Once upon a time PC Gamer was my primary source of all things PC gaming. I liked Computer Gaming World well enough, but every month Future Publications would offer up a veritable tome unto my mailbox with compelling reviews, tons of articles and almost enough gaming goodness to mitigate how little time I would have to actually play the games they were talking about. Seriously, you could press flowers in these things, they were like little Gideon bibles for gamers.
I suppose it's fair enough to say that this was during the golden age of PC gaming, and there's only so much that you can say about the platform these days without naming yourself the Official World of Warcraft Magazine, but at least the now excellent Official Games for Windows Magazine augments their editions with amazing articles - admittedly authored by people that started out their writing careers in this industry not getting paid for writing articles for me. Eventually I just stopped reading PC Gamer, and had I not stumbled across a copy while waiting for my physician to fall a good hour behind on his appointments today, I'd probably still neither know nor particularly care what the publication was up to.
I hadn't even noticed that Greg Vederman, who put together a magazine that I assume appealed to some, was no longer steering that particular Titanic. The Vede was a fine enough personality in his capacity for writing about hardware, which I was never overly interested in reading about anyway, but I was never quite comfortable reading an entire magazine put together by someone with the word "The" in their nickname. Oh, how I would pine for the days when Gary Whitta ran the show.
I'm sure Le Vede genuinely earned his promotion; demonstrating excellent qualities on important checklists, and I'm really not being disingenuous when I say that PC Gamer certainly appealed to someone. Maybe I had been spoiled by what the magazine had been in the mid-nineties, but around the time that PC Gamer ejaculated (ewww) on Doom III with their exclusive review I began to become seriously disillusioned.
But that's all in the past!
PC Gamer, I quickly realized, has a new sheriff in town and her (!) name is Kristen Salvatore. Hey, I thought, I'm married to a Kristin, so that's a point in her favor right away, and she opens her editorial with some gaming chops. I also notice how wonderfully girthy the PC Gamer feels, like the PC Gamer of old, thick and laden with ink-filled pages. I begin to get excited, so I open to their Exclusive Review of Crysis!
It's Doom III all over again.
Look, I'm as excited about Crysis as anyone else. I have the PC to play it, the demo looked great and a AAA PC shooter appeals to me in the fundamental way that Victoria Secret ads do, but when the reviewer describes his FPS philosophy as now revolving around the false dichotomy of "pre-Crysis games and post-Crysis games" I felt like I might actually drown in liquid hyperbole. Here's a quick way for me to think your objectivism took the last train to Clarksville, use the phrase "instant classic". Crysis will have to feature a guest appearance by Christ or Krishna to meet the level of enthusiasm with which the review was imbued.
And, lest you think I'm being unnecessarily critical, that weighty page-count, so reminiscent of PC Gamers of old, included a twenty page advertisement from AT&T. I kid you not! I hated the advertorial at the end of Games for Windows enough, but it's small enough to be at least occasionally forgivable. This AT&T monstrosity was an advertisement of epic proportion, and it was surrounded itself by pages and pages of additional advertisements like. I began to forget there was even supposed to be original content within these bound pages, and when I reached the op-ed sections I felt like unsponsored text was almost out of place.
Seriously, what kind of mind-bending man-hours are being put in at the Ad Dept of PC Gamer? Whatever super-human effort these people are offering needs to be bottled and used an alternative to our dependence on fossil fuels!
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2 comments:
I hate to put to fine a point on it, but its really your fault. Well, maybe not GWJ specifically, but the internet has killed good gaming mags and the golden days of 500(!) page holiday editions are gone gone gone.
Sometimes I still read old PCG issues with a tear in my eye...
Ooooh, I disagree, though I can see why that point would be made. GFW has certainly cut out a strong niche with excellent writing and content. I've talked with GFW editor Jeff Green about this numerous times and he makes the excellent point that the traditional outlets still have access, connections and presence, and while they've certainly had to adapt to what the internet has offered there's still plenty of room for good gaming mags.
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