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Gamesradar editors don’t know their history…
Once again, Gamesradar has displayed a complete disregard for gaming history. I find this problem to be very, very odd indeed. On the one hand, their retrospectives and articles on the early days of gaming are usually terrific, and a great throwback for those of us who can remember playing games in the ’90s (and before, but that’s for folks older than myself). On the other, many of their editors seem to believe that video games started with COD4 and Bad Company. This week’s offender is in their “9 horribly embarassing ways to die in a video game” article. I’m fine with the article itself, but when we get to page 3, their first method is death by airdrop in Modern Warfare 2. Apparently, these guys never played Battlefield 2 or 2142, because you could not only kill an enemy with an airdrop (it was a fun distraction in a slow game where the commander had little to do becasue his squads were owning the enemy), but you could also kill friendlies, even with friendly fire turned off. Please tell me how THAT is not a more embarassing way to die?
In addition, I would argue that this is even more humiliating:
It’s one thing to get crushed by a box that weighs a few hundred or possibly few thousand pounds. It’s another thing entirely to get clipped by a 50 lb. toy helicopter toting nothing bigger than a camera and a laser designator.
Ok, forget running around at the front lines, knifing every noob. UAV kills is my new hobby.
Maybe they wanted their readers to be engaged. What’s better for the readers, reading about some game that probably a few dozens people played and remembered or reading about a fresh new game that almost everybody’s played?
And just because they’re journalists don’t mean they have to know about EVERY single game, and how can you research shit like that?
Think before your write
Any FPS editor from a major publication should be of the age to have played BF2 or 2142. Neither is a terribly old game. Considering that BF2 was a defining game within the FPS genre, they absolutely SHOULD know about it. Before COD4, it was easily one of the biggest multiplayer shooters of all time. It sold over 2,250,000 copies, which in 2005 was a huge deal. 2142 came out a year later and sold well. This was before the Xbox generation took over as the driving force behind games sales, so these numbers need to be taken in context. Either way, any decent games reviewer would be familiar with all of this.
Also, it’s easy to research that stuff. Just ask for a demo copy from the publisher. Any real media outlet has that kind of access. They don’t have to know about EVERY game, but they SHOULD know about big, genre-defining titles like BF2. Not knowing about it IS a failure of journalism. Journalists have a responsibility to know their history when they report. Yes, it is part of journalistic integrity.
Also, perhaps you haven’t visited Games Radar before, but they are quite fond of retrospectives, video game history, and obscure titles. Their staff knows a LOT about days gone by in terms of video games. They established their own reputation for knowledge. Their failure to use that broad knowledge is even more glaring in light of this fact. Reader engagement or no (and I seriously doubt that was the intention), it doesn’t HURT anyone to mention the true origins of certain things, even if it is an obscure game. It’s easy to say “this first happened in game x, though most readers might be more familiar with it from game y.”