"Game journalists" are still shit

Actually, there were some pretty fearless game journalists out there when the medium was young. Stuart Campbell could always be relied upon when it came to sheer brutality. I seem to remember Total magazine not giving any shits whatsoever for the feelings of their publishers either.

I'm honestly not sure when the rot started in; I guess it happened when print began to die and the writers began to prostitute themselves for ad-space. Too many paper magazines led to a massive cull and the survivors formed a natural monopoly on game news. Added to the games companies themselves forming syndicates / amalgamating and you have the same recipe for corruption and incompetence that dominates the rest of the entertainment industry.

Just let this sink in:

Imagine if you will.. being angry that a generic shooter  has a silent redneck protagonist that defends Americans from a murderous cult instead of finally being able to role play your perverse degenerate psychopathic fantasy of killing Christians (but it's ok because if you had it your way; you'd justify it by forcing the team to make an opening cutscene depicting your favorite straw man that "everyone I hate is a racist" so you can hold a flower in your left hand while shooting them with your right hand because you now have higher moral ground, everyone that disagrees with your sense of moral superiority is also a racist cuz they're defending the racist characters and not because your narrative is creepy at all, obviously).. this is the deep Rick n Morty level social commentary we need in games.. a game where you can kill the people that you spend every day on Twitter fighting with or writing articles about.

Personally, my view on games is that they're art.. and as such, there's critiquing art and ruthlessly ripping it apart.. then there's relying on moral outrage culture to forcefully impose your ideology on someone's hard work.. using  guilt, "activism" and shaming tactics which is selfish as hell and is censorious. In a healthy society you should allow people to express their art on their own terms, even if commentary is shoehorned into it by them... if I find said commentary stupid like I did with the latest Mass Effect; I can just play something else that's worth my time (my steam library has probably 3000+ hours worth of a backlog of games anyway haha).. at most I'll poke fun at something if it's especially cringey or get annoyed if it's a call for violence towards an existing person.. but trying to lobby for a cultural shift in other people's work to fit your principles is selfish as hell. Other than that I only get annoyed when a dev does this to a beloved franchise that they played no hand in helping it achieve cult status in the first place; like Beamdog's passive aggressive edits to Baldur's Gate which messes with the lore in a way that could inhibit future sequels. ;P

The thing that annoys me are the talking points these people make when a game or movie actually does have social commentary shoehorned into it by pretending the people complaining are "delusional!" or they'll say "but games always had politics in them, it's impossible for them not to!"... but when a game legitimately has no politics you get this garbage:

 

"Farcry 5 is apolitical to the point of absurdity"

I don't know anything about Farcry so that headline makes no sense to me whatsoever.

Is Farcry at some sort of politcal statement deficit and so they are accountable to make a stand on some issue in the form of releasing a game, and by releasing a game with no political stance they are being aggressively neutral?

The best Far Cry game was the first one. It was a somewhat novel idea at the time, and fairly well executed in my opinion. You were placed in a lush large-scale jungle environment with plenty of potential cover, but were outmanned and outgunned by the enemy, so you had to rely on stealth and cunning rather than Doom-style brute force tactics to complete objectives. The twist revealed in the middle of the game was that the island you were on was being used to create genetically modified super-soldiers, which became your primary opposition in the second half of the game. There was no pussy shit like regenerating health or a perpetual moron compass guiding you safely to your next objective, you had to figure things out and learn to fucking play the game well to win. Pretty cool game. It all went downhill from there in my opinion.