Monday, October 16, 2006

Peter Says...

I love reading postmortems. Of games, companies, people, whatever. A look into the inner workings of... whatever... is always fascinating. I also like DVD extras.

One of the most interesting things is the viewpoint. I like to read postmortems written by someone (or multiple someones) actually involved in whatever the thing was. Why? This is why.

When someone else writes the postmortem, you have to read between the hero-worship bullshit before you can tell what actually happened. "...the game [Black and White]... sold two and a half million copies on the PC, despite a slightly mixed critical reception following the extreme hype."

Slightly mixed? If "slightly mixed" means "some 2/5s and some 4/10s and some 37%s" then, yes, the reviews were slightly mixed.

The whole thing oooooooozes slippery yellow pus. Every paragraph contains a subtle or not-so-subtle "of course, as everyone knows, my heroes, my boys down at Lionhead, the heroic legend called Molyneux, did I mention I know him, he can do no wrong..."

Pisses me right off, especially since I really do want to know, in detail, what happened at Lionhead. I'm extremely curious, since it was effectively Molyneux's fall from grace... but I can't trust this source of information.

So I hereby give the "Derisive Barracus Stamp" to Simon Carless, the author of that article.

"Stop that jibba-jabba and talk straight, foo!"

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