Ben-DutkaIt's a huge topic of conversation these days, what with so many games coming out all at once. After all, these games need reviews, and there are plenty of media-naysayers out there who say it's getting increasingly difficult to trust video game reviews.
Now, after last year's GameSpot Kane & Lynch fiasco, they probably have a point. And we sincerely doubt that reviewers on one of the super huge sites never once fudged an overall score just a bit, entirely – although perhaps subconsciously – due to the lure of advertising dollars. Then, the smaller sites don't have the resources to review every single title the instant it's released, even though they may not bend to potential bribery. As evidenced by this article , some gamers are having a difficult time trusting anyone. Well, we're here to tell you that reviewing games at PSX Extreme is a really simple process: we get the game, we play it, and then we tell you what we think. It never goes beyond that. Our reviews are as timely as we can make them – you almost never have to wait more than a few days or a week or so for a high-profile review – and they're always informative and detailed. Hell, we got you LittleBigPlanet , Dead Space , and Bioshock well before they ever released on store shelves. And the likes of Silent Hill: Homecoming , NBA 2K9 , and Saints Row 2 weren't far behind.
The point is, this question of trust doesn't just involve reviews; we're starting to hear more and more about gamers leaving the huge sites due to a lack of community control (among other reasons), and we've also heard a lot about the death of blog-based gaming sites. We are neither a blog nor a crazy huge gaming site, but we're large enough to get our games from publishers to review, and we're small enough to keep our community fantastic; exactly the way we like it. Reviews are a staple of this particular form of media; that's for damn sure, and we do understand everyone's concern. Who can you trust? Honestly, we think too much is being made of the idea that all these game critics are on the take, because as much as we dislike places like GameSpot and IGN, we assure you this isn't true. It's more accurate to assume the majority of reviewers handle their game reviews the same way we do ours.
But here's one thing you're not going to see at PSXE: ads plastered all over the place for a certain game, than that game scoring a full two points higher here than the standard critic average. …kinda like Mark Ecko's Getting Up at GameSpot.
