an imbalance in the force

The trouble with counting down the top ten games of the month is that unless your month was abominably terrible, most of those games are going to have pretty good scores. Call me a cynic, but I like to see a thoroughly miserable review now and then. It reassures me that the reviewers aren't completely in the pockets of the people they're reviewing. I want a review, not an advertising blurb, you know?

Of course, while I'm posting that miserable review, I still want to take issue with it. The review goes on about how ugly the game is, right below a screenshot that doesn't look particularly ugly. (It does say the animations are particularly dire, and I can't tell that from a still screenshot, of course.) Worse, it commits the sin of timewarp - the review later says "The original Defender of the Crown was created in 1987, which was about the last time graphics like these looked current." Buh? What are they smoking? They're RIGHT THERE admitting that this is a REVAMP of a game from 1987, which would seem to imply that they've, you know, actually seen the 1987 game and what it looked like....

An image from back in the 1980s. We didn't have a lot of colors then.

Images from the modern version. Ugly? Sometimes. Looks just like it did in 1987? No.

So, GameSpot shows that they're not afraid to give something a savaging, but they also show that they hire kids who weren't alive in the 1980s to write their reviews...