Well, call me obsessed or whatever you want (even if you didn't) but the only magazine I trust is Electronic Gaming Monthly.

And honestly, if a game makes heavy use of the Wii Remote and 1UP complains about it, then the control is busted. It is that simple. Not to mention there is too many crappy games on the Wii anyways.

Snesboy

Just to justify my simplification of their summary, to me, saying "We didn't get it" says that the puzzles were too hard for them.  Plus, any time you mention "insane difficulty spikes," I take it that you're talking about the difficulty.  Of course, that could just be the way I understand something like that.  Honestly, I doubt they really played the game that much at all.  One of their five paragraphs referred to what others had said about playing it, and there was more mixed throughout the rest of the paragraphs.  Another was spent complaining about how Atlus should be doing better.  There was really very little valuable information.

I don't like 1up reviews at all. some sites use previews to show how the game works and then analyse it in the review. 1up's previews are 1 paragraph long and most of the reviews are 5 paragraph's long. and even the shortest IGN & Gamespot (!!) reviews have more useful information than 1up ones.

Edit: Man, it's getting hard to tell who's serious and who's not.

I love how gamespot and 1up are finding games are to hard or to simple. Its funny as hell.

Kinda sad isn't it? If a game is easy enough for everyone (Phantom Hourglass) it's suddenly too easy.  If it's hard enough to challenge the best of core gamers (Fire Emblem) it's suddenly too hard.  Well wtf do you want?

Anyway, I don't care about the score, but the content of the review was absolutely awful.   Reading the  review, this is what I saw, paragraph by paragraph:

Paragraph 1:  I can't beat this game.
Paragraph 2:  I know this other dude and he couldn't beat this game either.
Paragraph 3:  I don't understand instructions. 
Paragraph 4: I don't like this game because it's too hard!
Paragraph 5: TOO HARD.

Now, go and read that review, and tell me if you found anymore content in that review than I outlined up there please tell me.  Also, he doesn't understand what the nurses tell him to do?  Unless you have no idea where anything is on the human body you can't possibly struggle with this.   He couldn't place a heart catheter?  I did it on the first try... does he not know where the heart is???  

I mean seriously, I could understand him saying something like "You should have a general knowledge of human anatomy," but if you can't even find the heart...  that's absolutely ridiculous.  They completely failed to give any content in that review.

I'm kind of curious what difficulty levels they are playing these games on to make these reviews. It almost seems to me like they are playing them on hard or something and assume being the leet game reviewers they are it should be cake to walk through anyways. I understand the calling it "hard" under hard in both of these games as I did every last mission on Trauma Center:SP for an XS with the exception of one or two and yes I definitely classify that as hard. However the same missions on easy you can literally hack your patient with the scapel for 15 seconds and probably finish most of them with ease sounds like a case of doesn't know how to play the difficulty level that suits them. Fire Emblem seems to be similar I've only watched the game being played so far on Normal as thats highest they let you on the first play through and between the save feature and an additional easy mode its laughable I think for anyone to complain about it being too hard that professes to be a gamer so hardcore they qualify to review them. Thats not to say though I'm expecting 9/10s on everything by any means for sure for instance that 7.5 I saw the other day for New Blood seems quite reasonable. A 5 though just smells of I didn't even try to give this reasonably good game a chance though.

I stopped reading at "Laughable plot" on gamespot. They're losing so much credibility with me nowadays.

 I used to trust gamespot and 1up more then IGN, things like this and their comments on their dumb ars On the spot show, made me switch to IGN and never go back or trust any other review. Plus 1up's podcasts are junk too, way to much sex talk and to little game reporting which I thought was the purpose of the podcasts. I understand some fun but geez try to limit the BS by 25 minutes.