Jul 17

Opposite of Good Journalism

Author: s1n
Category: Chuckles, Mushroom Kingdom, Off The Press

I signed up to receive a year of OPM (Official Playstation Magazine) for free and I received my second issue today. I discovered something barely noticeable when reading the boring sections in the back of their magazine. To put it bluntly, their professional reviewers must be the worst in the industry. You’ll see why many developers are justified in hating game reviewers:

Dear OPM,

I’ve never been a faithful reader of your magazine (or any lopsided platform magazine) but I discovered something in the back of Issue 107 (Aug 06) that I doubt many other readers found. The feature on page 92 titled “The Opposite of Fun” clearly proves that the people who review your magazine are looking through beer-goggles when reviewing Playstation games.

Of the 20 games you advise to avoid at all costs, OPM gave scores of 5 on HALF of them. That is to say, 50% of the games you list as the worst for the platform, your magazine at one point proclaimed was flawless. Four of eight PS2 games and seven of twelve PS1 games received a 5.

Perhaps OPM should actually play the games they review for longer than an hour. How do you honestly call yourselves gaming journalists and still sleep at night?

Horribly Unsatisfied Reader,

Jason Switzer


7 Comments so far

  1. Jokerr July 18th, 2006 11:39 am

    That is awsome. Reminds me of the time you were posted in the UTSA paper, though they paraphrased part of your letter. I would have added more insult to injury by letting them know that the only reason why you have their magazine is because you got it for FREE!

  2. s1n July 18th, 2006 9:58 pm

    Yeah, but I think they might try cheap lash-back comments rather than actually explain themselves. If I resorted to slander, then they’d probably have a smart-ass editor respond without any decent explanation. I’d like to see them try to earnestly explain why they’re giving such horrible games high scores.

  3. RaymonWazerri April 21st, 2007 12:39 am

    Hey,
    I love what you’e doing!
    Don’t ever change and best of luck.

    Raymon W.

  4. s1n April 26th, 2007 1:55 am

    That was about the last time I read OPM and took it serious as a gaming rag.

    There really is no “topic” here as I am the only current contributor and the things I write about are the things that matter to me: video games, software, school, life, running. I don’t run one of those themed-blogs where it’s about one thing. This is my electronic memoir; I’ve been doing this for several years.

    If you’d like to contribute, then contact me and we’ll discuss it further.

  5. s1n April 26th, 2007 1:59 am

    However, I’m not really sure where Randy’s post came from, it was largely off-topic of the original post (if that’s what you were referring to Raphael).

  6. s1n April 26th, 2007 10:57 pm

    Okay, I think these comments are spam. If I find one more similarity in them, I will remove all comments after comment #2 and mark the ones I did not post as spam.

  7. s1n April 30th, 2007 11:21 pm

    Okay, so it looks like a bunch of the conversation is missing here. That’s because There were several comments that had a repeated pattern in the URL linked by the commenter’s name.

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