@ woopah,
Sorry, I should have made it clear that I wasn't directing my rant at you, I understood exactly what you meant. It was some of the responses that I was directing my tirade at. I'd just been over at Gamespot and their blatant bias had me in a foul mood. I even asked them to cancel the so called "Wii and DS" newsletter which despite its name is getting just as bad.
I also get cranky when I have to listen to how wonderful a game GTA is. I'm sorry; I'll never accept that the best game of the year is nothing but gratuitous violence, a storyline that would get you fired off a soap opera and the most sophomoric so called humor I've had to listen to sober in my life. I'll happily admit that there are fine games on both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 and for those that put a high premium on graphics, I'm sure they're the best but GTA was not the best of them by any stretch of the imagination, in my opinion. See, unlike game critics I am willing to accept my fallibility.
I'm not sure why this industry cannot seem to generate critics that can judge fairly even things that they may not personally like and accept that others may have different tastes and criteria. I spent years judging photography competitions for the state fair. It often required me to judge pictures that I personally wouldn't hang in my trash can. For example, to me the cutest little doggie picture ever made is still just a damn picture of a mutt. But there are people who love and put a lot of effort into such images and they are entitled to the same consideration and to be judged in terms of their appeal to their target audience as anything else. Most game critics are so egocentric and convinced that their preferred gaming style has to be best that it would be as if I had only awarded pictures to the nudes and ignored everything else.
