Who died and left you God?

Our mothers had an expression they used: Who died and left you God?

Several items that crossed our news feeder this morning brought that adage to mind. The first was the closing of Metaplace.  We won’t try and tell you that we were big fans of Metaplace.  But as all our readers and listeners know we ARE big fans of independent game developers. In fact we would go so far as to say that if anything that is large is compared to “the State of Texas” anything that is large in Texas is usually compared to our attitude about independent game developers.

Why?

It’s just in our nature s(see earlier story about the scorpion and the frog crossing a river).

Raph Koster himself gives the reason as being “…it just hasn’t gotten traction” (see article here). Sente over at “A Ding World”claims “I am probably one of those people that is the reason the service is closing down.” (We personally doubt it but the quote does say ‘one of’ – see article here.) What all this does is bring to mind the time Tipa took a risk  by telling the guests and hosts on No Prisoners, No Mercy show number 49 she felt qualified to judge us all because she had a blog – all just to make a point (she wasn’t serious by the way).

Here is another quote that crossed our news feed this morning, via Game Politics.Com (one of our favorite sites).  We won’t give you the quote, as much as we love Game Politics, because they were quoting a group to which we have no intention of giving a pingback.

“All decent people should denounce the video game ‘Modern Warfare 2;’ and join in opposing the sale and use of such games. Moreover, it may be time for Maine to begin a debate over the advisability of banning these games completely, giving due consideration to both the First Amendment, and the danger these violent games pose to the public.”

Another post that crossed our news feeder was Tobold’s post “Syncaine insults Lum – Pass the popcorn” (available here). It appears that “Syncaine” took exception to an article written by Scott “Lum the Mad” Jennings. The result was that, with the calm and eloquent tone most of his articles take, Syncaine starts out his “Failure post failure” (available here) by doing his best impression of a monkey throwing his crap.

Now we seriously doubt that anyone over at Activision will be losing any sleep over the call for “all decent people” to “denounce” Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. And like Tobold, we think it would be interesting to read a response to Syncaine’s post by Scott Jennings (We doubt it will ever happen.)

Where all this is going is this:

We realize it is a matter of hotly contested debate, but it was not that long ago that one of our friends who develops video games for a living told us that the average “professional” reviewer spends one or two levels with the product they are reviewing. The average blogger is sometimes worse. Such is the example of the blogger who spent 10 minutes of Aion in the beta and regaled us all with the eloquent review “It sucks” (We can only imagine how long author of that review must have pondered over his words). Many is the time we have seen reviews show less thought than the average six year old puts in to whether or not he should eat his popsicle or read his comic book.”

Quite simply, we immediately dismiss every review we read that ends with the author uttering a statement they feel should be tantamount to an edict from God. Those that merit our attention are well thought out analyses, followed by an entreaty to go try the game yourself.

And yes, while we are on the subject, we did have someone who decided to throw some crap over the fence into our playground. But the best part about having your own playground, like No Prisoners No Mercy.com, is that when some monkey tries to throw crap over the fence we don’t have to let it land. Yes, we will be the first to admit that we have our spam filters set tighter than a drunken sailor on shore leave on a Saturday night.  Still, it’s our playground and we do have our favorite causes.  Sometimes we feel like a good debate, and in fact Julie just loves to take out the ol’ ruler and give some deserving monkey knuckles a well deserved wack when they try and throw their poo over our collective fence.

So before we leave you, we will leave you with a link to a well thought out review to one of the games we have been playing lately.  Take a look over at Lorewriter.com for the article…then go try the game on the trial server make your own judgment here.  And here are a few pics (following) of the place you will ultimately be going of you head over to the trial server. If you think the game is great let us know we will pass the word along the devs. If you think of some changes, the same advice goes.  If you just want to hurl monkey crap over our fence be aware that we just might hurl monkey crap back.

The No Prisoners, No Mercy team