(A random Slashdot reply to yet another game journalism discussion by yours truly on the idiocy. Sorry if I've written about this earlier; I think I need to sound like a broken record at times. =)
Know what's even more disheartening to me as a game fan? I stopped watching game TV when I realized what these people were doing: Okay, the game makers spent several months or even years making a game. These people cherish the game for one five-minute appearance. (Three of which are spent showing kEwL pre-rendered FMVs from the game.) And in the remaining time, they have barely enough time to say whether they think the game was good enough to spend money on. If I were to be a pessimist and say the success of the game hinged solely on these reviews, I'd say it'd be absolutely sickening to think how they treat the games. Game TV show crunches a game that took a long time to make, and for everyone who bought it, a month or two's evenings to play through, into a three-sentence review, says it was "kind of okay" and slaps it some semi-arbitrary rating, and that's the last we'd hear of the game, ever. (And frequently is, if you rely only in this TV program to get your game information!) What kind of message does this program give? "We're drowning in games, make less of them" to the publishers and "we don't care enough of these games to demand our producers to get us more air time to do this properly, so all you get are really chopped reviews, sorry", secondly, to the viewers.
TV is the worst possible medium for game reviews, you just can't cram information about, say, five games to a 30-minute weekly program. It's a little bit better medium for in-depth stuff like interviews, documentaries and like.
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