In this episode, I have a look at a different side to gaming.
I know the plan was to look at some more genres, but a good plan is a plan that can change and something more interesting came up!
Apologies for the sound and lighting. I’m very much learning by doing, or at least learning by making mistakes and seeing what I can get away with.
In quiet moments over the last few weeks where I have been reading through parts of the gaming press, my brow has become furrowed over the furore concerning complaints about the review score system.
As a brief background to anyone who has missed the mess, Eurogamer gave Uncharted 3 an 8/10 score and were internet-crucified by a series of commenters claiming that Eurogamer were attention seeking, trying to get extra hits, and generally saying that they were wrong and irresponsible to give it any less than a 9/10. Incidentally, most of these often incredibly harsh and unrepeatable-before-the-watershed comments will have come from people who hadn’t played the game yet.
That doesn’t make a huge amount of sense to me, but then I could chalk that up to the fact that I barely understand the desire to leave comments in general. I do however think it’s fair to say however that it’s insane and sadly not existing in a vacuum. The issue has been discussed and dissected in other places, most recently by Jim Sterling at the Escapist and by Checkpoint on PATV a while back, both worth a look if you are equally perplexed about the issue.
Game journalists complaining about game journalism is actually becoming a bit of a cliché now and is nothing new. The complaining about review scores has been bubbling away for ages. One of the main issues is the conflict of interest that can arise in the course of the symbiotic relationship between PR and journalist with the PRs under no obligation to send review copies of games and journalists needing copies of games in order to review them and maintain a readership. I’m sure most establishments could afford to arrange a game-buying budget to circumvent this but regardless, it can make it a little awkward when it comes to reviewing an absolute stinker.
For anyone subscribed to my site through an RSS feed, my videos sadly don’t show up in there. I’m trying to work out if I can fix that or if it’s a quirk of the blip.tv player, but in the mean time, you’ll have to have to click through to the site to see them!
Oh, and there’s no video in this post. So you”re ok with this one. You can stay where you are.
Putting together a semi-coherent web-show is actually a lot of hard work and easy to mess up. Considering my episodes are around the 7 minute mark, it keeps me awake at night thinking about the poor, if not slightly lucky, souls who have to edit full TV shows together.
From my two episodes I have about half an hour of film that I’ve scrubbed through of me messing up and getting things just slightly wrong. If you want an exercise in maintaining self confidence, or if you just want to see how long it will take for you to want to punch yourself in the face, film yourself making endless little mistakes and then sort through it.
Oh, also, the music: That’s completely my music! I made that this morning! I’m oddly proud! Exclamation mark proud!
I present episode 2 of An Introduction to Video Games. In this episode, we have a look at some different genres of video games.
This took forever to put together and I learnt many things, for example my video editing software does not like video files over 3GB in size and when you are 98% done with the editing process, it will crash constantly in a desperate and successful attempt to get your attention and make you want to cry/explode/both.
An Introduction to Video Games should always appear here, but you can also catch it on my Blip TV show page (UPDATE: No you can’t! Blip.tv got shut down!). I think you can also find it on iTunes…but I wouldn’t put money on that.
Additional Notes:
Incidentally, Blip TV: Actually pretty cool and well worth taking a look. I think they’re doing something very interesting that could very well be the next big thing. (UPDATE: Hahahahahahaha wooooo hindsight)
