I have a bone to pick today. There is a bone on the ground and I’m going to pick it up. After I take this bone, I’m going to polish it until it glisters ivory white. I might even modify it like add a spike or a chainsaw. Then I will saddle up my armored moose and ride into the sunset, clobbering any dumb fucks along the way with my shiny new bone. And I’ll bring a camera along just so I can YouTube this expedition. Who knows, I might be on the front page.

In case that paragraph didn’t clue you in, let’s say I’m very pissed off right now. I just had my intelligence insulted by the folks at Gamespot after rummaging through one of their articles. It was a preview of Midnight Club: Los Angeles for the Xbox 360. I’ve always liked this underdog racing franchise because it’s easy to get into and doesn’t take itself too seriously. It has stupid moments, like the retarded powerups in Dub Edition, but the series has been entertaining enough to keep me away from developing a criminal record.

So I begin to read the preview and by the second paragraph, my mouse pointer is already hovering over the back button thanks to this:

This is the fourth game in Rockstar’s Midnight Club series and, as in the past, the publisher’s San Diego studio is in charge of development duties this time around. It’s obvious the team is pushing the next-gen envelope when it comes to MC:LA. The game’s sprawling version of Los Angeles will provide an ample backdrop for open-world exploration and on-the-spot races by a variety of challengers.

Great, just what I need: A writer who thinks rolling into a pile of Wikipedia while vomiting words like a sorority girl at a kegger is an entertaining read. This actually goes on for the first three paragraphs without uttering a single word on gameplay. They even dare mention the number of polygons used, a notion I thought died in the 90s. That didn’t stop me from continuing though because I’m used to bullshit; I’ve been a subscriber on Xbox Live for over a year now.

Things started to pick up with this opening sentence from the fourth paragraph.

So we’ve established that MC:LA looks good. But how does it play?

Finally. None of this history lesson garbage or feature checklist douchebaggery. After four hundred words of nothing, we get to the point of a video game. Or so I thought.

Well, we’d love to be able to tell you firsthand, but unfortunately we weren’t able to get hands-on time with the game. Instead, we watched one of the producers play the game and, from what we could glean from the handful of races we watched, it looks like a heck of a lot of fun.

Read twice if you need to, because I couldn’t believe it either. I thought Firefox was messing with me as punishment for having Kotaku and Destructoid in my bookmarks. How can a team of “professional gamers” believe it would be a grand idea to slap a conclusion on a game they never touched? That makes as much sense as opening a used dildo shop. I’m surprised that these idiots didn’t cut themselves on the sharp edges of the keyboard with such an abundance of raw stupidity.

But then it hit me like a cockslap from an unwashed Ron Jeremy. Previews are a waste of time. They are not even entertaining since they follow a formulaic pattern and have a personality of a Bukkake extra. It’s not like a writer can’t add their own voice to these articles without sounding like a complete asshole because they would be “reviewing” unfinished code. In journalistic terms, they are not productive or honest, so what’s the point to them?

When you actually look at this crap from a broader perspective, video games are the only entertainment industry that has journalists constantly hounding for previews. Can you recall a time when Ebert was hyping an upcoming film or Rolling Stone publishing a three thousand word article on an unreleased music album? Of course not, it’s stupid. But the gaming press is so starved for content that they are willing to take screenshots sprayed with Photoshop or CG movies that have absolutely nothing to do with the game itself. With this type of behavior, they come across as glorified microphones for publishers than the independent entity readers expect them to be.

The sad part is this wasn’t the case a decade ago. Writers had absolutely no problem injecting a bit of humor into their articles and ripping a game to shreds for being less than perfect was acceptable practice. They didn’t take themselves seriously and why should they? We gamers enjoy wasting our free time killing zombies, pretending to be a ninja, or defending Earth with a crowbar. Anyone outside our circle would think we are paranoid sociopaths who can only get a hard-on with violence.

For whatever damn reason, all this changed a few years ago when these journalists felt the need to have “credibility”. To satisfy that need, sites no longer focused on just previews and reviews. No, they decided to have industry news 24/7 by regurgitating press kits thrown in their direction and have a one-sided relationship with game publishers. All of a sudden, reviews started to read like spread sheets and interviews are limited to an email exchange with a PR rat instead of an actual developer.

Usually I don’t care much for change. The industry has evolved from a hobby for geeks to a gargantuan unstoppable machine and has been gaining acceptance from the public with each passing day. Of course the guys who write about games would desire a different format and that’s not my concern. My gripe is the dumbass who decided to rip the humor and criticism that founded this specialist press, only to be replace it with drones. Because of this change, writers no longer possess the witty personality like the days of old. All that remains is a pool of journalists too afraid to step out of their confront zone of writing guidelines just so they can pretend to look like professionals. This is something readers don’t want from people who cover video games for a living.

If you think I’m just talking shit, I only need one name to prove my point: Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw. He lifted the Escapist website from the ashes of obscurity, and amassed a huge following within a few months. What made him so famous isn’t just his sense of humor, but rather he looked at the traditional standards of game reviewing and broke it in half. Thanks to his unorthodox method, we now have someone who can tell us whether or not a game sucks in a short, blunt, and most importantly, entertaining manner.

And that’s where all this boils down to. Video games are founded by the idea of having fun and the writing should reflect that. This doesn’t mean pointless previews or obsessive use of block quotes. Instead, these writers should be more focused on critical subjects that reveal their character such as commenting a developer’s questionable decision or game cliches that piss them off. Is it too much to ask for a love/hate relationship between reader and writer?