Kotaku pointed out an interesting read on Esquire by Chuck Klosterman, the man who taught me to hate Coldplay and otherthink Saved by the Bell in his masterwork Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. He's also a respected music critic and has a tendancy to uppercut you right in the balls with his convincing diatribes, completely rendering even your fiercest core predispositioned notions completely useless as you gurgle in your mental urine. His latest story hits close to home... Chuck does not read Destructoid, he's got chainsmoking screamers to attend to. But the long timers here will tell you how much shit we got around E3 time for saying we thought a handful of games were crap, and fended off an army of fanboys who are responsible for funding crap games. That's pretty much what he's talking about: how there are no game critics when it's clear that the industry needs some hardcore gamers to look at incoming turds and point the finger based on years of disappointments across consoles. If it's not going to be us, it will be some other blogger or podcaster -- the media hates this shit. Every game is wonderful until you've paid for it and are stuck with it!!! That's why I cancelled my subscription to Nintendo Power fifteen years ago, you were better off talking to people than trying to read through lies and doctored photos. Here's my favorite passage from the article, which inspired an overnight redesign of the logo up yonder:

There are still people in America who do not take video games seriously. These are the same people who question the relevance of hip-hop and assume newspapers will still exist in twenty-five years. It's hard to find an irrefutably accurate statistic for the economic value of the video-game industry, but the best estimates seem to be around $28 billion. As such, I'm not going to waste any space trying to convince people that gaming is important. If you're reading this column, I'm just going to assume that you believe video games in 2006 are the culture equivalent of rock music in 1967, because that's more or less reality. Read the rest on Esquire