May
6
Some odd stories
In a not so surprising story, it seems that Eurogamer put up a review of Darkfall that was not so flattering:
Sadly, every little thing Darkfall does is tragic, but without a personality that might make you feel sorry for its developers, Aventurine. From the grubby textures and grammatically incorrect quest text to the anarchic control system, any attempt to glean joy from this torrid husk of an entertainment product is met with disdain. It’s almost as if Darkfall doesn’t want you to play. But nevertheless, a job is a job, and play I must.
…but that is not the problem. I think we all agree that if a game deserves a bad review, then it should get one, but only after the reviewer actually spends the time to play the game. At the very least, in order for the reader to get some context, the reviewer should let the reader know how much time was spent in game. Turns out, this review did neither according to Aventurine’s own server logs:
When we read the hostile review by Ed Zitron, one thing became apparent: he had not played the game at all. Eurogamer readers and Darkfall players are posting bullet lists of factual errors in the story. The reviewer hadn’t even figured out the very basics of the game before he wrote about it. We checked the logs for the 2 accounts we gave Eurogamer and we found that one of them had around 3 minutes playtime, and the other had less than 2 hours spread out in 13 sessions. Most of these 2 hours were spent in the character creator since during almost every one of the logins the reviewer spent the time creating a new character. The rest of the time was apparently spent taking the low-res screenshots that accompanied the article. At no point did this reviewer spend more than a few minutes online at a time.
….oops. Kind of puts a dark smudge on Eurogamer as well as game “journalism”. If true, and I certainly tend to believe Aventurine on this one, then this review is completely bad form and should be brought down immediately and a retraction made. No re-review because Eurogamer obviously cannot to those correctly or ethically. Heck Aventurine, I’ll review it for you and I’ll also include the number of times I kick Syncaine‘s ass in-game 
/blows kiss to Syncaine
In other news, looks like Garriott feels the need to sue NCSoft for $24 million under a “Torts – Property – Other Fraud” classification…and that’s all we seem to know at the moment. This kind of made me scratch my head considering how much money this man spent on the astounding success that was TR. Considering Garriott wanted to pursue “other interests” that just happened to be yet another game, winning this suit would at least fund a quarter of the price-tag for him.
D out.
