The Blog for the Sports Gamer

I’d like to also throw in my two cents about reviews and payola.

The same thing happened to me for the PC Gamer gig. The sports editor then, a guy named Rob Smolka, had read my newsgroup posts and work at Operation Sports and said, hey you want to review, and I said sure. So I started to get assignments. I will say that the editor did change some of the words I typed and the score I originally gave a game and I only found out about it when I read the magazine myself. (Different editor than Rob). I fully understand editors changing (ie editing) the review, but to not even let you know about it until you get an email saying “thanks for the 89″ when you gave the game an 84 is a little off-putting.

That being said, we’ve all been on press junkets. One I recall is Papyrus sending me to the Daytona 500 in 2002, yes the Daytona 500 where #3 died. It was my first NASCAR race, and boy, that was quite the eye opener. Just for the sake of a conflict, I didn’t end up reviewing that year’s NASCAR game for GamePen and instead had another reviewer do it.

Most magazines have an explict policy that says that if you go on a ‘junket,’ you have to pay your own way to avoid such a conflict. Of course, some reviewers really don’t get paid much and consider the ‘junket’ their payment for their work, which I can certainly see. I’ve seen some reviewers demand all kinds of things on these junkets that I would never dare ask — you’ve probably seen some reports online about this. It’s up to the individual outlet, but there really isn’t a better way to get information out about a game than to have a junket. Especially with those genres that are hard to experience — such as a Rogue Spear campaign or what not.

Now, let’s move along to the mailbag:

Bill Lysse writes:

“I was just wondering what you guys thought was the best online gaming rental site. I have read in your articles that you use Gamefly, but i was wondering if there are others that you have tried? I am in NC so Gamefly takes a little long to get games to me. Thanks”

Bill, I feel your pain — I in fact cancelled my GameFly subscription because the mail was so painful in delivery (I too am on the East Coast). I have been using another site lately called Gamerang. They have a mail house in New Jersey, I have seen a much faster turnaround by 1-2 days on games — however, although you end up mailing games back to NJ, it seems a lot of the new releases still ship from CA, so it can take some time in getting to you. Like Netflix, they give you an estimate of when you should receive a game — usually 2 days after they ship it. On 4 of the 6 titles I’ve rented, I’ve received a game a day after the estimate (which is still shorter than Gamefly).

Gamerang is also less expensive than GameFly. I’ve used it for less than a month so far, I have the 3 out plan at $27.95/month, they haven’t been ‘out’ of a game yet and I’ve rented for multiple platforms. I would love for other readers to add to this thread — I’d love to hear what your online luck is for rentals!

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 25th, 2004 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.