Lepus Lepidus

Look! We’ve taken every negative thing said about a game and woven it into one review! It’s the nega-review.

I know it’s supposed to be cheeky and funny — I get the joke, honest — but I truly don’t find it funny to intentionally take the words out of context. When I say the Rock Band drums are “not indestructible,” that’s a fact. No game controller is indestructible; you’re still going to have to approach it with respect, and treat it like the piece of consumer electronics it is. But the review’s original line is “They’re not indestructible, but they were built with abuse in mind.” That’s consumer advice — don’t boil it down to hate when it’s not intended as such.

This kind of remixed review also assumes that the reader cannot comprehend the original article. I don’t need you to edit down the words to bite-sized chunks; I believe the audience is smarter than that. I didn’t call for an interpreter, nor did the reader. So, you know, fuck off.

Sure enough, this edit of just the bad bits has created confusion and — exactly what our industry needs — more mocking. Please note the reader comments where people take issue with some of the OXM comments, as if that’s all we said.

I’m tired of all the negativity in this industry. The web breeds it like cancer — comedy cancer. I left GamesRadar partially because I didn’t agree with the negative editorial vision — they seemed more interested in shooting down good things than celebrating them. I knew I couldn’t do that on a daily basis. So I’m not thrilled to see my words showing up in someone else’s project about how everything sucks when you look close enough.

If you disagree with my reviews, that’s fine — we can always disagree and we can even discuss it. But I take immense pride in choosing the right words and putting them in the “right” order. I sweat over the flow of my articles; I want them to be entertaining and informative and above all clear. I don’t give you permission to destroy their very specific and carefully considered meanings for your joke.

Leave my words out of your cynical hack job next time.

Look at us, we formed a site:

http://www.OXMonline.com

It’s been a few months in the works and frankly took longer than we hoped, but it’s what we wanted it to be, and while there’s always room for improvement, we’re better off having waited. We wanted to put out something useful and hopefully valuable to both mag readers and web-only visitors.

I sent a tip to Kotaku but they didn’t take the bait. They did report that IGN reported the news found in our Holiday 2007 issue (which many subscribers have had for several days), which is that “Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld” is a bonus track in Rock Band. (I’m disappointed that Kotaku didn’t know who Freezepop was, but there you have it.)

Kotaku also reported that the New York Times reported that print magazines might be dead. Good thing that will never happen to newspapers, as long as there are blogs to report on what they say.

So with all that reporting on reporting going on, maybe Kotaku missed our news.

From today’s New York Times:

But game players are also suspicious of publications’ ties to the game publishers they write about, said David Gornoski, the editor of a Web site called Vgmwatch.com. “We’re seeing situations where publishers are dangling exclusive stories in front of publications in exchange for scores for their products,” Mr. Gornoski wrote in an e-mail message.

Source, please? Evidence, anyone? Let’s start pointing fingers and weed out the criminal element. I don’t want people exchanging scores for exclusives in my industry either, but I don’t have the proof to expose these alleged unethical practices. I mean, the publishers can ask, but is the press biting? Because that’s what’s heavily implied here.

I’ll coroborate the first part. There have been times that publishers have hinted, or simply “shopped around” a review, like, “Well, we have a lot of people interested and everybody wants the exclusive review…what are you thinking of giving it?” Can you blame them for asking? They want to look as good as possible; they see the media as a marketing tool. But when that happens, the mags I’ve worked at have said no dice, every time. If it comes with strings attached or some early information about what it’s getting — even if it’s a game where we strongly suspect it’s going to get a good review, based on all we’ve seen and played up to that point — we say no. But that only covers the mags I worked at when I worked at them, and I haven’t worked for all of them.

So…which mags are taking the bait?

Mr. Gornoski? You’ve got the traffic and the attention from a New York Times article; hopefully you’ve done some investigative reporting and have research to back up your statement. I mean, surely, you’ve learned that lesson, right?

The floor is yours…

Its failure is complete.

I might buy one just to destroy it.

Man, can I yammer on. And that’s only part one.

Check the gamercard to the right — I’m finally a member of the 10K club. This weekend, with Kat away seeing some friends, I spent some time with the 360 and was able to get my score into the five-digit realm, where it will remain until I die.

I am happy to be done with Guitar Hero III on Hard, but a good chunk of the final push was going through Portal (so to speak!). I’d done the review on a debug, so I wanted to do it “for real.” I’d only monkeyed with the advanced maps for the review; man, level 18 on Advanced is brutal. But the Portal games and a Puzzle Quest boss battle took me to 9990, so I rummaged around for another 10 points…only to find it in Frogger. It ain’t pretty, but the Achievement that took me over to top was Chicken 1 — you have to wait on the road until the timer turns red, then make it home. Took me a few tries, but I got it.

Now I have to live with the fact that the milestone Achievement was called Chicken 1.