newsweek

Wednesday, March 4, 2009
News

N’Gai Croal Leaves Newsweek and Game Journalism

11:10PM Brian Crecente | Friday will be popular gaming pundit N’Gai Croal’s last day at Newsweek. The well-known game journalist took a buyout from the magazine publisher and plans to move more toward the development side of gaming.
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Friday, April 11, 2008

“Clearly No One Black Worked On This Game”

1:00PM Brian Ashcraft | In line with the earlier post on race in video games, Newsweek journalist N’Gai Croal offers these insights about the Resident Evil 5 trailer: I looked at the Resident Evil 5 trailer and I was like, “Wow, clearly no one black worked on this game.” Because I wonder, and I haven’t sort of really dug into it that much, but I wonder what sort of advice Capcom gave them. The point isn’t that you can’t have black zombies. There was a lot of imagery in that trailer that dovetailed with classic racist imagery. What was not funny, but sort of interesting, was that there were so many gamers who could not at all see it. Like literally couldn’t see it. So how could you have a conversation with people who don’t understand what you’re talking about and think that you’re sort of seeing race where nothing exists? There’s more. If you’re interested, hit the jump. More »
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Thursday, March 20, 2008

Pokemones Are Not Oral Sexy Obsessed, Just Kissing Crazy

5:00PM Brian Ashcraft | Yesterday, we brought word of “Pokemones”, the androgynous, public-orgy-havin’, Poké-watchin’ Chilean youths. Well, according to Newsweek. And what does Newsweek know! It’s only Newsweek. Chilean reader Juan writes: More »
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Wednesday, December 5, 2007
News

Game Publishers Hold Enthusiast Press in Contempt

6:00PM Brian Ashcraft | Still having trouble making sense of this whole Eidos-CNET-Gamespot clusterfuck? Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal does a nice job of summing up what it all means. N’Gai writes: The reality is this: publishers generally hold the enthusiast press in utter contempt, and they have for a long time. This disdain began as scorn for the enthusiast media’s roots in videogame fandom, rather than traditional journalism from “respectable” publications, but it has since metastasized into a veiled but nonetheless seething anger over the advent of the Internet and with it the rise of fan sites, forums and blogs over which publishers can exert little pressure, let alone control. The contempt emanating from the publishing community, by the way, is not limited to the enthusiast press. In our view, it extends to publicists, whom certain executives believe can and should be able to dictate the nature of their coverage and secure review scores of a certain magnitude. It even extends to their own developers, for whom Metacritic and Game Rankings scores can dangle as precipitously as the sword of Damocles, as if these executives were incapable of determining for themselves the quality of their games and taking action accordingly. Pretty heavy. The solution to this? That, after the jump. More »
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