Review Copies (Destiny)

by Leviathan , Hotel Zanzibar, Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 19:11 (3742 days ago) @ Ragashingo

It kinda makes any review a bit pointless doesn't it? Why take the time to read a review when I could just keep playing the game and decide for myself? I wonder how upset the gaming journalist world is over this. :)

Yeah, I don't see how Bungie could do it any other way. Since Destiny is dependent upon a population in its functioning, reviewing it without one would not be reviewing Destiny at all.

Advanced reviews often feel like marketing strategies (although I guess they don't always work if the game is truly terrible); I prefer these days to try things out myself or talk to people I know to discover art & entertainment (I also don't enjoy assigning numbers, letters, or stars to those things anymore - my compulsive brain gets all caught up on the ordering when I do, so that's another nail in the coffin).

Hell, I need like a month to think about a game or a movie or a book, and multiple sittings or viewings or reads before I feel qualified to say anything about it. When I played Tomb Raider (2013) recently, I wasn't a fan at all the first few days, and then a week later I was sad there wasn't more to do. Reviews don't have the luxury to accommodate such ways of experiencing things - they need to be posted quickly with a catchy title. And then they seem to influence the words associated with the thing in question like dominoes. Buzzwords? Trends? They make me as frightened as a deer in the headlights of a truck driven by the deer-husband of the deer-wife the deer is having an affair with.

These issues are especially evident to me when I go back to classic movies held in high regard now and read their initial reviews - they're surprisingly poor and drastically different sometimes.