazines (Player One for example) used to say about the neo games "it's good but it doesn't the money, wait for a SFC or MD port". it me

I'm a game/technology journalist

This next Thursday morning I have to attend to an Apple Press Conference and see what they have to offer in exchange for good product reviews, haha.

Anyway, I used to read a lot of magazines years ago, but I stopped when the PlayStation2 was still planned to be a 64bit system to compete with the Nintendo64... I believe the last game magazine I ever bought had Sega's Jurassic Park: Lost World (AC) in it's cover.

When I stopped reading magazines I stopped caring about game reviews. It sounds stupid, since I write that myself - the thing is, I only review one or 2 games a MONTH. In other words, I only review games that are really worth reviewing. Snake Eater, BioHazard4, Gradius V, etc. And when there are no good games, I just talk about recent events/news.

So, my point is, when you are reading a review, you should know how to "filter" the information the journalist is providing, and turn it into something relatively objective.

Now we have "Journalist" to ad to Mushiki's ever expanding repoire.

CurtWRX said:

Now we have "Journalist" to ad to Mushiki's ever expanding repoire.

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In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Mushiki said:

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

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I'll have none of your masturbation jokes.

I actually remember the old EGM with Sushi-X, Ed Semrad, and Steve Harris. Sadly, other than Seanbaby's rants and the "Hsu and Chan" in the back, there's precious little to justify the existence of EGM, or perhaps any gaming magazine. I mean, with the Internet allowing for the dissemination of gaming news, as well as the fact that now anyone with two brain cells to rub together can post reviews online (hell, even I can), there's not really much the magazines can offer. Unless Insert Credit plans to offer a monthly anthology of their frigging dissertations...

That said, the last "great moment" in any magazine that I remember was when GMR, the "official" EB mag, totally raked the N-Gage (whose "official sale headquarters" at the time was EB) over the coals. It was funny on exactly one level, but that's all some things need to be funny on, I guess.

At the end of the day, there's little or nothing in EGM that I can't read for free at
http://www.the-magicbox.com/ .

And their decision to include DVDs with some issues(thereby jacking up the price of said issue) is a load of fucking shit.
The only different thing EGM can offer me is a bunch of lame-ass Metroid Prime 2 and Halo "wall calendars" and "alternate package art".

It's sad when Seanbaby is the closest thing they have to an editorial opinion.

Only buy mags for demo disks, besides journalism is a whack subject, as a news editor basically there is no objectivity, the press releases just get put out as is pretty much.

You guys don't understand the point of Game magazines.......

They serve the same pourpose as handelds. Something to do when your either traveling or on the shitter. Mostly the latter.

Unless you have an internet connection in your bathroom, then you still need somethint to read when you shit...... take your time....