In the name of SCIENCE!!!

I haven’t been too active on Destructoid lately, mostly because my computer broke, then I got sick and vomited for a few days, and then my computer broke again, in fact at the time of writing this I’ve caught a cold too, I’m starting to think God doesn’t want me on Destructoid. It would have been nice to know that I was frontpaged on Christmas eve and I guess the rest of my X-mas X-travaganza will have to wait till next year but never mind about that right now. Needless to say it was a long and harsh winter without Destructoid but that time was not wasted, oh no, not at all. Through weeks of research and experiments I believe I may have found something big, something important, something that may even rival the power of JOURNALISM itself, I’m talking about the power of....................SCIENCE!!!



Yes SCIENCE, the power that can take man to the sky or to the very depths of the earth, the power that can build skyscrapers or let man walk on the moon, why not harness this power and apply it to games? So using SCIENCE I decided to study one of the most controversial aspects of the gaming industry......... the reviewers. What makes them tick? Why does everyone hate them? Why do they insist on giving games I love even though I haven’t played them yet low scores? I was determined to find out using specimens that I obtained totally legally and had nothing to do with kidnappings.


The Brain.

Let start at the top shall we. The reviewers brain doesn’t work like the average humans does, through various scans and dissections we’ve been able to ascertain that the areas that react to stimuli have been warped and twisted and do not respond as they were originally intended. Normally parts of the human brain “activate” when the person is exposed to different stimuli, for example certain parts of the brain are more active during exercise and others are more active during sleep. There are areas that respond to many situations and emotions such as hunger, sex, panic ect... With regular people we know which areas control what in each part of the brain, and with a team of top scientishons we’ve have discovered that a reviewer’s brain works more like this......



As you can see it’s quite.........different. The main control centre is the Bias lobe, wherein a deep seeded love for one console is comparable only by a hatred for the other, this may also affect their judgment of exclusives because there’s no way Prototype could be better than inFAMOUS. After that is the Bribery lobe where endorphins are released when the reviewer accepts incentives from Microsoft or Sony in exchange for positive review scores. Next is the Attention Seeking lobe which we’ll get to later. And then there’s the Journalistic Integrity lobe, so underused and dried up that it’s in danger of evolving into a third testicle.......or it would if reviewers ever procreated. The reviewers mind is truly an intriguing and terrifying thing.


Anatomy.

Me and my team of expert scientologists decided to further examine the differences between reviewers and normal people. The game reviewers seem to have developed a number of traits unique to their species. It appears that their skin, in addition to being sheet white from lack of sun exposure, has become extra thick perhaps as a result of all the abuse hurled at them online. They also have the ability to survive with minimal exercise and a terrible diet consisting mostly of fast food, salty snacks, and pure hatred. Their body produces a phenomenal amount of bile which they must expel by releasing it on games that don’t really deserve it like HAZE which should have got a 10/10! Their eyesight is horrible as a result of spending more time inches away from a computer screen complaining about games than they do actually playing them. And they seem to be able to go days without sleep, opting to instead spend the time constantly refreshing their reviews, in order to read the comments of people they purposely pissed off by giving games like Killzone 2 less than a 9 which is total bullshit.


How a reviewer sees the world..........Yes, they literally think the world revolves around them.

Psychology.

If the Bias lobe is the control centre of the brain, then the Attention Seeking lobe is the subconscious. Though the reviewer may not be aware of it themselves, every action they take is an attempt to get as big a reaction as they can. As long as they get a lot of notice they don’t even care if the attention they receive is positive or negative, this leads to ludicrous claims such as God of War 3 might not be the greatest game in the history of forever, which is silly because we all know it will be. It also leads to reviewers giving low scores like 4.5 to games like Assassins Creed, a game so incredible that people haven’t forgotten about it two months later and they totally still care. The reasons behind this attention seeking are still not understood, some believe it to be an attempt to validate their delusions of self-grandeur, by creating a stir around themselves it’s easier to believe they are important. Others believe it is to alleviate their guilt from all the bribes they receive, that they convince themselves that the opinions they are paid for are their own. With a team of crack scientographers we have developed our own theory shown below.


I think this speaks for itself.

There are still many unanswered questions about reviewers that we have yet to find out. We don’t know about their natural habitat because they never leave them, we don’t know how they reproduce (though I do theorise that it may be by mitosis.) and we still can’t understand how their own personal opinions are always wrong. What we do know is that with the power of SCIENCE we can separate the lies from the cold hard facts and help people make completely unbiased decisions for themselves. And when SCIENCE and videogames come together beautiful things happen............