[General Discussion] The Death of the Game Review

Demos have been available for more than a decade now and I still don´t see the death of the game review. But I see the death of the classic review magazine, with the claim of the oh-so-neutral, scientific, comparable game test.

Actually, I like some ego and personality in my game review - I don´t really need the scores, something like "Thumbs Up / Thumbs Down" is more than enough. Plus I really like some game-related journalism. Like... writing stories and not just working through the the pile of whatever the game publishers put in the mailbox of the publishing house. Background stories, Retrospectives, features like Zero Punctuation and VGN.

Here in Germany I really like the GEE mag. It has a review part, but are more a mag about game culture. Once they hired a Feng Shui expert to tune their houses in The Sims. Great stuff.

For me demos are an just additional part of the preselection process. After all, someone needs to point me to the demo first. Playing a demo is also much more time-consuming than reading a page of text.

I´m pretty new to the current generation of consoles - I just bought a PSP for SH0 and it´s not online, yet. AFAIK the demos come from some portal site by the manufacturer, not the game publishers / developers. This would make it a very "filtered" service. Demos of smaller titles might not be available.

Jam it back in, in the dark.