Well I knew Shane was coming to gloriously tell us why we should all think his show is best. I know you work on the show so you're going to defend it hardcore. I'm not going to get you to admit all of it's short comings and you're going to pretend as if X-Play is the best thing ever.
There's a reason every pub reviews games the way we do. Because it works.
Correction,
worked. And not very well I might add. But things are changing now. The television medium is going to change the way everything is consumed and delivered. And you know what it didn't work at all because the game buying masses never bought the games that got high review scores. All these years they've been completely ignoring game reviewers. That's why there's always been so much complaining at forums like this, why aren't people buying Panzer Dragoon, why aren't they buying this game? They don't listen to you because they don't like the games you keep telling them to buy. I believe you even dedicated an entire X-Play show to the fact that people don't listen to you.
Would you trust GameSpot, EGM, or CGW's reviews if they all were written by two people?
You mean like Siskel & Ebert or Ebert & Roeper. Yeah they've had a lot of trouble getting people to pay attention to them and listen to what they have to say, right. When you find someone who has the same taste in video games as you do then that's the best thing because it means it's someone you can trust. When I watch an X-Play review it means nothing to me because I don't know who you hired off the street this week to review the game. I have no idea if I like or respect any of the games that they do. I find Gamespot's user reviews a lot more accurate than the poorly written editorial staffs. And I find EGM's multiple reviews a lot better than just listening to 1 person. The thing that works on Judgment Day that doesn't work anywhere else is that the reviewers often have to defend their opinions. Anywhere else there is never anyone to challenge the reviewers opinion.
The people who don't like the genre already aren't going to buy the game no matter what.
Absolutely wrong! Were you not listening when I said that Tommy gave the Suffering an excellent review. How about when I said I hated survival horror, but was floored by the gameplay, control, and graphics of RE4?
The games in this industry that rise above their genre to bring in new fans are the games most worth buying. If you hand off your reviews to someone who's given every major survival horror game a 4 or 5 then it doesn't influence me much when they give another game in the genre the same review. Games like Knights of the Old Republic that invite gamers such as myself who hate RPGs into the genre by fixing the worst flaws of the genre are the best games that are made. When Tallarico gives the Sufferring a great review that makes me want to play it. A game I never had any interest in, I now want to check out. When you pass a survival horror game off to someone who already loves the genre all we end up with is another game review for the hardcore gamer who loves survival horror games, another 4 out of 5 for me and anyone else to dismiss.
Of course, you're entitled to your opinion. And I respect that. But in this case, your opinion differs from the vast majority.
Uh huh. How come you're constantly popping up on the X-Play boards screaming at people for expressing their distaste for X-Play. I see very few people at all who come forward and honestly say that X-Play is a good show. Most of us interested in games have had to watch your show because it was all we had on tv.
As far as I'm concerned, I wouldn't work for a publication or show that allowed people who hated particular genres to review games in those genres. Personally, that's a huge editorial integrity issue that I want nothing to do with.
Well as far as I'm concerned you've failed to work for a respectable review source in your career. Gamespot in particular is a site that I love, but can't pretend that they ever knew what they were doing when it came to reviewing video games. They knew how to grab attention with their terrible reviews, every time they butcher a game review all the attention starts pouring in. How many people did you have to defend your Amped review to, I bet you loved that experience didn't you?
If some people are unable to look past the entertainment value of the show to see that there's a strong editorial backbone behind it, it's a shame because we put a lot of work into making sure our scores are on-point.
I really don't appreciate the "editorial backbone." It's hard to make your scores off-point when theres a grand total of 5 numbers to give out. Why not just go down to a thumbs up, thumbs down routine while you're at it?
Does anyone out there in the hardcore gaming community take the weeks late, me too reviews of X-Play seriously? I never see them get posted. At least when you butchered game reviews for Gamespot people cared. The only game reviewer hated or picked on nearly as much as you were is Jeff Gerstmann.
Would you trust the opinion of the latest Command & Conquer game from someone who never plays real-time strategy games or from someone who has played 30 different real-time strategy games this year? I don't see why it's so hard to see the logic.
I would not trust it from someone who thinks every hyped game in the genre is great. Someone who's never played an RTS game before would probably be the most pristine, unbiased, pure judgment of quality. If you can impress someone who comes of the street and walks into their local game store and tries a game for the first time, then you are a great game maker. Are you reviewing games for a limited number of hardcore fans or are you reviewing games for the masses?
No I would not trust the person who has played 30 different RTS games this year at all because no normal game buyer can relate to that person. Forcing yourself to play that many games of the same genre in such a short period of time either means you love the genre too much to be objective or it's going to jade you against it. I don't want to be exposed to that review
ever, most of the reviews we get on the big game sites are from burnouts who've overloaded themselves, Gamespot comes to mind with it's weak small review staff. They're the most jaded bunch, I mean how many times have they had to in their history go back and change their reviews? What is this mood swings?
In all honesty, it's not hard to make a game show that hardcore gamers will love. It's not brain surgery. Developer interviews, news, no comedy, blah, blah, blah. We did it with Extended Play for four years and the ratings for the show were flatline the entire time. The hard part is creating a gaming show that appeals to both hardcore and casual players, because quite frankly, if you don't do that, your show isn't going to stay on the air.
Extended Play was never in trouble of being cancelled. You weren't even a part of Extended Play so it's not really appropriate for you to judge how well or how poorly things were done. Obviously the show has done well enough to be on the air for 6 years and get turned into an every day show. I'm pretty sure Extended Play would have done just as well if it had been fitted into every 11PM and 4PM time slot that X-Play is in every day. Your show became #1 on TTV because of your production schedule, your time slots, Morgan's boobs (no offense, I respect her, but it's the truth) and having a monopoly on the market.
The problem isn't that you do comedy, it's that the comedy writing and delivery is so bad. There's no reason for the extended skits either. People watch your show in spite of the bad comedy, not because of it. It's worth sitting through an unfunny skit because you want to see the footage they have of Resident Evil 4 or Doom 3. Gamers will do that. We will sit through garbage tv to get to the part we want.
We're very excited to take the show to the next level and we hope that everyone likes the result!
Well that's not a very realistic goal, but I still wish you success. I also wish that you would think about and consider the problems with the show but unfortunately you, Matt Kiel and others from the show are not very receptive to the enormous amounts of criticism you have received on your message boards. One of the things that I find particularly distasteful regarding your staff is the way you treat your viewers which even bleeds through onto the show in the way you loathe viewer mail. Basically you believe the people that watch your show are idiots. I think that sums up the problem in a nutshell.
Finally you should have more respect for Judgment Day (Tommy & Vic). You've been in the tv biz for a very short period of time compared to them. They paved the way for you and it's likely your show would be dead and buried right now had Sony been able to outbid Comcast. G4 was built upon the hardwork of Electric Playground and AGN, now you get a chance to share the stage with them. If Sony had won the bidding for TechTV the new networks focus would not have been gaming and you'd most likely be unemployed right now. Everything you get out of this merger in large part you owe to them for convincing Comcast to pursue this idea.
