Rapture

I haven't blogged anything about Bioshock, but for the record I did enjoy it very much, even though I found it a bit too easy and the DRM really pissed me off.

Eurogamer has this article which tries to defend Bioshock from the backlash that followed its release. It's a great read, but it doesn't get around to one of the problems which I think underlies the entire game review scene: hype.

Things have gotten bad enough that reviews for games aren't really informative anymore. Halo 3, which I thought was good but not near great, piled up dozens of perfect scores and drooling raves from reviewers. Any game that's hyped as hard as Halo 3 was (and Bioshock too) is going to have awesome reviews which don't really map to the quality of the experience for most gamers. Publishers can hype games almost to the point that it distorts the reviewer's critical thinking skills -- even the Gerstmann firing, which stinks to high heaven, implies that a publisher holds the review industry in such contempt that it can have people offed who don't toe its line.

So what is to be done? I don't know.