Friday, April 14, 2006

I'm back!

Has it realy been almost two weeks since my last post? A combination of work, illness and a lack of motivation have all combined to make a lazy and slothful me. But I've returned home for Easter Break, and am in much better spirits. I'm going to try to create a more robust post for later, but for now I've got a couple of things to get off my chest:

-I've always joked about how many liquors have gone from being sophisticated spirits to Jolly Rancher flavored junk for young, mostly underaged teens and college kids. Yesterday I saw Watermelon flavored rum for the first time in my life. That means we've got lemon, orange, melon, raspberry, green apple and banana. I suppose the joke is in fact reality; looks like we've got all the flavors but grape (and I bet that's out there and I just don't know about it).

-So the Mets are off to a fantastic start, and all the New York sports media can talk about is the Yankees' home opener and how they are a threat with a record barely over .500. I think the Mets could win the Penant and the critics would still spend their time talking about how the Yanks "almost made it". Ain't no respect for the Amazins'.

-I was reading a back issue of the dismal Game Informer magazine (my brother got one of those dreaded gamestop subscriptions), and read an interesting letter from a reader concerned about the 8.5 score given toTrue Crime NY, a game which has been decmiated in just about every review I've read. In the typical fashion of poor journalists and drooling fanboys, the GI response was the typical "how can you criticize our opinion when you haven't played the game?" This is always their defense; don't cry foul if you haven't tried it yourself. This might sound like a fair critique, but it isn't, not in the slightest. By this logic I should be trying to play every game that comes out. Even through renting this is an impossible and costly task. Truth is, you can't expect every gamer to play every game out there. No, we rely on good, critical reviews and opinions to help us figure out what is worth playing and what isn't. Then maybe we'll give it a shot, and we can formulate an agreeing/dissenting opinion. This isn't easy to do when one magazine gives a high -and rather suspect - score to a game that is generally agreed upon to be horrid. What if I buy the game on your good word GI and find that it really is trash? Will you listen to my own review of the game, or would you be like every forum fanboy on the internet and disregard it by saying "well that's just your opinion" because you know you're a bunch of dishonest and uncredible "journalists" who don't know how to give a game less than a score of 6. The entire "have you played it?" argument is just a backup for gamers who know that their glowing opinion of a game is completely unfounded and ridiculous and would be absolutely destroyed by a solid and well constructed arguement.

On second thought, why do I even pick up that stupid magazine in the first place? Am I asking for pain or what?

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