Gamefan and Gamepro Have No Game

Just wanted to make a few comments about two game magazines that I once considered to be a fan of but will no longer be buying. First up, in order of cancellation of reading: Gamepro

When did this mag turn me off? I guess it was when it went boring. Ok, I'm not a little kid that won't read something unless there's pics, but at a certain point last year, Gamepro tried to act all smart. That got rid of most of their pictorials and replaced them with boring lines of text and philosophic ramblings about the nature and business of games. And I'm all for this, but make it interesting. Make it entertaining. There's only so many things you can say about games when it comes to existentialism. "Are games art?", "Why do we play games?", "What is the nature of fun?" etc. Get over it. Games are entertainment. Don't look to them to get the meaning of life. It's like Hamlet walking into a Three Stooges short.

But the real thing that made me put down this magazine in disgust was the reviews section. Instead of writing reviews, Gamepro made the decision to simply aggregate them from other sources. So a "review" goes something like this:

"IGN says this game sucks because of its sexism, while Gama Sutra is enlightened and trepidated by its coarse gameplay, even as IGN says the game is a flawed softporn masterpiece..."

And just imagine this running on for 2 pages like a gamebot parrot stating other people's opinions rather than their own. Reading reviews is one of the most important reasons I have for buying game mags. I tried reading one more issue after they switched review formats and then just gave up. Goodbye Gamepro. I don't miss you.

Now to Gamefan....or should I say Davefan.

I loved Play Magazine. Just simply loved it. It had a beautiful layout that was matched by awesome writers like Nick Des Barres, Heather Campbell, and others. When it got cancelled it made me very sad. But it turned to gladness when the main editor of Play, Dave Halverson, restarted his old magazine, Gamefan, but without most of my favorite writers. I've bought two issues so far, but with the newest I have decided to quit buying this product.

The reason? Too much Dave! He writes almost every review himself. So 90% of the mag is his opinion only. And this wouldn't be so bad IF he had good taste in games. In the newest issue he gave a 9.0 to Splatterhouse. SPLATTERHOUSE!!!! He also gave an 8.5 to Tron Evolution!! When someone gives such high grades to such shit games, they can no longer be trusted. Now, it would be allright if he only wrote like 2 reviews out of 14, but when he writes 85% of them, it makes for pointless criticism. The ONLY game to get lower than a 7 this issue was Megamind. Dave needs to hire some more writers instead of trying to do it all himself. If he wants this much spotlight, he'd do better just doing a blog or a podcast. You shouldn't publish a magazine if yours is the only opinion that matters. You need a variety of tastes and interests to do justice to all the different genres of videogames out there.

So this is why I've given up on these two magazines. Gamepro is dead to me but not just because of the reviews. The writing wasn't that good either. Gamefan could still be saved in my estimation if Dave got some more writers to look at these games with a bit of objectivity instead of making the mag a vanity piece.