the future of gaming journalism

Since my return from England in July, more than a few of my tastes have changed. My brother has had a subscription to Nintendo Power since we were both in grade school, but when I picked up a copy of it after coming home, I found that I no longer respond to its Disneyfied tone and its low expectation for all things Nintendo. The age difference between its target audience and mine had become painfully obvious, and their high scores for well-known mediocre games (like Enter the Matrix) proved their reviews untrustworthy. Having been introduced to UK magazines like Edge and GamesTM, the typical game news/reviews seem self-satisfied and unvarying. True, there is a time and place for straightforward news and reviews, but I think we could use more of the game criticism featured in these magazines as well as the US-based insert credit.

When I say these sources are more "intellectual," I mean that they scrutinize the game industry as well as individual games and provide not only overviews but also layered analyses. Edge (and GamesTM, who copied Edge) does this using editorials as well as a strict scoring scale -- a 5 out of 10 means average -- that highly favors originality. Liam does accuse Edge of being "ever so slightly pretentious," and I can't say I disagree. That's perhaps why I liked GamesTM's tone better, but I've only read one or two issues and have nothing else to say except that it's kind of like Edge. I don't know about the quality of Edge's stuff these days though, since my friend whose best friend who knows people who work there said that there were some controversy over an insensitive editorial as well as something involving Edge being paid to score a game better than it deserved, and half the staff ended up quitting. There's no magazine in the US quite like Edge and GamesTM, but my brother's friend Joe who also went to USC pointed me to insert credit, which has good writing and thought-provoking features like this one. It's an interesting site you can spend hours reading if you're so inclined. My one minor complaint is that the site is poorly organized (everything under one category is listed chronologically) so as to be unfriendly to newcomers. That and some of their articles could be a bit less verbose.