Gamespot Editors Are Dumb

I’m not one to bash on people, but yesterday I spent part of my afternoon watching Gamespot’s live Wii marathon. It was fun at times, but it was also a huge eye-opener. See, I haven’t really read Gamespot for a few years because I can’t really stand wading through the pages of crap on these huge gaming sites. It annoys me to no end, so instead I read Joystiq and Kotaku for most of my gaming news and info. Anyhow, so gaming mags online and offline tend to get a bad rap for being dumb and I’m not sure if that is entirely fair, well I wasn’t sure until yesterday. Now I am quite sure in my stance that Gamespot editors are lacking brain cells in masse.

See, watching a half dozen so-called “gaming experts” sit and attempt to play the Wii was pretty sobering. Seeing them play Super Monkey Ball wasn’t that bad because they at least had one of the developers there to help them through it, but Wii Sports was another adventure altogether.  Wii Sports is a sports game that emulates real sports to some degree and it was very easy to tell that these guys didn’t play sports, maybe ever in their life.

First, there was tennis, a game where all you do is swing the racket and it does the rest. Apparently these Gamespot editors had never played it or hadn’t read any previews for it because they didn’t even realize that you don’t move yourself. Just about every preview out there mentions this and I would assume that one of these guys would have had some knowledge of the game, but apparently as a game editor you aren’t required to be knowledgeable about any games before you play them. The sad part is not even one of the 6 editors in the room seemed to know.

Then there was bowling. Bowling is a sport that I know quite a bit about, but apparently the Gamespot editors have never been bowling before in their entire lives. Why? Well for one they couldn’t figure out how to swing their arm straight, so their ball kept curving to the left. Then, instead of compensating for this by moving their character to the right, well they just kept doing the same dumb thing over and over again hoping for a different result. Every time the same thing happened and I think only one editor ever figured it out. Sad.

Last on the list of horrible idiocy was golf. I’ll admit it, golf is a hard sport in real life, but in video games it isn’t so hard. By now I would expect that these guys would be reasonably acquinted with Mario Golf or Hot Shots Golf enough to know how to play reasonably well, but again, my asumptions were wrong and they suck at Golf too.

I’m not even going to go into Baseball and how one guy’s character was batting right handed and he was using left handed motions for that and it wasn’t working for him. Boxing was also a travesty, but it at least was fun to watch since both were just swinging at each other relentlessly.

All in all, I have to say that the Gamespot editors should not be allowed to drive or even walk down the street. I’d be amazed if they could even tie their own shoes. Maybe instead of playing so many games and pretending to be experts, some of the editors should take up a sport or read a book that doesn’t involve pictures.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 11th, 2006 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.