It’s easy to sit back and scoff at “review bombing”, as we saw last week when Blizzard released a broken Diablo III. Flooding Amazon to give zero stars to something others have called 10/10, sure, that’s not a legitimate review. And people staging a sit-in aren’t there to legitimately patronize a public accommodation, either. But a sit-in is a legitimate form of protest. And I think a review bomb is, too.
If the folks behind Kane & Lynch 2 should be sued, they should be sued for something other than the “vicious vilifying” of the Chinese people. And they should be sued for a lot more than $US1585 — that figure would represent no more than 27 copies of the title sold at full retail price here and I’m certain the actual victims of the game’s nausea-inducing shaky-cam and the nauseating characters depicted by it, number far more than that.
When you face low expectations, falling short of them doesn’t count for much either. And that’s the dirty secret of Call of Duty, which has spent four years solidifying its image as a crass chickenhawk brand thanks to some particularly dumb marketing initiatives. But hiring on Col Oliver North to stump for Black Ops 2 represents a new low.
Two weeks ago, a million-dollar contest supplied an interesting prism through which to view the reactions to different people’s failure to accomplish the same thing in a video game. In one, a gamer stretched a remarkable achievement into an inhuman streak of perfection, ultimately snapped as much by bad luck as his own physical limitations. In others, their attempts were thwarted much earlier, before they could even be considered any kind of an achievement.
When a game gets as many things right as Trials Evolution, it’s all the more noticeable when it gets something wrong. And man, this game’s soundtrack is all wrong.
There I stood, before the Greybeards, ready to learn the truth of my existence as a Dragonborn. Einarth stared down at the floor, and thus spake “Ro.” Strange runes glowed upon the stones at my feet.
See that guy up there at right? That’s “Bogeyman”, my DC Universe Online homage to the Hobgoblin as created by Roger Stern and John Romita, Sr back in 1983. I’m damn proud of him, but I can’t tell if his colours match, or can even be called “orange” and “blue”.
