You know, for the longest time, I thought Kotaku was the worst gaming site out there. Gamasutra would have to be another candidate. But during these last few months, I’ve really started to see just how much bullshit Polygon puts out. I guess maybe it’s because I never used the site much, but I didn’t realize just how bad they were, until recently. Let’s take a look at a small sampling of the evidence, including a column that ran just a couple days ago.
Before I get to their most recent tripe, let’s take a look back. As I’ve mentioned before, this was the site that took points away from Tropico 5 because of feels. And what about the Bayonetta 2 review from a month or so ago? Here’s a section from a post I did related to that travesty:
“The new Bayonetta 2 is getting near universal praise in the week before its release. That admittedly doesn’t mean much, with the state of gaming journalism, but it is notable. One early outlier, is the review from Polygon. In it, staff writer Arthur Gies admits that the gameplay, and just about everything else in the game is spectacular. But, he still gives it a 7.5 due to the ‘over sexualization” of the main character. You literally cannot make this shit up, at this point. The SJW Tumblrverse mentality strikes again.”
They’ve published a number of dishonest anti-GamerGate propaganda pieces, and shamelessly push the SJW agenda every chance they get. Remember the #FullMcIntosh op-ed? I haven’t even mentioned the flaming pile of excrement known as Ben Kuchera. I’m actually saving that for another column (perhaps the Christmas series). I just wanted to establish some of Polygon’s historical awfulness, before I talked about their most recent transgression against gamers.
The other day, meathead game journo Colin Campbell wrote an attack piece on Grand Theft Auto V for the aforementioned Polygon. It was breathtaking in it’s dishonesty. Not only that, it was just fucking stupid. I’m having a hard time deciding whether to laugh or be angry, but I think it’s perfectly acceptable to do both.
“It’s one thing for games to portray the slaughter of soldiers and gangsters and even vanilla members of the public. It’s another to show us victims being kicked in the teeth, and then pretend this is not worth talking about.It’s a shame that Take-Two is so uninterested in such a conversation, that when the company does address the issue it tries to fob the world off with some weak piss about free speech.I suspect that Take-Two is secretly terrified that the world might wake up tomorrow and figure out that, yes, this aspect of the game is in very poor taste and perhaps we should be having a bigger conversation about how this company portrays women in games that are overwhelmingly consumed by young men.”
What do these idiots not understand about GTA? You can kill everyone, dumbass. Hookers shouldn't be protected. Breaks immersion. #GamerGate
— Ethan Ralph (@TheRalphRetort) December 10, 2014
As you can see by the tweet, Campbell’s arguments do not pass the test for me. You can kill anyone in GTA V, not just prostitutes. Is he saying we should take them out of the game, or make them un-killable? What else should we take out of the game, Colin? He mentions later on that you can’t kill children in the game. Yea, good point. That’s one element of realism we’ve already had to sacrifice. I have no real desire to do that, but then again, I hate breaking the gameplay immersion. At least there’s no invincible children, like you see in Skyrim. If you have a game where you’re supposed to be able to kill everyone, you should be able to do so. Since there’s no correlation between video game, and real-world violence, I don’t see an issue with this.
The whole piece is just another trash article from a site rapidly becoming the worst gaming “news” outlet on the web. Years ago, sites like this defended us from maniacs like the SJWs in Australia, who got GTA banned from Target and Kmart. They would have run editorials excoriating fools like Colin Campbell, not celebrating them. That’s not even my main gripe. If these clowns would at least present the pro-gamer side of things, it wouldn’t be so bad.
But, like we saw this morning with Game informer, they know that they lose, every time our side of the story gets told. So, the game gets rigged, and we get smeared as misogynists. As long as we evangelize and spread our message, we cannot lose among core gamers. GTA V is still flying off the shelves. You think they want to hear shit like this from Polygon? They don’t. So be sure to let your friends know about these attacks on gamers, and show them the actual (archive) links. Name and shame these bastards. They are enemies of the gamer.
