And good for you if that aligns with your wants (it sure aligns with mine).

But, at its core, it is “stupid games media” rhetoric. If you are in a mad dash to finish a review or even a game guide (Fandom’s gotta eat), you might not have time or even interest to go back track and do ten side quests in the starting area. At which point constantly hearing “you should get a better pistol” is gonna be REAL grating and is arguably bad encounter design. What is described as “no friction” is often designing encounters so that people can do both the critical path (just story quests) and all the side paths. And its why so many games either have continuous encounter scaling or just big levers you can flip (PoE1 and 2 did the latter).

So yeah. I do have a bit of an issue with someone in the games media space (especially at the company that steals the work of the rest of games media…) “be(ing) kind of a shit” to colleagues in a manner that just fuels the same kind of bullshit they constantly put up with on social media.

Whereas a “real” games reviewer learns to… not be a shit? I forget what game it was, but I remember Mortismal basically saying “The level scaling is kind of wonky. If you just do only the main story quests, you are going to have a bad time and you’ll need to really understand the combat systems to progress. But if you do too many side quests, you’ll be overpowered and just run right through everything” (… actually that sounds like PoE1 after the DLCs came out…). Rather than just making fun of other reviewers for not being able to handle “friction”.

Although I will say, in Grubb’s defense: That is also kind of the Giant Bomb style guide. It ignores that the OGs (Ryan, Jeff, Brad, Alex, etc) had fairly strong “games media” backgrounds by the time the site started and knew how to say something inflammatory to get a point across without angering the publishers to the point of losing ad revenue (… okay, Jeff wasn’t quite as good at the last part). But without those old hats to act as editors (and no, Dan doesn’t count), you get situations where “snark” is just shit stirring that feeds the people tormenting the rest of the industry.

Like, if someone hires me to do a job, and I accept, I cannot go “Oh, I’m gonna do half of it because the rest isn’t my cup of tea. Sorry.” No, I’ll do the job and maybe complain about it afterwards, which IMO, is exactly what reviewers should do—example: “I beat the boss, but the fight sucked because X, Y, and Z.”

How about we have ANY job security before we start playing the “I am paying you sub minimum wage to run that kroger. HOW FUCKING DARE YOU DO RESTOCKING AT EIGHT AM!!! YOU ARE PAID TO DO THIS OVERNIGHT!!” shittery? Hmm

Which is something a lot of old hat games media have actually talked about. It is a lot easier to run a 36 hour day to finish up that JRPG review when you know you’ll be able to rest next week. Rather than be told your contract isn’t being renewed but to check back next month. Or to just have your entire department gutted because an exec decided they didn’t need to have TWO whole people playing video games. And when you know you’ll get something other than “Fucking woke reviewers don’t understand how to play a game” feedback from the “fans” who only ever see your review when their favorite hatemonger youtuber talks about it while making sure EVERYONE knows your social media accounts.

I think there should be standards, otherwise you get reviewers unfairly judging games they barely played like in the infamous God Hand review.

Define “standards”.

Is it “You must finish a game before reviewing it”? Because Jeff Gerstmann kind of infamously made it a point to finish Metal Gear Survive prior to reviewing it (I think it might have been his final print review at Giant Bomb?). EVERYONE, colleague and fan alike, told him he was stupid. And his consensus was basically that he felt the same way after 30 hours of misery that he did after 2.

Is it “You must be good at a game to review it?”. Because, funny enough, Remap Radio kind of talked about this last summer on one of their ridiculously long podcasts in the context of “games media suck and aren’t good enough to play Shadows of the Erdtree” in that short window before basically everyone said “So… this DLC is fucking hard, huh?”. And they pointed out that this is not at all a new experience for them. They are regularly playing much less polished and MUCH harder versions of these games under a strict time crunch where the only “guide” they have is what their buddy who is paid to write a game guide can experimentally figure out.

And how that translates to a review?

like in the infamous God Hand review.

You mean the game which, throughout every re-release, the vast majority of players either nope out after they get their asses beat by random grunts in the first stage? And most of the rest leave when they get to the shop and realize they need to buy and build their own combos blind?

I have no idea what “infamous God Hand review” you are referring to. But the majority I read when I heard about this cool ass PS2 game? It was “Hey, this is a really freaking cool concept and I personally had a blast. But it is not for everyone and a lot of the fundamental gameplay concepts are outright bad. OPM or whatever the hell has a demo of it and we strongly encourage you to get that if it is still on news stands because you are either going to love or hate this”. And, because this was still the era of print (like the VERY tail end), there was money to have one main review and like two “impressions” reviews at most of the major outlets. And, like almost all games, they would make it a point to have at least one sicko persona give it a high score while the rest bounced off. Which kind of represented how players respond to it to this day.

I think there should be standards, otherwise you get reviewers unfairly judging games they barely played like in the infamous God Hand review.

Or is it just “you must agree with me?”. Because, speaking as someone who has loved flight sims and tactics games his entire life (I was the kid in elementary school who liked xcom. The old xcom…)… most gamers don’t have my tastes in gaming. So having someone who dreams of Silent Storm reviewing Fire Emblem isn’t a particularly useful metric for most people.

That said? I learned from an early age to actually look at the by line on a review. I learned which guys/personas at EGM or PC Gamer I vibed with and which I didn’t. And that continued on into the online age and to this day.

Sometimes it is really annoying. Like… I like WW2 RTSes a lot. I fully understand why I need to vet every single youtuber who likes the games I like…

But also? Sometimes it is a really awesome realization that the weirdo audiophile on a podcast is the same guy who wrote some of my favorite reviews over the past decade (Rob Zacny is a treasure). And that the reason I am vibing with his thoughts on Valkyria Chronicles is that I have been vibing with his thoughts on other games for a significant part of our adult lives.