Last weekend, I started getting lots of mean tweets and comments on my video. It has made me rethink my own little putdowns, like how I enjoy dissing Mega Man, one of Minotti’s favorite games. Still, it was a bit hard to laugh, because they were so expert in their cruelty and so gleeful at my expense. I could see how “pulling a Dean Takahashi” would be a joke about incompetence at games. Some critics were quite funny, like one who said I had discovered the Dark Souls of tutorials (Yep, even I know that Dark Souls is a hard game and comparing games to it has become a cliché).
It was not unlike the heat that Google endured after firing James Damore, who wrote a controversial diversity memo. This was my own little Black Mirror episode, where I was the target not because I was a victim, but because I had perpetrated a wrong against this mob. I despise how this was triggered by a viral post that represented the worst of fake news. I swear to god if you ever review this game, I’m gonna smash you in the face doom guy style. I’m not trying to overplay my victimhood, but you get the picture. Afterward, the Gamergaters, or hardline reactionaries - or whatever we would like to call them - believed this narrative fit into their views about game journalists just fine. His post was political propaganda for the disenfranchised gamers, the sort who went from Gamergate to the alt-right and elected Donald Trump as president.īefore he got to it, my video had maybe 10,000 views. He used me to condemn all game journalists, raising the smoldering issues around Gamergate and its focus on game journalism ethics. He clipped it to the 2.5 minutes of the most damning inept gameplay, and he posted it to his followers. Stand by for more on that, if you’re willing to read more than 140 characters.Īnother game journalist (and some say “shitlord”) saw my video. I was messing around at first, and I wasn’t focused and serious until I had warmed up.īut there are things I will not apologize for. So many people didn’t realize that this wasn’t a serious review. It was naively devoid of context that possibly could have headed off that anger. I didn’t make a weighty judgment about whether you should buy Cuphead or not. I came back with video that I thought was unusable, but my colleagues thought it would be funny, too. Mike Minotti of GamesBeat plays them, and he will likely do the formal review of the game when it comes out on September 29.īut he wasn’t at Gamescom in Germany, and I was. In fact, platform games like Cuphead are not my specialty. My own responses to my critics revealed my ignorance on a number of facts. I apologize to my fellow game journalists, as I just made everybody’s lives tougher again. I apologize that so many expected the best from me, and they got horrible gameplay. As my colleague pointed out, I misread the climate in which it was received. I mentioned from the first sentence that I suck at Cuphead. Not just the tone of the video and the story. I intended it to be funny, and I apologize that I so misread the tone.