Decline Share The Absolute Worst of Game Journalism

[ind33d]

Or do you want to read about the time a Daily Dot game journalist played through Fall Guys with a butt plug programmed to go off whenever their controller vibrated?

Ana Valens eh? mmm...

Get to know your new favorite journalist​

Journalist, author, and video game designer Ana Valens is someone I very much admire. Valens writes about things other people are too scared of getting wrong. But whether it’s covering ‘hypnoslut’ gamers as a NSFW columnist at The Daily Dot, going long on Tumblr porn for her novel, or offering her perspective as managing editor of We Got This Covered, Valens dissects her subjects with enough close care to serve a pufferfish. After meeting at a Brooklyn bar, we talked about gaming and how women writers exist in it.

Tell me a little bit about you and how you first got into gaming. How has your relationship to the video game community changed since then?​

Hi! I’m a games journalist and critic and an adult game developer. I currently serve as managing editor for the geekdom site We Got This Covered, which was recently acquired by Gamurs.

My relationship to the video game community has definitely changed over the years. I’ve played video games since I was a kid, and I used to read Kotaku and Joystiq (RIP) daily as a teen. I definitely started out as a bit of a gamer, then moved on to more nuanced political beliefs about the games world during my college years.

I’d definitely say I went from left-of-center to a bit of a leftist, with very radically inclined queer beliefs about what games are and what they can be. Case in point, I’m an enormous advocate for supporting the adult side of the games community, and my writing tends to spotlight how kinky pornographic titles can be affirming for queer players (and what happens when they’re not).

(If you want to keep staring into the abyss: https://www.destructoid.com/ana-valens-interview/ )

meanwhile i got fired from games journalism for writing an article about how watch dogs 1 was good

 

[mediocrepoet]

Or do you want to read about the time a Daily Dot game journalist played through Fall Guys with a butt plug programmed to go off whenever their controller vibrated?

Ana Valens eh? mmm...

Get to know your new favorite journalist​

Journalist, author, and video game designer Ana Valens is someone I very much admire. Valens writes about things other people are too scared of getting wrong. But whether it’s covering ‘hypnoslut’ gamers as a NSFW columnist at The Daily Dot, going long on Tumblr porn for her novel, or offering her perspective as managing editor of We Got This Covered, Valens dissects her subjects with enough close care to serve a pufferfish. After meeting at a Brooklyn bar, we talked about gaming and how women writers exist in it.

Tell me a little bit about you and how you first got into gaming. How has your relationship to the video game community changed since then?​

Hi! I’m a games journalist and critic and an adult game developer. I currently serve as managing editor for the geekdom site We Got This Covered, which was recently acquired by Gamurs.

My relationship to the video game community has definitely changed over the years. I’ve played video games since I was a kid, and I used to read Kotaku and Joystiq (RIP) daily as a teen. I definitely started out as a bit of a gamer, then moved on to more nuanced political beliefs about the games world during my college years.

I’d definitely say I went from left-of-center to a bit of a leftist, with very radically inclined queer beliefs about what games are and what they can be. Case in point, I’m an enormous advocate for supporting the adult side of the games community, and my writing tends to spotlight how kinky pornographic titles can be affirming for queer players (and what happens when they’re not).

(If you want to keep staring into the abyss: https://www.destructoid.com/ana-valens-interview/ )

meanwhile i got fired from games journalism for writing an article about how watch dogs 1 was good

Should've reviewed from the perspective of whether shoving the console DVD up your ass was good or not.

 

[Aemar]

Industry's most pressing matter has finally been taken care of.

 

[Dave the Druid]

Ooh. Let's go back to the 90s for some incompetent public access television nonsense. This is NAVGTR, the best worst game reviewer ever. Here's possibly the most rambling, schizophrenic, off-topic review ever:

And here's maybe the greatest bad review ever:

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Here’s a memorably stupid write up of a preview event for Rock Band 4 from Polygon’s (former) senior reporter Colin Campbell:

​

Rock Band 4 is doing a lot of the fun things you want it to do​

By Colin Campbell@ColinCampbellx Jun 1, 2015, 10:00am EDT


A few of my more effervescent, more gregarious, more alive colleagues in game journalism are on stage "rocking out" to The Killers. We are on the rooftop of a pricey hotel in Santa Monica, at a press event organized by Rock Band 4's developer and publisher Harmonix.

I'm standing at a safe distance, drinking fizzy water, eating puff pastry canapes and chatting to another colleague about politics in the Philippines. I'm having an OK time.

I'm supposed to be focusing my attention on Rock Band 4, but there's more chance of Ferdinand Marcos leaping onto that stage than there is of me mounting the boards, swinging a guitar strap around my neck and yelling "whooooooo."

I don't care about rock music. I dislike crowds and I dislike loud noises. I don't do public performances, excepting "Toastmasters" which I enjoy from time-to-time, along with half a dozen accountants, schoolteachers and self-improvement nutters.

Look, sometimes in this job you gotta cover games you don't really give a stuff about. I played some Guitar Hero ten years ago and I thought it was kinda stupid. This is not because rock star sims are stupid. It's a perfectly valid fantasy. It's just not my fantasy.

But I can tell from the people on stage, the fact that they are having fun and coming back for more, that Rock Band 4 has something to offer people who get together and enjoy each other and music and the whole rock-'n'-roll ethos. I'm jealous of their ability to enjoy this product.

If my grandmother, who does enjoy a good party, were here on this windswept hotel roof — instead of sitting in an old people's home in Manchester, watching Britain's Got Talent — she'd be up on stage, singing and yelling into the mic, mocking me for being a "boring old fart."

Some of the journos on stage are as old as I am and, frankly, no more rock-star-ish than a bag of spuds. This is a game for everyone. Except me.

All video games are stupid, of course. That whole thing of, 'you're not really shooting terrorists or winning the World Cup, you're just pressing buttons' is patronizing and simplistic but every now and again you come across a game that has so little emotional connection to who you are that you end up standing there, gazing at the screen and saying "I'm just pressing buttons and my life has no meaning," to a slightly bemused PR person.

Music games are often about pressing buttons according to visual cues, which is probably why the whole genre collapsed a few years ago. That and the ferocious greed of Activision, which insisted on publishing way too many of these games.

MUST READ​

Rock Band 4 is Coming
But Rock Band 4 is also not about just pressing buttons. Various instruments, including vocals, have been given carte blanche to express themselves in ways that are individual to the player, and be rewarded for their personal skill. It's not just about sticking to the colors and the lines. It's about adding your own flavor to the song, through drum-riffs and vocal meanderings.

I'm not entirely dislocated from the appeal of this feature. There was a time when half a bottle of gin and a copy of Lips on Xbox 360 basically turned me into Boy George. I can do a gorgeous "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me," assuming there's no-one else in the house.

But I found, with that game, that I could sing it worse and score higher, by doing what the software wanted me to do, rather than what my Tanqueray-fueled inner-Culture Club needed to release.

Rock Band 4, as Harmonix keeps telling us, is not so much about creating a game in which there are scores and channels and targets and RPGish upgrade paths (though they are all certainly present) but in creating a really fun experience in which people get to sing, guitar and drum their fave tunes their way and generally have a good laugh and not be booed off stage by AI douchebags. So far as I can tell, the company is making a good fist of this endeavor.

At the end of each song, the game offers up suggestions for the next track, which band-members can vote on. The AI crowd shouts out requests. This keeps the fantasy alive, avoids the tedium of back-tracking through menus, helps iron out the social difficulty of choosing the next song. This seems to me to be part of a convincingly earnest attempt by the people at Harmonix to do the thing they are best at, which is making music games that actually make people feel good, that allow people to have a good time.

There are new guitars and drums being made by Mad Catz (no keyboard) but you can use your old Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 wireless contraptions on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions, which are due out later this year. Exported songs from those old games can also be uploaded.

A new group of journos are on stage banging out some Fleetwood Mac. My friend, the one I was talking about the Philippines to, has wandered away. I go in search of a developer to interview. Perhaps there's a nice quiet room where we can sit and chat.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Jesus, it's impressive that he manages to sound like an insufferable cunt even in writing a game review. That's basically a super power.

 

[orcinator]

meanwhile i got fired from games journalism for writing an article about how watch dogs 1 was good

Deserved, get some taste fgt.

 

[ind33d]

meanwhile i got fired from games journalism for writing an article about how watch dogs 1 was good

Deserved, get some taste fgt.

>open world Dark Souls invasions in Chicago with real-time hacking is bad taste

kek