It's always been shit. Pick up any EGM from the 90s. It'll come off like it was written by some easily impressionable child that totally bought all the marketing bullshit. People just need to understand that the video game "press" has never been anything besides thinly veiled marketing. That's all it is.
If anyone actually got critical, started asking hard questions, and didn't give the "right" games a free pass, they'd get blacklisted. Anyone remember the minor controversy behind
Brandon Sheffield's Rage interview? All the guy did was not buy their marketing bullshit and actually questioned the developers. Was blacklisted, employer was basically sent a threatening e-mail. And gamers still bought Bethesda games after this.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/37939/Opinion_Journalistic_Rage.php
They're all the same, though, and if you think this isn't happening on a wide scale, I've got a bridge to sell you. There are games that are too big to fail, and there are conversations happening that basically amount to, "if you don't give this game a 90+, you're not getting invited to the locker room after the game anymore," and these pussy media outlets let them get away with it every single time because they just want to sell ads and couldn't give less of a shit about quality video games.
All you really have to do is look at games that have a huge variance between the critic and user rating, and you know something's up. These are sacred cows that you can't call out on their bullshit because there's too much riding on their success.
Uncharted 4, for example, was a piece of fucking crap. Thing basically played like Dragon's Lair. 93 my ass. Game critics talking about how wonderful it's "gameplay" was. There's a reason that there's a 10 point difference between the critic and user score even after all the Playstation fanboys propped the game up.
http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-4/uncharted-4-a-thiefs-end
Another funny example is Dark Souls. So Dark Souls was just a normal good game that hadn't achieved sacred cow status yet. There wasn't a lot of publisher pressure and people could generally be honest about it.
http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/dark-souls
Game is a watershed, seminal, huge hit. Dark Souls 2 rolls around. The franchise is too big to fail now. Bandai decides to pay attention to it, put a lot of money into marketing, start pressuring the media outlets to make sure it's a success. Game's a piece of shit, yet look at the critic reviews. The fucking douches rated Dark Souls 2 more highly than 1. Of course the user scores are actually realistic.
http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/dark-souls-ii
What's going on is comically transparent. I don't understand why anyone even visits commercial gaming news/review sites anymore when you can just watch gameplay video on Youtube and Twitch and know whether a game is good in 5 seconds.
