PC Gamer: the end of an affair

Ever since I got my own PC for gaming, PC Gamer has been on my monthly magazine buying list. I even had a subscription at one point, thinking that it would somehow position my brain in a stream of PC gaming news. As with all magazines, though, you quickly learn that newsstands get it first anyway, with even that superceded the month previous by a glut of gaming news sites that love to harvest exclusive information. This effectively makes magazines almost useless unless you were bedridden on some asteroid in a vacuum sealed stasis pod.

Game magazines in the age of modern gaming is a topic that I have been struggling with for some time, and I've convinced myself they are a necessary evil when internet access is not easily at hand. Though I've come to an impasse where PC Gamer is concerned - I've basically had enough of their antics, and buying a magazine for Greg Vederman's RPG reviews and amusing hardware section cannot in good conscience be defensible any longer.

PCG has always been a hefty tome, attributed to the ridiculous amount of advertisements found throughout an issue, and like Wired, sometimes entirely devoid of useful content. As other fellow gamers dropped support of this mag, citing a lack of well written editorial content, lazy reviews, and typical PR/hype-laden previews, I stayed the course, thinking that any publication that slags a game that bought an ad in the same issue has got to be credible to some degree. As long as I had PCG, I would never go wrong on a game purchase.

Skip forward a few years when I started writing game reviews for fun - before even starting this site. Sad, I know, but I figure at least now I have somewhere to put them. Although far from a professional I began to notice patterns in the writing. Specifically the previews, which are every real gaming journalist's worst nightmare. How is it that these writers can find something unconditionally positive to say when it's clear the game is not yet complete, or worse, it's obviously a derivative pile of crap? The reviews maintained a pretty fair viewpoint, but in my increasingly cynical eye it became clear which ones the publisher had bought. On the same token, PC Gamer still managed to make me question my own judgement at some points - Sacred and Far Cry come to mind - with mixed results.

Up to this point, I had considered PC Gamer a bastion of gaming review integrity. And then their world exclusive Doom 3 review came out. It was a fair review in hindsight, but the problem is the entire magazine's stance on innovation in gaming - and Doom 3 had none, aside from its technically superior engine. I wouldn't say this shook the pillars of my faith, but it was a definite step in that direction. After the cover story was leaked, many gamers claimed this downturn in editorial quality had been going on for some time; I guess in my devotion I was just blind to it.

When I purchased the following issue with the world exclusive Quake 4 preview, I didn't get it for that specifically. Instead it was my monthly routine, looking forward to some demos that I may have overlooked that are included on the accompanying CD. I had seen some of the concept art for Q4 already, and I knew Raven was developing, so I guess I just wasn't that interested.

Reading the article, the screens and example character models looked too much like Doom 3. And the environments, corridors and described situations sounded all too familiar to the action that I experienced only a month previous on the Mars base. Even the weapons are boring and of Doom 3's run of the mill variety. But what really caused surprise were Dan Morris' overly positive sentiments, while creepily stressing how different it was from Doom 3. The preview also emphasized repeatedly how Quake 4 will envelop you in the most visceral of space combat situations, complete with a variety of vehicles. Yet Raven has no plans on carrying this over into multiplayer, citing that vehicular combat should remain with Battlefield 1942 and Quake should be, well, Quake. So much for creative competition.

Since reading PCG's second exclusive review of Half Life 2, I told myself it would be the last issue. It was too hard for me to accept their extremely high rating with so little justification. Indeed, Chuck Osborn was careful not to "give anything away", but as render already put it, it's not like we haven't seen everything already. And this is nothing against the game, because I've already made my position on that known. I just felt that the review didn't really tell you anything except that it "redefines the art form". Curiously, an article featuring the magazine's former editor laments the disappointment of Doom 3, while concurrently downplaying PC Gamer's review two months before.

In the same issue, Mr. Osborn gives us a very convoluted description of the first quest in Vampire: Bloodlines in a preview. No real descriptions of game mechanics, the interface or the implementation of White Wolf's rules are present. Accompanying the many screens are captions that comment about the excellent quality of the game's graphics - something I'm still waiting to be fulfilled as I play through the game myself. Bloodlines' graphics are far from brilliant and despite the system requirements don't even come close to the rendered characters and environments of Half Life 2. Again, nothing against the game, because I think it's amazing. The preview was just incomplete, if not misleading.

Though I've considered switching to Computer Games in the past, every issue I have picked up has been at least a month out of date. Naturally late reviews never really go out of style if they're well written. But their problem is that they're still trying to compete with the preview, ad and PR-engorged magazines on the rack next to them instead of exploiting their thought provoking writing. Trying to beat magazines with a readership like PC Gamer's to the exclusive is an exercise in futility. Their December issue featuring a key to a recent Guild Wars beta weekend was a great read, the most memorable article being Tom Chick's review of The Sims 2 that was specifically aimed at the gamers who were "too cool" to play the original. Most of the other reviews seemed standard - Kevin Rice's United Offensive review comes to mind - but for the most part the entire package read like a stimulating conversation, instead of a catalogue.

A quick browse of Play magazine seemed promising, although the layout came across as being a little too screenshot/art-centric for me, and the articles I did read were pretty fluffy and geared towards more of a console audience. Book of Hook does a detailed run-down of Computer Gaming World, which is another alternative I considered after reading about relative scoring methods of gaming publications. Unfortunately he ranks it only slightly higher than Gamepro - probably the biggest waste of pulp the industry has ever produced.

Due to their convenient level of accessibility, game magazines will always be a part of my gaming lifestyle. There's just something satisfying about picking up a publication dedicated to such an exciting hobby. Though with an increasing amount of competition between magazines and gaming websites, a publication that dedicates itself to quality writing will almost always lose out to a cover story announcing "exclusive screens" or "world's first review". And with the PC as my chosen platform, my hope slowly dies every time I visit my local bookstore and I see less and less print being dedicated to this platform alone. If there is another gaming magazine worth reading, preferably PC-centric, I'd definitely like to hear about it.

walking up a slide