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maximusfuller

Gaming News and Reviews Sites

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Thumbs, what website(s) do you use to keep up with the latest gaming news and reviews?

 

I mainly use Polygon, love their reviews. I also read RPS a bit, mainly to discover new Indie titles but I also enjoy the Wot I Think thing that they do. Other than those to I sometimes use IndieStatik for weird Indie games and I enjoy the small bit of Video Games coverage that The Verge do.

 

Anyone looking for a great feature you should read this. It is written by Chris Plante and describes the launch of Towerfall Ascension among other things. Heis one of the main reasons why I read Polygon the most out of any site (along side the McElroys) and the feature that I just linked is one of his best pieces of work and one of the best pieces of games journalism I've read.  

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If I'm looking for reviews of a specific game near release, then I follow the developer on Twitter.

As far as just grazing for games and news goes:

- I follow people on Twitter who have written essays that resonated with me, and get a lot of suggestions through that stream.

- I check Warpdoor daily and play maybe a game every two days.

- I check these forums to the point of neurosis.

- I browse Polygon daily.

- I check Neogaf and RPS when things are slow.

I think Twitter is a great source of game news once you get a good crop going and cull it regularly.

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I mostly just follow several gaming sites on twitter (like Polygon, IGN, Gamespot, Giant Bomb, RPS, etc).  I also have an app on my phone (Appy Gamer if you're curious) that aggregates news from a lot of different places.  I can't recommend one site over another because I try to only pay attention to facts and purposely distance myself from reading opinions that may influence my own before I've even formed it.  This means I don't read reviews or editorials/opinion pieces very often and get news from whoever has it.

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I also have an app on my phone (Appy Gamer if you're curious) that aggregates news from a lot of different places.

I use the the app Flipboard and subscribe to my favourite sites then just use the part of the puts them in order of most recent and that is good for me but the only problem is that I get the same news story from different sites which gets in my way a little. The app I use also has really cool animations.

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Obligatory: http://www.objectivegamereviews.com/

 

 

I also like:

-Giant Bomb: you know what this is.

-Tiny Cartridge: weirdass niche handheld site that caters to my love of Nintendo handhelds and silly reporting.

-GoNintendo: obsessively covers in great detail any and all games for Nintendo hardware, including stuff that absolutely nobody cares about (a buttload of really awful budget eshop releases) and games that clearly aren't actually coming to Nintendo consoles (Watch_Dogs). Generally good otherwise.

-USGamer: the current home of Jeremy Parish, who is a really cool dude who's been writing about games for a long time.

-Serebii: gaze into the depths of intense Pokémon news reporting and webpage design that hasn't been updated since 1999.

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I check Polygon but I have to say, I'm not part of the audience that really cares for the "culture" section they've started doing  

 

Does no one read Gamasutra? I also have to say re reviews, i still really love actionbutton.net for all its gaudiness 

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I don't. I read this forum and browse gaf (although it makes me angry so I try to avoid posting). If something is interesting it's usually on here or a podcast I listen to. I'll use IGN if I'm looking for a release date or something very specific. 

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I don't. I read this forum and browse gaf (although it makes me angry so I try to avoid posting). If something is interesting it's usually on here or a podcast I listen to. I'll use IGN if I'm looking for a release date or something very specific. 

 

Don't be coy, you know you're going there to be blown away.

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I check Polygon but I have to say, I'm not part of the audience that really cares for the "culture" section they've started doing  

 

Does no one read Gamasutra? I also have to say re reviews, i still really love actionbutton.net for all its gaudiness 

 

I was going to say something similar, but then I realized most of my posts lately have been old man complaining about things I don't like about the internet.

 

Anyway, the culture section, posts that are just fan art of games, and Ben Kuchera opinion pieces are kind of driving me away from Polygon too (fan art is cool, but its not what I go to sites like Polygon for). I really like a lot of things about the site too. Danielle, the McElroys, and Chris Plante tend to write great stuff, and the site generally has more long-form features than others like it, which I really appreciate. Still, the stuff I like seems to be getting buried under a pile of stuff I'm not really interested in.

 

On a more positive note, I like RPS, Giant Bomb, and some of the other sites mentioned. I've yet to subscribe to any of them, but I also check out Venus Patrol, Unwinnable, and Kill Screen occasionally.

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Don't be coy, you know you're going there to be blown away.

All I can say is never read the comments. 

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I just get my gaming news by waiting to see a bunch of people making snarky comments on Twitter and piecing it together from that.

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Anyway, the culture section, posts that are just fan art of games, and Ben Kuchera opinion pieces are kind of driving me away from Polygon too (fan art is cool, but its not what I go to sites like Polygon for). I really like a lot of things about the site too. Danielle, the McElroys, and Chris Plante tend to write great stuff, and the site generally has more long-form features than others like it, which I really appreciate. 

 

Since you brought it up, i have to admit Kuchera rubs me the wrong way sometimes, and I can't really put my finger on why. I admire his and Polygon's commitment to bringing marginalized issues like representation and gender discrimination to the forefront, and i think their efforts there are really valuable and make Polygon an important site, but Kuchera's opinion pieces unrelated to that occasionally seem weirdly / needlessly abrasive. I don't really know how to articulate this. 

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Since you brought it up, i have to admit Kuchera rubs me the wrong way sometimes, and I can't really put my finger on why. I admire his and Polygon's commitment to bringing marginalized issues like representation and gender discrimination to the forefront, and i think their efforts there are really valuable and make Polygon an important site, but Kuchera's opinion pieces unrelated to that occasionally seem weirdly / needlessly abrasive. I don't really know how to articulate this. 

 

You are not alone in this opinion.

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I only follow a few places. Joystiq to get what is basically a feed of press releases and zeitgeisty stuff, and Giant Bomb for long videos and dumb entertainment. I used to follow RPS, but I found the writing style in a lot of their articles annoying and eventually gave up on it. Other than that I just check a few forums and twitter which combine to do a decent enough job of highlighting articles or games I might have missed otherwise.

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Since you brought it up, i have to admit Kuchera rubs me the wrong way sometimes, and I can't really put my finger on why. I admire his and Polygon's commitment to bringing marginalized issues like representation and gender discrimination to the forefront, and i think their efforts there are really valuable and make Polygon an important site, but Kuchera's opinion pieces unrelated to that occasionally seem weirdly / needlessly abrasive. I don't really know how to articulate this. 

 

Via Twitter I once asked him polite, specific questions on his stance on the NPD (he feels it's pointless) and he responded to me in a laughing, condescending way as if I were an abusive troll. It's just his personality, I think -- he doesn't take disagreement well, no matter how non-confrontational it's presented.

 

As far as news places go, Joystiq and IGN are decent news feeds for the basics. Kotaku's actually improved greatly over the last year or so -- while there's still pointless fluff they also do some great and informative feature and investigative pieces from time to time.

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I mostly use forums/friends/twitter to hear about new things, and I usually get most of my suggestions from there, too. In all but a few cases I've stopped buying games when they're new, so I usually just wait to find out if they're buggy messes or bad ports, and then make up my mind from there. It helps that the stuff that I am interested in knowing about pre-release/at launch is mostly sim games or other things that generally don't get much press outside of enthusiast blogs. For those I usually go to the source because SCS Software (Euro Truck Sim 2) have a good dev blog, and the Eagle Dynamics forums are chock full of info on upcoming DCS games (as long as you know Russian/are willing to use Google Translate)

 

For general news I tend to migrate to Giant Bomb mostly because I find their video content entertaining, and I know how my tastes mesh with the crew over there. Sometimes I'll flip around Kotaku, Polygon or siliconera for general news, and I do enjoy some of the features on Rock Paper Shotgun.

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I sift through my RSS feed for whatever looks interesting. Mostly it's from Polygon and Giant Bomb, but RPS, Gameological, Grantland, etc. are in the feed as well as specific developers and specialty content like Campo Santo and Soren Johnson's Designer Notes.

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I agree with quite a lot of you. Twitter is a great place to get news because it is becoming much more often for devs to release information on twitter now and reading from my twitter feed is like cutting out the middle man. I get new a lot faster.

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Not only does it cut out the middle-man, but it allows you to tailor your feed into something special; the culture of gaming becomes less and less homogenous.

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I check Polygon but I have to say, I'm not part of the audience that really cares for the "culture" section they've started doing  

 

Does no one read Gamasutra? I also have to say re reviews, i still really love actionbutton.net for all its gaudiness 

 

the culture stuff annoys me because it seems so insular and projects a depressing image of gaming (outside of the stuff that's completely disposable man finds jesus on toast type)

 

like polygon in general is pretty good at looking at the diversity of games, they gave gone home game of the year, their features cover a really wide range of stuff within gaming, they try to explore social issues.

 

yet all the culture stuff feels just like stereotypical nerd culture pandering. it's all articles about superhero comic book stuff, the latest blockbuster action films, tv recaps for nerd favs like walking dead and game of thrones. i think there's lots of cool stuff you can look at how gaming relates to the wider world as games don't live in isolation, though i don't want it to dominate the site, but it seems so limited in its world-view. it's like if polgyon the gaming site only covered triple a games.

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