More and more I find it really hard to find good, honest reviews. I used to go to GameSpy quite a bit for that, but I found their writing and the quality of their articles sagging.
I like the Escapist. I found their review of DA2 puzzling given that everyone and their mother are piling heaps of scorn on it (and when even people at Bioware admit it was rushed, then you know something's not right with this game), but I find most of their other reviews trustworthy. I like ZP quite a bit, and Extra Credits and Unskippable are also right up there on my must-watch list, but I don't really like MovieBob all that much. He really lost me when he started going all Yahtzee on The King's Speech - it's not a perfect movie, and it's more than a little saccharine and heavy handed in places, but it's a good solid movie, and I liked it (disclaimer: I am a stutterer myself).
What really got me upset though isn't that he disliked a movie about a stutterer; it was that he disliked it because it wasn't a sci-fi/fantasy/action-adventure/comic book movie, and because he was bitter because said genres are almost always ignored by mainstream movie events like the Oscars, to which I have to say:
(a) Fuck the Oscars: who else has lost track of the times where the Oscars utterly failed to recognize sheer brilliance in cinema? A movie should stand on its own strengths, not on how many Oscars it's won or been nominated for. If you're going to rag on The King's Speech, do it for those reasons, not because the Academy and the press has showered praise on it.
(b) Then are all movies that don't have aliens, robots, orcs or anime fight sequences shit? To me, MovieBob seemed to especially hate The King's Speech because it wasn't the kind of film that *he* would have picked for recognition. Would he have labelled movies like Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Full Metal Jacket, or Casino as "Oscar Bait" because they weren't sci-fi/fantasy?
Anyway, sorry for the OT rant.
I also like Kotaku, and Joystiq; I've also been going to Rock Paper Shotgun a lot too. I also like Ars Technica's Opposable Thumbs column too.
Post edited April 21, 2011 by rampancy