Ronald Moore, the creator of the Battlestar Galactica reboot, debuted a new pilot on Fox last Friday called Virtuality. If you didn’t watch it, you’re not alone. In order for a pilot to be picked up for an eventually series, one general rule is that people need to see it. That didn’t happen. Hence, Virtuality will not be a series. Frankly, that’s just as well. Apparently I was one of the few people to watch the show, though I only watched the first half before terminal boredom set in.

Virtuality could have been a good series, but for me, the whole ‘reality show on a spaceship” aesthetic failed to grab.

From TVByTheNumbers:

I’m shocked…SHOCKED! that ‘game journalism’ is being called out for a lack of integrity.

Eurogamer is under attack from the developers of recently released MMO Darkfall, insisting that the final score of 2/10 is completely erroneous. Their proof? They examined the server logs of the two accounts the devs gave the magazine for reviewing purposes and determined the critic played the game for only two hours.

From Darkfall Forum:

When we read the hostile review by Ed Zitron, one thing became apparent: he had not played the game at all. Eurogamer readers and Darkfall players are posting bullet lists of factual errors in the story. The reviewer hadn’t even figured out the very basics of the game before he wrote about it. We checked the logs for the 2 accounts we gave Eurogamer and we found that one of them had around 3 minutes playtime, and the other had less than 2 hours spread out in 13 sessions. Most of these 2 hours were spent in the character creator since during almost every one of the logins the reviewer spent the time creating a new character. The rest of the time was apparently spent taking the low-res screenshots that accompanied the article. At no point did this reviewer spend more than a few minutes online at a time.

Darkfall is the largest MMORPG game of its kind and this guy spent a few minutes playing(?) before he tore it apart. How can someone do that responsibly? Ed Zitron didn’t even give Darkfall a chance.

As someone who spent over 15 years as a ‘game journalist’, I can tell you this is far more common than people know. Any claim of integrity within the gaming press is unfounded and without merit. Most are on the take, puking up great reviews of crappy games so they can keep getting access for the next big preview. Or advertising dollars raise their ugly head as an influence. Or, as is most common, critics are under ridiculous time constraints that simply make playing a game thoroughly an impossibility.

Only thing different about this situation is the proof.

Darkfall Dev Message