A Guide To Video Game News Sites -- The Heavyweights
Since January of 2006, I've been sifting through a selection of about 40 game news websites each day, five days a week, sorting the crap from the only-kind-of-crap and posting the results in what I hoped was some kind of helpful, condensed form. It's not something I recommend doing (though if you must, Firefox's "open in tabs" option for bookmark folders is a godsend), but it does ensure that you catch most everything worth catching.
In the next few articles I'll lay out all the sites I've used for Error Macro, and hopefully you'll find some combination that works for you without having to check 15 different places every day. Today, I cover most of the majors.
Fun 'n' Games! Be sure to look out for the patented Horror Vision™ icon, letting you know that at least one element of a site's design was implemented by a mentally challenged six year old who was just struck by a bus!
Mommy and Daddy: Gamespot and IGN
The two primary news sources in our little world. They have access that many other sites don't, but they also have journalistic integrity (or at least aspirations thereto) that other sites don't, so one shouldn't turn to them for the latest breaking gossip and rumor. While this leaves them a little slow to respond to certain news events, it also awards them a stronger level of certainty -- If it shows up on Gamespot, you can assume that someone with half a brain actually looked into the issue and found it worthy.
Of the two, I prefer Gamespot. They've got more of an enthusiast bent, whereas IGN feels very corporate. If Gamespot is your local game shop, IGN is a Sam Goody's, trying to cover games and movies and music and women and anything else males age 16 to 34 might be interested in.
Tastes like money! Individual news items at IGN usually have one big Flash block planted in the article, some of which can get pretty heavily animated. Despite this, they're generally not too bad, unless left open in tabs alongside other some of the other Flash whores I'll be mentioning later. That said, IGN is responsible for the legendary McGriddle Incident, and this is something we must never, ever let them forget. Ever.
Of course, Gamespot goes overboard in their coverage sometimes too, just in a nerdier way. They've established the unfortunate trend of streaming live feed of them playing a major new title the day of its release, sometimes for hours on end. Imagining the people who put aside large portions of time to watch these events is about as sad as those little kids you used to see in the arcades who would stand there yanking the joystick around and smashing on buttons while the game's attract mode demo played.
Related links: Gamespot's weekly release schedule. Note that it's automated, which means you can browse ahead but also leads to all ungodly number of problems. Seems like every week there's at least one obscure PC or portable game that's not actually coming out when the list says it is. This especially happens when someone has set a game's date as "spring 2007" or "TBA 2006," which causes the system to just set the game's release date as the last day in that time period.
The Boys: Joystiq and Kotaku
If Gamespot and IGN are the parents, then Joystiq and Kotaku are the younger and older sons, respectively. Young Joystiq is brash and impetuous, unwilling to compose himself for polite company and prone to bouts of naivete and damned stupidity. As if responding to an unspoken theme, the site's comment sections are fittingly composed entirely of idiot children.
For as big a site as it is -- and how that has come about is anyone's guess -- Joystiq updates less frequently than one might think. They're not slouches, but in the space of time between a morning and evening newspost on Error Macro, Joystiq would have roughly a half-page to a full page of new content, whereas Kotaku would have one and a half to two new pages. As another example: Going back from right now to the last post of May 29th on Joystiq takes me to the bottom of page 2. Doing the same for Kotaku goes back to the middle of page 4. Obviously numbers aren't everything, but given Joystiq's average output (hey guys let's vote on webcomics and talk about Pokemon workarounds all while making the same tired "My Pokemans" reference twice in 24 hours), I don't think they can play the quality over quantity card here.
Kotaku, being the elder child, is a bit wiser and a bit sharper, with a greater sense of responsibility. Their posts are usually semi-intelligent, without being overblown or sensational, and cover a pretty wide spectrum (it's the only place I've noticed linking Insert Credit with any regularity aside from GameSetWatch -- I'll talk more about those two later). If you could only pick one site as your news source, Kotaku would probably be your best bet at catching the most information.
That said, there is a downside. While Joystiq roams free with its childish wonder and amusement with the phrase FTW, Kotaku stays inside to brood in its awkward teenagerness. The site sometimes drifts into repeated, obsessive tangents about Japanese pop singer game IDOLM@STER (at least that seems to have finally faded awaoh goddammit they've done it again) and even less game related otaku things. Other times, Florian Eckhardt just acts retarded. Yes, I realize he doesn't write there anymore, he moved on to bloody Wired.
Thankfully, these moments are comparitively few, and can be skipped over. I know some people don't like Kotaku, and I'd be interested to hear why, but right now I think it's one of the best bets you've got.
The Weird Uncle: 1up
I will strain this family metaphor until it shatters. Or if that doesn't work, here's another: 1up is kind of the Fox to Gamespot and IGN's NBC and ABC. (No one wants to be CBS.) By the time 1up came along, the others were already well established, so they must differentiate themselves by being hip and "now." They have some entertaining features, like histories on certain franchises and the old standby of scans of terrible game ads, and the Retronauts podcast can be interesting for old coots who like to talk about old things.
The news section itself is reasonably good. It's a bit of a halfway blend between the "official news source" feel of the Big Two and the looser, more immediate coverage of blogs. I actually kind of wish it had a bit more of the former... The site is backed by Ziff Davis, giganto publisher of EGM, Official Playstation Magazine, Games For Windows and Succulent Juggs, and yet their news always seems to come from somewhere else. When an important item is in Japanese, they wait for some slipshod translation to appear on the Internet. Shouldn't they have people on staff who can do this?
They feed on your circuits for their fuel! It's pretty bad when I have to intentionally limit how many 1up pages I open at once for fear of crashing my browser. 1up employs horizontal banners and side box and skyscraper ads, sometimes working in tandem, all in that terrible legacy of Nazi occult research, Flash. If you're lucky, you'll just get the "a Flash script is taking too long to finish" message, or even "a Flash script has caused an error, restart Firefox soon." If you're not lucky, your browser will crash, disappear from your screen, uninstall itself from your computer, buy a bus ticket, head out to New Orleans, and fall into a downward spiral of drugs and prostitution. If you plan on using 1up, you should get AdBlock. You'll feel better.
I suppose it doesn't mean anything to them that I can't actually remember any of the products ever advertised in this way, even when the images were frozen on my screen (along with everything else) while I silently cursed the heavens.
The Industry Insiders: Next Generation, GamesIndustry.biz, and Gamasutra
Built from the ashes of the old magazine of the same name, Next Generation is a mostly industry-focused website. That can make things kind of dry, with lots of reports about numbers and executive reshufflings, but there is the occassional interesting news item. For the casual game news reader, though, said items will usually show up somewhere else soon enough.
Teamed up with Next Gen as possibly the only sites with .biz doman suffixes that aren't built for spam is GamesIndustry.biz. The news content is similar to Next Gen, but GI also seems to have a weakness for gossip. I've noticed an unusual number of news items that revolve around someone important in some company making a bold statement about the competition sucking or the industry dying or some "oh no they di'nt!"-worthy comment. Because of this, it's best not to rely solely on GI's headlines, as they sometimes trump up remarks in the titles to make something sound bigger than it is.
It should also be noted that GI is based in the UK, which means they're more likely to report on what HMV is doing than Wal-Mart.
Finally, and perhaps best of the three, is Gamasutra. Keep in mind we're talking about a website whose sister magazine, Game Developer, is filled with thought-provoking articles like The Dark Art of Pivot Animation, complete with diagrams of how feet should work, and you'll get an idea of the intended audience. Still, there's a lot of intelligent, substantive material here, including regular articles looking at the issues facing game design itself instead of just naming the ten best controllers ever for the 80th time. If that sort of thing appeals to you.
One important flaw to note in all three sites is that, being industry-focused, they actually pay attention to what analysts have to say. This is never a good course of action.
Related links: Gamasutra's Release This! column, their weekly release schedule. Unlike Gamespot's, this is put together by a human, and is less likely to be stupidly wrong. Additionally, they label the top ten most anticipated titles as measured by IGN GamerMetrics, which gives you some idea of how popular (or at least how hyped up) each game is. And, for those dirty foreigners who manage to clamber out of their caves long enough to find a lemon and some copper wire to power their rock with the word LAPPTAWP scratched on it, they also have release lists for Europe and Japan.
That's it for now. Next article: How to read Digg and not hate humanity.
