Once upon a time.. I used IGN as my go to source for gaming info but for now I've almost completely lost faith in them. I remember about maybe five or six years ago IGN had a crew of hardcore gamers writing articles and giving us the esssential information from a gamers perspective when it came to making the decision of whether to buy and spend our hard earned money on a true must play experience or wait for something better.

That's all but gone today as IGN has become a "serious" media outlet. The real gamers who knew what they were talking about seem to have been replaced by wannabe journalists looking for something to put on their future resume, writing nothing but positive blurbs to hype specific games that sound like paid advertisements. One editor in particular, who was newly employed in 2009, re-reviewed Fallout 3 because it was the only game he had ever played and in a long and drawn out article outlined just how much he was in love with the game. This had many people scratching their heads, and for good reason. In one more recent article they attempted to call a guide, IGN simply got together a list of MMO's and put underneath each a short description with almost no real gameplay information and a link to where you could buy a subscription. This is actually called a cheap advertisement roundup written by someone with limited information on the titles or had never played them at all who had nothing better to do than attempt to show their skills at pandering to developers. It does NOT qualify as a guide. I could go on, but the "articles" get progressively worse and far more laughable as anyone can see simply by visiting the site nowadays.

If you have stopped by IGNPC lately, you will notice that they are reviewing casual games.. It's understandable because the editors I've seen on the site probably spent more time playing Pet Shop Deluxe 2 than Call of Duty or Mass Effect and a few of them are too young to even remember Diablo 2. Others indicate that they are fairly new to video games(if that's even possible in this day), actively lauding standard features that have been present for years and failing to present any relevent information at all.

Furthermore, before I stopped reading IGNPC's reviews I had literally lost count of how many times they based their negative reviews on a concept that the reviewer in general just didn't like, and panned the game probably before even playing it through completely. Giving a game a bad review just because you aren't used to using a mouse to move the camera is ridiculous. On one occasion, in a show of maturity from IGN, I was actually banned from their forums at one point because I criticized a specific editor for her failure to understand what should have been a simple gameplay mechanic. It is important to note that I was unbanned within the hour.

This isn't to say that Gamespot in its history has been free from fault as well as unresponsibile for a degree of "hyping" but a percentage of that is expected from these sites. It's when articles become unreliable with a marked loss in quality as major as they have at IGN, that this becomes a real problem. Perhaps one day I'll come back to them when there are more serious reviews that don't sound like company manufactured statements and less ultimately pointless junk articles titled things like "Top Ten Naughtiest PC Games". *Shakes head*