Eurogamer! To many gamers, Eurogamer is a great source for gaming news, reviews, and other editorials. To Darkfall fans, on the other hand, Eurogamer is just another shady “unbiased” review website that backs up writers with questionable journalistic integrity. It feels like only a year ago that Eurogamer was launched into a controversy regarding the then-recently launched Darkfall. A contributor by the name of Ed Zitron wrote a scathing review of the title, scoring a 2/10 (Or a “Don’t touch this game”), and causing quite a stirrup at the Darkfall community. Aventurine, the title’s developers, shot back quickly: Publicly revealing logs from the accounts that revealed not only did the reviewer spend less than two hours in-game, but the majority of that time was spent in the character creation screen, with only a few minutes of login time each session. Tom Bramwell of Eurogamer did nothing to fan out the flames when he announced that Eurogamer was backing up Zitron. Of course, it was Zitron’s word (And who wouldn’t trust a man who laid out in writing his complete inability to do the most basic tasks in Darkfall?) versus Aventurine’s log files. Eventually, Eurogamer had another reviewer take a look.
Like water down the Niagara, the slip ups just keep flowing. This time, Gamespot is in some hot water after a review giving the recently launched Global Agenda a 5.5/10. Being as loyal to the title as one would expect a community, the Global Agenda community quickly did some dirt digging on the reviewer, and found quite a dearth in play time. The reviewer’s account, fittingly named DoofusJones, clocked in less than six hours of gameplay, making it to level 13 and wholly ignoring the subscription areas of the game.
I don’t get paid to write for MMO Fallout, but I often get the idea that I have more integrity than some of those who do get paid. Although Ed Zitron was not paid for his review of Darkfall, the Gamespot reviewer was, even though the review has since been removed. Myself, along with a legion of millions of other gamers, would kill to have the opportunity to be paid to write reviews for MMOs. Hell, if MMO Fallout paid my college tuition, you’d see me here every waking minute I wasn’t at my regular job or at classes! Alas, my future is in political talk, but the legion of millions still stand.
As if Gamespot needs to hand out more stakes to the people who are still angry over the Kane and Lynch fiasco several years back. I vet my own articles before I publish them, and I do my own fact checking in-house, but I still do fact-checking. For the companies that actually pay people to be “main editors,” do your jobs and make sure the person doing the review isn’t skimming off the top and putting out a half-assed piece of work.
More importantly, and I regularly reinforce this, if you are looking for a source to base your purchase on, don’t read a review. Don’t listen to what Gamespot tells you, or any other review website. I even tell people not to listen to what I say in the “month in review” articles, foremost because MMO Fallout is not in the business of reviewing titles, and secondly because I don’t want people basing their purchases of a genre where enjoyment comes out of the player’s own experience, to come from a piece of text no matter the size. The Month In Review is meant to be an, albeit morbid, comedic article about my own failed attempts to reign in spending.
So I’ll say what I always say when it comes to choosing your MMO: Go window shopping, almost every MMO on the market has some form of demo available, and in cases of Champions Online and Warhammer Online, you can try entire sections of the game for absolutely free, without limits. You may go through a large number of MMOs before you find the one that suits you, but look at it this way: You’re not spending thirty dollars a pop for each title that eventually ends up gathering dust. And if a title doesn’t have a demo, that is their loss, not your own.
MMO Fallout 