The Hype Machine is running on full power.

The overly-obvious, undeserving hype machine that is the video games review industry is at it again. PS3 supporters rejoice, your "savior" has arrived, and it looks like nothing more than something that should have just been a PSN title. The review industry has been giving the game completely over-the-top review scores (though nearly all of them have entire large sections of the review dedicated to negatives...) to make it seem like the best thing since sliced bread and/or something that will revolutionize video games for times to come. This game is Little Big Planet, if you haven't caught on yet.


Most of the reviews say the entire game on the disc is disappointing and short, and the controls are bad but that the levels you can download through the internet made by any random clown make the game worth a 10 out of 10 score. I had to read these things more than once to even let such an asinine idea get through my head. The "revolution" the game is supposed to cause is one that only exists through the internet? So this is like an... e-awesome game? I don't get it. And what about people who don't connect their console to the internet?

After touting the "create-a-level" system as being the greatest thing to grace interactive entertainment since the Atari 2600, the reviews largely end up saying that this same system is extremely difficult to use and clunky. Am I missing something here?

The over-used buzzword here is "user-created gaming," which is something that I don't think should even really exist in any official form, since you'd be essentially paying a company $60 so that you could do a bunch of work to see if it turned out fun. This seems extremely counter-active for the video games industry and something I want absolutely no part in. I'd rather play a game that an experienced developer has made instead of something Johnny Nobody from Debuke, Iowa made for the internets. At least with the other games in the past that encouraged user-modification (things like Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, Doom 3, etc.,) we had a great, powerful, and useful engine to play with, as well as a great developer-created game that went along with it. All things that this game does not have, apparently.

This is another step into the downward spiral that is the gaming industry. All some developers can think to do is try to change conventions because they've run out of interesting or fun ways to work with what they have. Reinventing the wheel is something they use to try and fool people into thinking that they've made something interesting and good just because its different from what you're used to seeing, when they almost always slack on the effort just because they think they have that cushion. And wow, I'm going into all of this based on the hypothetical situation in which this game did do something new or unique in some way besides the developers completely slacking off on development in order to have players make the game instead of themselves.

The game engine looks like an exact copy of a number of Xbox Live Arcade titles that quickly come to mind, with worse physics, yet they constantly cite this game as being "highly original" over and over again. Wik: Fable of Souls, Braid, Cloning Clyde, and well.....just about any game with a strict 2D platforming system come to mind, which easily can disqualify this game as being an original concept.

And how is this any different from those fantastic titles like RPG Maker or Fighter Maker that graced us on Sony's first console? Those flopped like a fish out of water, but now that you can share content online it makes it a game worth a perfect score? I'd like to ask, what can't you share online nowadays? You can share replays for games, there are dozens of other games on the market where you can share your own created content (like ANY PC GAME EVER, N+, and a few others in recent memory,) you can share your game accomplishments with achievements, you can share pictures, video, and audio online. What the hell is so important and "revolutionary" here?

Even past questioning the importance of this game in particular, it looks people are judging how good the game is by how "important" or "meaningful" it is. This sounds like pure hipster marketing talk to me.

This is just a small piece of my qualms with the review industry, but this is the most recent and relevant one, which deserved an article closer to its happenstance.