"In fact, when Driver was released in the fall of 1999, Grand Theft Auto was nothing more than a bad 2D top view game that didn’t have more than 5 minutes of re-playability to it. I remember this, because my one of my roommates used to drop acid and play the game for hours, which seemed to me like the only way you could enjoy it. "
"So, you could say that I was anxious to play Driver 3. I picked it up, popped it into the PS2, and waited to be amazed. And I was. Kinda. "
"Graphics in this game are pretty good, although I’m reviewing the PS2 version, which has a lot of jagged edges and blockiness. XBOX owners will probably have a better visual experience, as usual. A lot of the problems that plagued the original Driver have been taken care of. "
“So…what’s the bad news? Not much, actually. While some people tout Driver 3 as an obvious GTA ripoff, I fail to see it.” - followed by, in the next paragraph - “Still, there’s something missing. I don’t know what, for some reason it’s hard to pinpoint. Maybe the real problem is that I’m tired of these third person crime games. I’ve played a lot of them, and some of them have been great, but more often than not the games become so repetitive. That’s kind of what missing in Driver 3: a sense of individuality.”
I don’t buy that. I’ve never in my life heard of anyone being paid to do a review. Companies will occasionally take you on press preview trips and send you smalltime swag and quite often they’ll ask your “candid” opinion about preview code before deciding whether or not to send you a gold master (as opposed to a retail), but I’ve never personally heard a credible story of money changing hands. There’s rumors and accusations of course, but given how everyone yells bias and foul over any review, it’s hard to take them seriously.
I don’t buy that. I’ve never in my life heard of anyone being paid to do a review. Companies will occasionally take you on press preview trips and send you smalltime swag and quite often they’ll ask your “candid” opinion about preview code before deciding whether or not to send you a gold master (as opposed to a retail), but I’ve never personally heard a credible story of money changing hands. There’s rumors and accusations of course, but given how everyone yells bias and foul over any review, it’s hard to take them seriously.[/quote]
Read the RPG Codex thread and the links in it. There’s no doubt in my mind Atari bought reviews for this game.
Read the RPG Codex thread and the links in it. There’s no doubt in my mind Atari bought reviews for this game.
Maybe, but there’s nothing in those three articles linked from the first post that establishes bribery. There are allegations, insinuations, and suppositions, but nowhere was there evidence offered of bribery, or a direct accusation made (outside of the dismissable ranting thread on the rpgCodex) of actual bribery.
What you have is anecdotal (though quite possibly in this case true) evidence of grossly heavy handed and unethical PR tactics by Atari, and a lot of assumptions. The magazines deny promising high scores for early code, the publisher hasn’t commented. The evidence offered, such as it is, relies primarily on the “consensus” (among whom, one wonder?) that DRIV3R is a POS. Could be, don’t plan to play it, not my type of game. Then there’s the usual rants about how horrible it is that such a turd will inevitably sell four million units, or whatever, which proves that people must be getting tainted buying info from the media.
Uh, yeah, right. Selling shit and making money off of crap is as old as commerce; I doubt this is a phenomenon unique to gaming. People bought Vegas for God’s sake.
Anyhow, I have no idea whether there was “bribery” involved or not. Thing is, neither does anyone reading those articles, or for that matter writing those articles. Is it likely that Atari leaned on people? Could be. In five years at CGM I never saw that sort of pressure. People I know on a day to day basis who have been there for nearly a decade haven’t seen that sort of pressure. People I correspond with who write for other gaming publications have not seen that either. That’s not to say that it doesn’t happen. Maybe the console world is riddled with corruption. Who knows? More likely the practice of early reviews and reviewing betas has finally started to bite console mags in the ass; it was only a matter of time before they gambled and lost in this regard.
Yeah and http://www.xgr.com/ is the first place they ran to spend their money. “Hey can you give it a good review, and an extra $10 if you mention taking acid in your review”.
I will say this, a review is an impression of the game, you can disagree with it, but at least they kept the page count in the single digits.
Oh, there’s no hard evidence yet, I didn’t mean to insinuate that. I just think any rational-minded fellow with knowledge of how scummy Atari is will come to the conclusion that they leaned, and hard.
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Fun. Once again viral marketing rears its head. Who at Qt3 will jump up to say Driv3r RAWKS?!
Oh, you’ll not catch me saying there’s no skullduggery going on in marketing. Few choir boys (or girls) in that business. Anytime there is money at stake there will be the chance for corruption, in any endeavor.
I just like to limit the accusations of journalist on the take to instances where someone can provide harder evidence than we have here. I mean, shady PR tactics is about as newsworth as Dog Bites Man, sadly enough.
"In fact, when Driver was released in the fall of 1999, Grand Theft Auto was nothing more than a bad 2D top view game that didn’t have more than 5 minutes of re-playability to it. I remember this, because my one of my roommates used to drop acid and play the game for hours, which seemed to me like the only way you could enjoy it. "
Jakub, as predictable as a six page thief review by you, that is glowing, only to give it an 81% at the end. Like a movie that cheats you with a bad ending, 6 pages of glowing for an 81%?
And I have to ask, when you insert an (ed- ) comment into your own article, did you know you could have just added that comment on your own? Especially considering it was not for clarification or correction, just a stupid little color comment?
I like to imagine, when you are writing, you actually put on a hat that says “Writer” and then when you go back thru, you actually change hats to “Editor”. So inserting the editor comment was actually done by a different entity than the guy in the “writer” hat. I can only hope you have long arguments between the two, reminiscent of Woody Allen’s court scene in zelig.
“This paragraph stinks!”
“But it does pad the article out to 6 pages”
“Well okay then, but what about…”
There’s some interesting–and by interesting I mean poorly through out–comments in one of those pices about how unethical it is for Atari to enforce and embargo date on reviews in exchange for pre-release code. To which I say, “Well duh.”
Atari isn’t obligated to provide pre-release code to anyone, and if all they ask for is the review to appear on a certain date–usually the day of its release–why is that an issue? That’s standard with all entertainment products I’m aware of. If you don’t want to agree to those terms, you can wait for the final product to appear on shelves; it’s really that simple. If Atari made part of that deal, “the review has to be positive,” that’s a whole other thing.
Magazines doing review covers really run the risk of having this kind of thing blow up in their faces. If the game sucks, do you feel some compulsion to overrate the game in order to justify the cover? That doesn’t necessarily mean Atari–or any publisher–forced you to raise the score. You could just be in an “oh shit” moment. Which doesn’t make it right, but it doesn’t mean the publisher can or will exert this sort of pressure.
But what it does show is how exclusive reviews are a bad idea, for everyone involved.
No it isn’t. Commerce was invented in 1353 BC by the Achaeans, but making money off of crap was invented in 748 BC by the Pheonicians. If you’ll do the math, you’ll see that there were 605 years where the world didn’t have to deal with shoddy goods.
I know there’s a Microsoft joke in here somewhere, but damned if I can figure out where to insert it.
I have to admit, I kinda saw this Driv3r flap coming. I know of at least one print mag that can no longer get Atari code, because they slammed the bejesus out of one of the Terminator 3 games.
