Gary Whitta Doesn't Like Wing Commander!

=Shadow= said:
I mean, WTF? When did they turn so graphic-suckers?

As a reader since the first issue, I can say that PC Gamer really went downhill when they merged with that other magazine (who's name I can't even remember). Instead of really great gameplayers with insightful things to say, we got your run of the mill journalists who judge everything on "Wow factor". That's about the same time we stopped hearing about pointy sticks, gaming goodness, coconut monkey, and Gravy Trader (the best game EVAR!). It's also about the time I let my subscription lapse. Now PC Gamer is a relic of another era. Ce la vi.
 
I love lots of new games. But I mostly find them lacking in replayability. I hardly even seek out new games to play anymore. Not cause I don't think there's anything good out there, it's just that my old pc games, particularly the ones I played on our old 386, continue to satisfy me. Especially Privateer and Lands of Lore.
 
AKAImBatman said:
As a reader since the first issue, I can say that PC Gamer really went downhill when they merged with that other magazine (who's name I can't even remember). Instead of really great gameplayers with insightful things to say, we got your run of the mill journalists who judge everything on "Wow factor". That's about the same time we stopped hearing about pointy sticks, gaming goodness, coconut monkey, and Gravy Trader (the best game EVAR!). It's also about the time I let my subscription lapse. Now PC Gamer is a relic of another era. Ce la vi.
That piece of garbage pc accelerator? I didn't put two and two together until you mentioned it, but yeah, when pc accelerator closed its doors that was the end of pc gamer being the high-quality pc gaming magazine it had been.
 
ChrisReid said:
I like Halo more than the thousand other FPS games released in the last few years because of how incredibly polished it is. It's really hard to make an FPS that stands out above all the others, but that's really what they've done with this one. The dynamics of motion, shooting and completing objectives are very well done.

I totally agree with you on the subject of FPS being a largely bland field for gaming but Halo has always struck me as being so polished that theres nothing really there but gloss. I've played through the original with a friend, so I'm pretty familiar with the first game. It's pretty to look at but it's not as intense or as interesting to look at as, say, Medal Of Honor Allied Assault.

Granted, a subject such as this is as subjective as you can get and I wish I felt the love toward Halo like the rest of the world does, but as it stands? Halo is just another pretty face and not much going on upstairs.

ChrisReid said:
If you got an XBox, Live and the game, I'm sure we'd have you hooked.

I know you've sold me on a couple X-Box games already but the little I played with Halo on Live did absolutely nothing for me. (I should note that I tend to look down my nose on FPS games on consoles, despite my owning several. I just felt that the genre is best kept to keyboard and mouse on PC- which even though some console games support that, many don't support larger systems of keystrokes available on PC versions.)
 
I feel that this is symptomatic of the whole gaming industry really. It isn't in the best interest of gaming companies to have magazines that are biased any other way. The whole industry is geared towards pumping out the next pretty game and it has to be prettier than the last. Not only that the cost of producing new titles has risen exponentialy which means that the stuff that gets green lit it is supposedly "proven" and relatively "Safe" Essentially the gaming world is turning into Hollywood. The big companies aren't willing to risk it on the edgy stuff that's got unique indepth gameplay (with a few exceptions). So it isnt in their interest to have reviews and such based on anything but how great the game looks and how slick and polished it is.

Unfortunately for us, if you polish a silver carving too much you rub out all the details... and the beauty is in the details.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
It is odd that PC Gamer dedicated half of a column to begging for Worlds of Warcraft space money and then half to attacking classic games without explaining why, I'll grant you that.

I don't know much about the publishing industry, but if there's one area where it seems likely that all the doomsday predictions of print media dying because of the internet will come true then it's gaming magazines. PC Gamer should be trying to counter the Gamespots of the universe by providing higher quality content rather than poorly written filler.

I Think this article is quite sad. First off this person obviously has little personality, its mostly ego. This is definetly a filler article. Even my PCPowerplay magazines have better (and actually amusing!) filler articles. They also recently introduced a new section into their magazine where they revisit the truly classic games, like Adventures of Monkey Island, Leisure Suit Larry, and most recently, Interviewed Bruce Shelley about Civilisation. Personally I have seen PCPowerplay deteriorate a little bit, but not as much as this weird PC Gamer mag. If anyone of you can find copies of PCPowerplay in the US, have a look and peruse it, its a great magazine.

With my own little bit of advertising about Australian gaming over, Ill talk a bit more about this article. By the sounds of it, they are heavily sponsored by all the graphics companies, and a few of the publishers/distributors. Like someone said, its all about upgrade,upgrade,upgrade! Someone would only bother to do that if they were being paid. PCPowerplay isnt too worried about tthe graphics, they care about how a game carries itself. Wing Commander has a great graphics engine for the time, and a great storyline, and one of the best mission sequence things ever! (Anyone know of any other games which will let you keep playing a different mission if you fail an objective during a mission? I only know the other Wing Commander Games :) ) Anyway This guy is definetly trying to run support for old games into the ground. Anyone who believes that article would be an idiot.

He also seems to talk about how great he is, and he has to include a quote to empasize that point? Thats just amusingly sad. He also has to talk about how great he is at keeping topics going. His topics sound about as interesting as changing every word in every book, in every library around the word to dull, and then reading it out in a dull tone of voice. Seriously, how can people support him?

His other problem is that he did not set out to try to find the best way of finding a good way to play his old games. Personally I love Wing Commander 1, and my box of the deluxe edition is a treasured item. Neither is he discussing the issue, or trying to find both points of the issue, which is what a good article should have in it. Nor does he try to tell anyone how they might be able to find a good way of playing those games.

His article at its most base is a highly commercialised absolutely useless stupid and mostly ignorant steaming pile of crap. Avoid trying to read his articles they might make you stupid. I don't think it was World of Warcraft that made him stupid, I think it was just something that happened at birth.

Anyway, I'm done worrying about the article, I don't really think its much to worry about, those that really care about their old games will keep playing them because we know the truth. Those that have old games, and won't want them after reading that, well it just means theres more copies of them out there for the rest of us! :)
 
Hmm, could this be very poorly edited satire? He brags about a soulless modern game and about how people at a message board hate him and *then* lays into classic games in a very generic way -- maybe it's just intentionally trying to provoke people (or trying to be some teenage version of ironic)?

(Why someone would have any reason to write such an article for a PC Gaming news magazine is another question -- but it's one that's valid whether or not it's taken at face value.)
 
AD said:
I feel that this is symptomatic of the whole gaming industry really. It isn't in the best interest of gaming companies to have magazines that are biased any other way.

Which was really what made PC Gamer so special. They gave it to you straight, and *very rarely* got it wrong. If PC Gamer said it was good, then the game was going Gold. Period, end of story. On the other hand, PC Gamer could (and did) just as easily kill a multi-million dollar game on its lack of gameplay. The guys who worked on that magazine pushed the industry toward ever better Gaming Goodness(TM) because their word was law, and the law was that your game had to rock! Didn't matter if it looked good, didn't matter if it had big budget actors. If it was a good game, they'd make it known, and if it was a ripoff in disguise, they'd make that known too.

Now they've been reduced to a mere shell of what they once were. All flash and glitz, and useless information. And thanks to their demise, only holywood style games are allowed to compete on the market. Sad. :(
 
Maybe this guy was so busy getting to level 60 in WoW and responding to the threads on his forums that he didn't have time to write a decent article.
 
Heh, that actually crossed my mind. The reason he talks about it for half his article is because he probably just logged off and it was the only thing occupying his little brain at the time.
 
Frankly I don't know what's up with this guy either. Granted... in some ways new technology has helped the gaming industry. But there are two things to be pointed out -

#1. On graphics alone, Wing Commander was still well ahead of it's time. No fair to compare those to todays games.
#2. On gameplay, WC kicks the ass of most games that I play these days, with few exceptions. In terms of the genre, it's really hard to top Wing Commander and it's sequels. If gameplay and story weren't good, would these forums still be here?
 
*Sigh* This from the magazine that, a few years ago, sold a copy with 10 classic games (including Wing Commander, Monkey Island, X-Com 1), able to run on Windows at normal speed! Man was I pissed when I lost the CD - thank god for Google ...

Idea, to take the letter-writing campaign to the next level: everyone order that particular back issue ;) (I don't remember which one :< ...)
 
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