Anonymous asked: With regards to your recent post about Jeff Gerstmann's incompetence - do you feel it is always 100% necessary for a reviewer to take notes while playing a game for a review? I would have thought that in the majority of cases, the notable things about a game will stick in your mind. Taking notes while playing would surely make it more cumbersome (with the reviewer constantly pausing to take notes) and not provide the reviewer with the same experience as the average gamer. Clearly Gerstmann dropped the ball in this instance, and I'm not defending this particular case, but overall I don't see why note taking is such an important thing to do while playing a game for a review/preview.
Tricky question. If it were me I’d try to take notes, or I’d have a Dictaphone or something. That said, I’m no journalist.
My primary problem, really, is if you don’t really feel you have anything useful to say in a preview - as Gerstmann himself more or less says in the preview - you have to wonder if there’s really any point in writing it. This article felt like Jeff covering Halo: Reach because it’s a triple-A title in a renowned franchise and it deserves coverage, but if I had just now discovered GiantBomb and this was the first thing I read on their site I’d probably be thinking, “My, what a bunch of tossers.”
I usually like GiantBomb. I do. It’s a good site. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than most. Unfortunately stuff like this doesn’t really help their cause any. A bit like posting irrelevant repetitive horseshit people already know, really.
