And then it goes into a sewer.

I blame the Tylenol.

I noticed you haven’t mentioned the actual quality of the content. Is it a responsibility to give money to a medium simply because it takes payment instead of using ad revenue?

The competition for what’s in those magazines is with independent online reviewers.

The idea of ranking games on a numerical scale is inherently flawed. I suspect many publications still use it as a way to make nice with game publishers. Text that’s lukewarm can slap a 9/10 score on and a lot of people just jump over the review to the “objective” score.

I feel it’s important

Genuinely, why?

Not all YouTubers are quality. This is obvious. What I am saying is that I’ve found a mere handful who are quality and for my tastes they have replaced the entire legacy professional gaming journalistic media. Other people I’m sure can find similar YouTubers who cater to their tastes and opinions.

That might be exactly part of why gaming journalism is irrelevant.

If the “news” about an upcoming game is just repeating developer hype, then it’s just useless noise. At that point the only thing that matters are reviews, and independent YouTubers are beating the professionals in quality and trustworthiness.

So what’s left? Actual dry industry news? I suppose some small amount of people care, but not enough to support the amount of gaming journalists out there.

click- and rage-bait headlines on Facebook over quality journalism

Gaming journalism has been overrun with that.

What I, and I think many people, want are trustworthy, knowledgable reviews.

I can’t trust any of the major publications. I trust a small handful of YouTubers who are giving me more of what I want than the entire professional industry.

Back in the late 90s-early 2000s the PCGamer magazine was actually worthwhile. It had reviewers who specialized in different genres and if read enough you could get a feel for their writing style and critical voice. The fact it was a monthly publication meant they weren’t racing to get a review out in the first 24 hours.

Nowadays it all seems like publications race to put reviews out online for relevance, and the reviewers often seem to have a disdain for video games and even if they don’t they aren’t genre experts.

I don’t like fighting games. My review of a fighting game would be trash. Yet major publications just pump out reviews by whoever.

Individual youtubers at least can develop a recognizable critical voice and stick more to genres they know and enjoy.

The entire industry was flooded with mouthpieces for developer statements, and opinion piece hottakes. How many of those people does an industry really need? (Or more importantly: How many of those people can it financially support?)

As for reviews, they are for the most part similarly worthless and hard to trust. There’s about five YouTubers who I actually trust the opinions of, and I haven’t felt left out at all with that as the extent of my gaming journalism intake.

I can’t be certain, but I suspect a lot of gamers are completely burnt out on the professional gaming journalism industry.

I think the original trilogy (plus Reach and ODST) work because while there’s a ton of lore, the really convoluted stuff is kind of at the background to the moment to moment feel of the game. The most forward facing content is a pastiche of other easily digestible scifi that’s all mixed together in a fun, interesting way. You’ve got conventional humans who feel like a straight expansion of the colonial marines from Aliens up against a diverse and interesting array of aliens. The Covenant are a refinement from Pathways Into Darkness and then the Marathon games. You’ve got the flood as a space zombie change of pace.

It all mixes together well and the more detailed lore can be built on top of it. There are many intentional gaps and hooks which can suggest things without having to be addressed explicitly, leaving room for some mystery.

After those games, the series kind of imploded under the weight of its own lore since the developers/writers chose to bring all of those mysterious elements to the forefront. It gave less interesting enemies to fight, and less motivation to care. I doubt many people have moments from those games burned into their memories the same way moments from the original trilogy are.

The MCC Halo had a graphical remaster on the original engine, that’s why you could swap between original and remaster visuals on the fly. The upcoming project is a remake on a new engine with changes to gameplay and design.

It is tedious, with repeated samey layout and a limited selection of flood enemy types. The mod mixes up the environment and adds more flood enemy types for variety.

In videos he has mentioned both reducing the damage from the sniper rifles so they aren’t one-hit kills, and allowing jackels to use carbines which will replace some sniper jackels.

Yes, it was in the CE PC multiplayer. And, to refer back to the post:

It adds new weapons to the CE campaign

Repeat from the other thread:

I beat The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

It was alright. A third person shooter where you are theoretically giving tactical orders to two NPC followers. In reality, good or interesting tactics go out the window in favor of just spamming special abilities as much as possible in a chaotic mess of fights. The story was decent and gets interesting near the end, although for my money after the big reveal it feels like it drags out a bit longer than it needs to. For $3 I got my value.

COD4 was the first Modern Warfare game.

World At War wasn’t numbered.

I’m not saying Clancy stuff is always completely grounded, especially the longer it goes on, but I’m trying to use the Clancy comparison to capture the essence of an idea. COD4 while fictional, and with moments that aren’t wholly realistic if you really hold them up to the most intense scrutiny has the overall texture of realism. MW2&3 and Black Ops games all exist as throwing bigger and more insane setpieces out with no regard to any realism.

It’s a the last COD with a real gutpunch moment that says anything about anything. The nuke going off it a moment of realizing you aren’t a special main character and you die like everyone else, and that maybe war isn’t just a big fun adventure. All the shock moments have been trying to top it are so dramatic that they don’t have the same effect that the nuke did.

While (classic, I’m not counting stuff ghostwritten under his brand) Clancy characters have hyper competence, it’s to be expected given that they are turbo ultra elite soldiers or spies. Their motivations and ability to act doesn’t reach the point of self parody.

For a COD4 example: Nikolai, the Russian that the player rescues early on in the game. He is a mole inside the Russian antagonist faction feeding information to the SAS. He got found out. He’s being kept at a house with a handful of regular soldiers watching him. When you rescue you him he is calm or at least puts up a calm front and thanks you. That’s a pretty believable guy who could have been a real person who is doing something realistic and dangerous.

In MW2 that character can materialize with apparently infinite types of military aviation hardware, and he is also a pilot able and willing to do insane maneuvers. And he is personal friends with Captain price rather than just being an SAS asset. And he is in touch with a friendly militia group in the middle of Europe.

There is a distinct jump from COD4 to MW2, where it goes from Tom Clancy to Michael Bay.

MW2 is still fun, but it exists in an entirely separate tonal reality than COD4.

I’m replaying COD4 and taking notes at the moment for a review I’ve wanted to do for years, coincidentally.

Looking at just COD4 without being influenced by knowledge of the sequels, it’s got a decent story and if you look at the edges you can find contemplations of cycles of violence, and while not to the point of being anti-war it does emphasize the waste of it.

The characters are Tom Clancy levels of larger than life, which is significantly more restrained than what came later. Individually the story beats and scenarios have at least a texture of realism, often loosely based in something real and then strung together in a story that isn’t convoluted.

I could see it being a good movie with the right handling. It probably wouldn’t be.