Definitive series in Retro Gamer...worst writing/research?

[blue lander]

I knew NOTHING about the UK computer scene until I starting reading it... it's gaming from a new perspective.

I used to love reading Games(tm) for the same reason. It got me into collecting Spectrum, Amstrad, and Acorn games. At first I thought "what's so great about a computer with pre-Commodore 64 graphics, no floppy drive, virtually no sound/music, puny color palette a chicklet keyboard, and no standard joystick?" But after playing great games by Hewson (especially anything by Raffaele Cecco) and Ultimate PTG, it really blows away most of the C64 games I've played.

It's funny when they make grandiose statements about games like Ant Attack 3D or Chuckie Egg being among "the most influential games of all time" when most gamers worldwide have never even heard of them. One article I read went as far as to suggest that Manic Miner was a direct inspiration for Super Mario Bros! Sometimes I don't think they realize how isolated the UK gaming scene was.

[Rev. Stuart Campbell]

It's funny when they make grandiose statements about games like Ant Attack 3D or Chuckie Egg being among "the most influential games of all time" when most gamers worldwide have never even heard of them.

What do those two statements have to do with each other? Gamers don't write the games, man.

[Vectorman0]

Tom, you're being pretty harsh over one normalized name. I do think that a paragraph could be used to mention the multitude of releases any series has seen.

That said, I think the magazine is great (infinitely better than any North American magazine) and I can't complain about a single thing other than the subscription cost in the US ($160). It isn't overly unreasonable, but beyond my means.

If all you want is a product list, there are plenty of places to find one. (The very website you're posting this on isn't a bad start, though its standards fall well short of what's acceptable to The Definitive.)

What would be an acceptable alternative?

[Rev. Stuart Campbell]

What would be an acceptable alternative?

I haven't found a single totally reliable one. DP is pretty good, but misses a lot of stuff (at least three Space Invaders games on the Playstation 1, for example), Mobygames catches some of the gaps but makes glaring errors of its own (you wouldn't believe the number of games they have me down as co-author of), Wikipedia is often very good but almost as often full of repeated fallacies from elsewhere, and so on and so forth. Ultimately, all you can do it try to gather information from many different sources and see how they tie up with each other, and the only way to be absolutely sure is to buy the games for yourself and then write features about them in Retro Gamer for everyone except Tom to enjoy.

[blue lander]

I have a hard time imagining how developers in Japan and the US, where the majority of games are developed today, could be directly influenced by games that were developed for computers that weren't released outside of Europe. There are exceptions, of course. Jet Set Willy was released for on MSX by Hudson on a Beecard, and a handful of Ultimate PTG and Synapse games were released on the MSX and Famicom Disk System, but if you do a google search of the Japanese titles they were released under you'll find one or two hits tops. I really doubt someone like Miyamoto was even dimly aware of them.

Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather play the early 80's Spectrum games from the UK or some of the trippy stuff that came out of France and Spain for the Amstrad CPC than the garbage that was being released in the US at the time, but from what I understand the British game industry died out with the Amiga, and claims to being "influential" along with it.

[Rev. Stuart Campbell]

So is Grand Theft Auto not "influential", to name the first example that comes to my mind?

[blue lander]

Unfortunately it is, but I don't know if one or two games by British developers really qualify the entire British game industry as influential, at least not the way it used to be...

[Rev. Stuart Campbell]

Well, you're shifting the goalposts now. The comment I replied to was "It's funny when they make grandiose statements about games like Ant Attack 3D or Chuckie Egg being among "the most influential games of all time" when most gamers worldwide have never even heard of them."

I just pointed out that gamers not having heard of something is no barrier whatsoever to it being influential. I'm not especially interested in arguing whether British developers are still influential now, because I don't care anywhere near enough to investigate. A game's a game.

[Mayhem]

DP is pretty good, but misses a lot of stuff (at least three Space Invaders games on the Playstation 1, for example)

DP is primarily a US website, and hopefully everything released in that country should be complete. The other regions are still working their way towards that, after all a list is only as good as the person(s) putting it together and the amount of time they can devote...

[blue lander]

Fair enough. For a second there I thought you were implying that Chuckie Egg influenced GTA. I wouldn't call the original GTA one of the most influential games of all time just because it influenced a genuinely influential game like GTA3, though. Nor would I call Atic Attack one of the most influential games of all time just because it may have influenced Rare's later work like Donkey Kong Country that people outside the UK actually played. But arguing about it is about as entertaining as arguing about the correct spelling of an obscure Frogger game.

[Rev. Stuart Campbell]

Um, GTA3 was made by a British team too. (The same one, in fact.)

[blue lander]

I know, but I thought your point was that a game doesn't have to be played by a bunch of people to be influential, such as GTA. The game itself wasn't that popular, but it was influential since lead to GTA3, which people did play and lead to all sorts of sequels and spinoffs and copycats. The same way nobody over here played Chuckie Egg, but it may have influenced games that influenced other games that ultimately influenced a game that somebody over here actually played.

[Rev. Stuart Campbell]

I know, but I thought your point was that a game doesn't have to be played by a bunch of people to be influential,

That was (and still is) my point, yes. The mention of GTA was in connection with a somewhat separate point.

[fennec fox]

Wow, this is the second Retro Gamer writer to meltdown on the DP forums, isn't it? We must be doing something right.

Between one writer telling readers to "fuck off" and another claiming that Americans can't understand his amazing satire, I wonder if they want any overseas readers at all.

[Mayhem]

Ah, you mis-read my post. I was aliterating to Stu, if he had been here at that point, would tell others to... well you see that. I don't. In general

[Rev. Stuart Campbell]

Between one writer telling readers to "fuck off" and another claiming that Americans can't understand his amazing satire, I wonder if they want any overseas readers at all.

Told ONE reader to fuck off, because he was being an arsehole. Which is what most people do when they encounter arseholes.

Are you an arsehole? If so, you can fuck off too. Everyone else is just super as far as I'm concerned.

[tom]

.......

[Alison DeMeyer]

With interest I read this thread.
I think being a journalist is just like a 'normal' job, some people take pride in their work, others just don't care.
I read Mr. Campbell belongs to the latter.

[Rev. Stuart Campbell]

With interest I read this thread.
I think being a journalist is just like a 'normal' job, some people take pride in their work, others just don't care.
I read Mr. Campbell belongs to the latter.

Yes, that's right. I get upset when clueless ignorant dickheads slag me off on the internet because I don't care.

What is it, International Fuckwit Day today or something? (I see GW Bush is giving a speech on the telly currently, so it's a possibility.)

[horseboy]

(I see GW Bush is giving a speech on the telly currently, so it's a possibility.)

Are you still mad that we won that war?