Oh boy, this is uncomfortable.
Subtracting from the already minimal respect I have for user reviews, High Voltage has been accused of retaliating against writer Michael T. Murdock for some scathing remarks he had to say in a recent review for Conduit 2.
After Murdock called the game’s graphics, story and design “appalling” and even went as far as spoiling the ending, High Voltage’s art director Matt Corso sent out a staff email encouraging the rest of the crew to “return the favor by writing a reader review for Michael’s book for him.” Corso claims that the email was meant to be tongue-in-cheek and ultimately harmless, but Murdock has taken it a little more seriously,
They don’t honestly care about what happened, and they’re trying to get their hands out of the cookie jar before they get smacked. They simply have no remorse for what they’ve done, and they think the industry and everyone else will just laugh it off. I hope that doesn’t happen. A game company shouldn’t just keep shooting themselves in the foot, hoping their limp goes away.
It’s stories like this that really make me disappointed in the internet. The combination of opinions and anonymity that the world wide web provides is obviously a volatile cocktail, and he-said-she-said battles like this one have just made this industry look so much more juvenile. As someone who both enjoyed and disliked Conduit 2, I can say that Murdock’s words are rather harsh (and his “Con-don’t-do-it 2” pun rather garish), but definitely not baseless. They may be condemning, but not nearly as damning as being caught red-handed like High Voltage apparently has.
[Source: Destructoid]
Oh the internet.
To be fair his review was pretty harsh, and adding spoilers like that is just bad taste.
Whether High Voltage had good intentions or not, this was probably not the way to handle it.
Murdock did also point out that he wasn’t covering the multiplayer portion as he didn’t really get to give it a go. I’d bet you anything that his words would have been much kinder had he gotten to try it. That’s what pulled the game from a C to a B- for me at least.
*sigh* everyone needs to calm down
Neither side is in the right here. Putting explicit spoilers in the review is bullshit, but so is getting all pissy and “retaliating” too.
Got all the respect in the world for HVS supporting the podcast and all, but… yeah.