Are "professional" games journalists clueless?

And tommorow ill see over 50 "Gamedevelopers" in training... wondering how many of them actualy know the history before ps2/xbox and gamecube.
(helping out at a GameJam) I try to ingnore people/video's like this. Research and wanting to know just facts are more intresting than "This flop, that sucked", no, I want to know good games and the spec's. I realy liked my dad's MSX, wanted a NES badly and liked it when I got a ps1... always wanted a DC.

donno why, its just tis above

 

Check out Classic Game Room on youtube (channel is @inecomcompany)
The host is older than most, hilarious, and much knowledge on the subject of older video games, and video games as a whole.

 

Honestly, I was born in 1988.

I DO remember the 3DO being in stores.

MY best friend had a Saturn, so I remember being there. I had a subscription to game pro and EGM in 97 until 99, so I was THERE...

Same friend had a Sega CD. I'm only a year older than you. Don't think just because a person is in their early 20's that they are in the exact same boat as you.

Not to go off on a tangent but gaming has been the ONE thing I have had damn near my entire life, since 1990 when my parents got me an NES and I stayed maintained into the scene. Though it also helps I had older sisters into gaming.

But gaming is the one thing I have loved more than anything my entire life and has encompassed damn near everyone moment of it. Even my friendships are primarily bonded because of it.

I still wish I had pictures of Chace's birthday party in 1994 where he pulled the Saturn out the gift wrap with the face on ALL Of us.

 

+1
Agreed 100%, been watching classic game room for years now and the guy knows what hes talking about. He's quality to watch as well, consice - funny as hell but to the point.

If classic hardware is your thing (sure it is, look where we are) then you HAVE to check out gamester81's channel on youtube. I garuntee you wont regret it, the guy is amazing.

 

I've been gamming for 30 years My first computer was the commodore Plus 4 (Basically a beefed up and better looking C16) when I was about 6. It broke after a year though. Shitty crap. I then waited until 1987 to get a Master System. Sega was way bigger than Nintendo in the 8bit, 16bit and even 32bit days in Europe. So most people had a Master System unlike the US or Japan were the Nintendo ruled.

 

Really, they just read it in Wikipedia or watched AVGN episodes, that's all. They don't care about all these consoles, they just want to see themself on YouTube or TV. Anyway, it's made for masses by masses and I don't see a point to discuss it, there's a lot of this garbage in the internets.

 

As a Swede, I can't agree with that. NES, SNES and especially N64 was way more popular than MS, MD and Saturn. The 32/64-bit generation was a fight between PSX and N64. But that may be because Nintendo had a hugely successful distributor in Sweden, with a huge Nintendo fan club and a fan magazine. The Dreamcast was seen as a strong competitor, though...

But to answer your question; yes they are. For example, Kotaku now has a web site for just gaming news. That's right, a gaming news web site now has a gaming news web site, just because there's so much other shit that's only vaguely related to games on the regular Kotaku.

 

In the UK it was a different story. Nintendo didn't give a shit about the UK. Sega had Virgin distributing there stuff for the Master System with many TV adds as well. Nintendo had nothing. The Mega Drive blew away the SNES again with a fantastic add campaign while Nintendo had nothing except a few adds for Killer Instinct or Donkey Kong Country. While the Saturn wasn't such a big hit in the UK it was bigger than the N64 which seemed to only get a new game every other month at times. I worked in the games retail industry at the time so knew the pain of Nintendo fans asking each week if anything had been released.

Yakumo

 

My video game history only dates back until about 1996, but among us kids Sega was never even heard of. I think the first time I heard the name "SEGA" must have been in 1999 when the Dreamcast was introduced. I've never heard anything about the Saturn, Game Gear or Mega Drive before that.

In Germany, Nintendo was the big master of everything. I still remember those SNES-ads for the Super GameBoy on TV, also tons of N64 and GameBoy ads. Never seen a single SEGA-spot though. All of my friends had a an N64/GameBoy, too. There were two kids with PlayStations and they were considered cool and more mature because of it, but the main argument of our parents (that means me and the guys from my class) was that PlayStation games were more violent and thus worse than N64 for children! hahaha. Little did they know that we always played a borrowed Hexen and Turok in multiplayer...

 

In the U.S. sega had better ads, but nintendo on the other hand was really connected to it's fans and promoted the hell out of any big title coming out (even putting out vhs tapes with some that you could rent for free with a game rental). But most of these videos are just giving you the jist of the history of the system so they might get some details correct while the rest is a bit off.

That's why my 3ds review was 4 parts really, I wanted to go over the whole system while giving input on what it is up against. Most reviews on youtube just show you what comes in the box and one tidbit about the thing. Classic game room is what I want see more of. Giving a brief but accurate description of a system.

He has a bit of a fallowing himself but unlike most reviews he tries to be very accurate about it while keeping it brief. Others like gamester81 get most of the info right, but some of it's off and you can tell he didn't bother looking up any info on it. To be fair though he is looking through it as average collector and not hardcore exactly.

Honestly I wish there was more journalism like Retro Gamer, you can tell those guys really have huge passion on what they cover and their making of game segments can't be beat.

 

Some people have different skills in reviewing and speech. It's hard to keep a review brief but informative.

For some reason Classic Games Room is weird with some reviews, sometimes he just mentions what he likes to do in the game and not talk about the game it's self (like Gran Turismo on Playstation) he does have good reviews here and there..

I'm not any better, in fact it's very difficult to review something that's quite popular like Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64 etc.

As for Gamester81 he's first reviews were very sketchy and basic, he'll mention release dates, what buttons are what, what the games look like etc. I quite like his videos as his collection is quite large. Sometimes I know what he's trying to say, but he seems to trial off. He has gotten better through his videos that's for sure.

My reviews are quite like Gamster81's first videos, low tone in my voice, trailing off and forgetting important information. Usually I find it's a lot easier to have a list of points what I want to talk about next to me while I make the video.

 

It can be tricky to do no doubt, the biggest difficulty as you mentioned is keeping it brief while informative.

 

If I'm looking for gameplay videos on Youtube for a title I'm interested in and Classic game room happens to show up in the search, I usually watch that. Because even if he doesn't get all his facts rights, I still don't get irritated. Plus, he sometimes admits that he just doesn't know and is only guessing. Nice guy with nice videos.

But gamester81 is just a typical collector who doesn't even properly play most of the stuff he owns. You can tell just by watching a few of his videos. Just owning something instead of knowing what it's all about is not enough.

The truth is that some people just buy what they think is cool. That's how there are kids out there with white Saturns and copies of Radiant Silvergun and whatnot, but don't know shit about the first party games on the system. They're the ones that take top ten lists too seriously and don't understand that most people contributing to those lists haven't played all of the games they rant about. Sadly, on the surface that's what retro videogames as a hobby is about these days!

I'll be 30 this year. That's why I'm so angry.

 

I agree. It's top ten lists that is driving the prices upwards. As a collector who is only interested in games I liked while growing up and not really caring about what they're worth, that's pretty irritating.

 

Yeah, I know. Like, I would never try to collect, for example, all PAL NES games. Apart from the fact that it is basically impossible, especially for myself, I'm just not interested in all of the games. Most of the games are probably crap anyway. I just collect what I personally want to play.

 

I mainly collect if I see a game for like $2, $4 that are well known or okay titles I'll pick them up. Other than that I do what ThetaSigma does, and collects which ones I personally enjoy.

When it comes to Hardware I try to collect as many as I can with my tight money :<

 

Honestly I think most "professional" game journalists are clueless on what they're talking about, reading a few Wikipedia articles does not automaticly make someone an expert at something it never did and it never will you actually have to sit down do some actual research and get different views on a topic all around in order to draw proper conclusions about something which is what the person who made that video did not do.

 

This is completely accurate. Most game journalists are normal guys sitting in front of computers all day, waiting for the next big story. Few have any formal education, and those that do don't always treat those that don't as well as they should.

You wouldn't think so, but it can actually be a really miserable job sometimes.

 

Most of them aren't journalists as it's been said. If you think that normal journalists get paid bottom dollar, gaming bloggers get paid even less.

When a company like Wired does a real article, it is interested, researched, and well-informed (for the most part), which actually is meant to be interesting (while bringing business of course). When someone like Joystiq or Kotaku does, it is regurgitated non-sense whose only goal is to get a hit on their ads.

I planned on becoming a real "gaming journalist." That position simply doesn't exist.

 

It seems to me that even "normal" journalism has really gone downhill with a lot of people who don't even know to check their sources...