This is pretty funny. It seems that gaming journalists are getting pissed that paying customers are disagreeing with their assessment of eShop games. Take this article for example: http://www.modojo.com/features/20110823/634/3ds_eshop_rating_system_flawed_practically_worthless/
The writer comes up with every possible conclusion for why Baseball and Alleyway have decent ratings except for the most obvious one: people like the games. It’s either that the paying customers reviewing these games are “fanboys” or “nine-year-olds.”
I own both Alleyway and Baseball, and not on the 3DS Virtual Console. I got those games with my brand-spanking new Game Boy back in 1990 when my family went to Switzerland and Italy. Let me tell you, those were some fun games! Hours and hours of entertainment. They made an incredibly long flight much more bearable.
These games are barely more expensive than iPhone games, so why shouldn’t people give them decent ratings? Hell, Nintendo won’t even let you rate a game unless you’ve played it at least an hour.
I think gaming journalists are terrified of losing their supposed authoritative status on what constitutes a quality game. But why should anyone listen to a person who didn’t even pay for these games when we can see what other paying customers thought of them?
As a rule, bright people don’t go into journalism as a profession and certainly not video game journalism. I don’t say this to offend people, but a smart person becomes an engineer or doctor or entrepreneur or something of that nature.
I loved Alleyway and Baseball. These Gameboy games are great because they were designed to be handheld experiences. They do their job well.
I remember saying something pissed off so many journalists that various sites automatically began to ban this website. When you look at the games these journalists love, they are games like…
Super Mario Galaxy
Aonuma Zelda
Pikmin
And oddball third party games like…
Zack and Wiki
Madworld
What do these games all have in common? They don’t sell. They don’t move hardware.
But when you look at these games…
Super Mario Brothers 5
Wii Sports
Wii Fit
The journalists despise these games. Something was up when we heard all this vitriol being sprayed on poor Super Mario Brothers 5. C’mon, its Super Mario Brothers. It is bigger than Pac-Man. No gamer hates it. Yet, we kept hearing about how ‘awful’ the game was, how ‘lazy’ the game way, how much Nintendo was ripping off LittleBigPlanet (LOL).
Innocently, I wondered, “Are these journalists intentionally trying to give Nintendo the wrong advice?” Why do they keep dissing the games that sell and keep praising the games that don’t sell?
That thought was what sent them over the edge. Suddenly, I was a conspiracy theorist. There could only be two answers: either game journalists were terribly out of touch with the market or they were intentionally trying to encourage Nintendo to make more games that don’t sell (and all these stories were written with extreme flattery to the Nintendo developers’ egos. Miyamoto was always written as The Genius). It had to be either one of those two. In most cases, I think ‘out of touch with the mass market’ is the reason. But in IGN’s case, especially after dedicating an entire podcast to vilifying Super Mario Brothers 5 in the most absurd way possible, it made me wonder. Not soon after, the people in that podcast had left IGN.
I think these game journalists who are upset that people like Alleyway or Baseball just don’t understand gaming. They don’t know the difference between digital experiences and gaming and think the two are the same.
Here is one thing I wonder about. Why were so few game media sites willing to rip Metroid: Other M? If any Nintendo game deserved to be mocked or made fun of, it is Other M. Yet, we heard nothing except from the more independent sites.
Speaking of Alleyway and Baseball, imagine if Nintendo went ‘back to basics’ and made a very simplified handheld that played those type of games and nothing else. How cheap would it be?$40 for the hardware? A Gameboy Advence with wifi and solid state memory would be very cool. The Nintendo handheld has become extremely bloated lately. Nintendo should go the ‘Flip Note’ route and disrupt themselves before someone else does.
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