{"id":296,"date":"2005-12-20T19:24:00","date_gmt":"2005-12-20T23:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=296"},"modified":"2006-08-18T16:19:03","modified_gmt":"2006-08-18T20:19:03","slug":"ign-puzzles-me-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2005\/12\/20\/ign-puzzles-me-again\/","title":{"rendered":"IGN Puzzles Me Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

IGN has announced its games of the year, and the PC choices aren’t full of surprises. Most reasonable people can agree on what a good game is. Plus, their ultimate choice of Civilization IV<\/i> as their Game of the Year<\/a> is in sync with mine.<\/p>\n

But a few little things bother me.<\/p>\n

How the hell is Empire Earth II<\/i> anybody’s runner-up<\/a> for strategy game of the year? As much as Age of Empires III <\/i>annoys me with its familiarity, it is at least an enjoyable little formula. Act of War<\/i> is better than both of them. Yeah, PCGamer liked Empire Earth II<\/i>, too. A lot of people did. But very, very few rated it higher than both those other games.<\/p>\n

“Best game no one played<\/a>” goes one better and picks two duds – the impenetrably dull Gary Grigsby’s World at War<\/i> and the mediocre Imperial Glory<\/i>. No sign of Psychonauts<\/i>. Or Darwinia<\/i>. Or Space Rangers 2<\/i>. Insanity.<\/p>\n

Not sure that Civ IV<\/i>, a game that almost everyone I know plays solo, is anyone’s pick for best online game<\/a> – besides IGN. Their runner-up (Battlefield 2<\/i>) is a more logical choice, but I’ll give IGN credit for going against the grain there, at least.<\/p>\n

It’s easy to pick on IGN, for some reason. You can fisk their articles<\/a> for vagueness or errors, mock their choices for columnists<\/a>, or simply note that many of their scores seemed to be pulled out of a hat.<\/p>\n

But rest assured that Gamespy will get examined in this space soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

IGN has announced its games of the year, and the PC choices aren’t full of surprises. Most reasonable people can agree on what a good game is. Plus, their ultimate choice of Civilization IV as their Game of the Year is in sync with mine. But a few little things bother me. How the hell […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-4M","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}