This Gizmodo post is getting rave reviews from all over the net. Oddly enough its a post attacking the readers of the site for being sheep who jump on the newest shiniest crap at the detriment to everyone else.
Stop buying this crap. Just stop it. You don't need it. Wait a year until theWeird that I never thought about electronic things like this. Maybe because I am poor and don't buy the newest shiny toy very often. I do see alot of truth in his post as it relates to another industry, computer software, specifically video games, but its applicable to most of the others . I have given up games for 2-3 years now and it wasn't out of frustration with the quality, it was that they had become to much of a time sink and I wanted to focus on finishing college (The horror I might be considered a grown up now)
reviews come out and the other suckers too addicted to having the very
latest
and greatest buy it, put up a review, and have moved on to something
else. Stop
buying broken products and then shrugging your shoulders when it
doesn't do what
it is supposed to. Stop buying products that serve any other
master than
you.
I put in my time playing video games so I can say with confidence everything Joel Johnson writes gadgets is applicable to them. People constantly bought into the hype and bought games that were frankly unplayable. And the game websites played along writing false positive reviews and hyping based off press releases
A good example of this is Masters Of Orion 3. Now this game was broken, you could win by just pressing the next turn button. The AI would never attack your planets, ever. The game revolved around playing with 100s of spreadsheets of data all of which made no sense and was not fun at all. Calling it a game is being generous.
So what did reviews look like? IGN gave it a 9.2/10 saying "It's been a long time coming, but well worth the wait." Here is a round up of reviews, notice how only about 3 of the 25 reviews are low scoring. I need to stress this is not a subjective what is fun for some isn't fun for others problem. One of the decent reviews is from SciFi.com (notice this sites focus isnt' videogames, most likely why an honest review came out of them)
The only thing worse than the interface seems to be the weak AI, which
makes questionable decisions to say the least. It's not all that uncommon for an
AI fleet to park a task force within one of your undefended systems, then sit
there, not taking advantage of its clear superiority. Instead, it will simply
wait for you to either build up a fleet or move a fleet in and destroy it. I
tried playing games across all difficulty settings, and I was never able to
determine any differences between the easiest and hardest levels of AI. Quite
simply, the AI is incompetent on all levels and at any setting. In fact I think
a player would be hard-pressed to lose a game, as the AI is simply too inept to
offer any challenge. For what is primarily a game meant as a single player
experience this is a glaring flaw in the gameplay, stripping any and all joy
from a victory over the AI.
As I stated before you could win by simply clicking next turn.
Now I really liked the first 2 Masters of Orion games and I would have liked to have played a well crafted sequel. I will never get that chance because the failure of MOO3 has killed the series. But if these suckers who rushed in without pausing to throw their money on the fire didn't exist the game companies would never have put out such a shoddy product. They would have either fixed it or not put it out at all. These fools damage all of us.
So Gadgeteers at least take comfort in the fact you are not alone. The schmucks who rush out to buy games hurt all game players who wanted quality products, and it doesn't look like getting kicked in the balls repeatedly for doing so is going to stop them. So I don't think reason and logic is going to help now
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