Brain Junkfood: 50 Cent Blood on the Sand

Let's take a step back to reality land here for a second. I am the whitest guy you may ever get a chance to meet. If I even try to sound like a "thug" or a "gangsta," it sounds like I'm about to get capped in the ass. And the people at my local game store know this, too, so you can imagine the looks on their faces when I grabbed this game for this article. I had nicer looks getting Naughty Bear: Gold Edition. Yet, lo and behold, I played a game starring a rapper that seems to think the words "bitch" and "fuck" are like the words "the" and like." I seriously think that 50 Cent has become a walking, talking stereotype. Luckily, he didn't go alone in Blood on the Sand. He took G-Unit with him. Dear God, that's like Bevis and Butthead in a game and saying that it's good that they took Snarf, Scrappy Doo, and that annoying blue monkey from the Super Friends.

The premise is that after a concert, 50 Unit and G-Cent find out that the concert promoter in an unnamed Middle East country lost the payment, and gives them a diamond encrusted skull. Of course, the poor guy is robbed of the skull at gun point, as 50 Cent jams a shotgun in the guy's stomach. Our hero, ladies and gentleman... er... bitches and... G's! Hey, you know what, I think 50 Cent is a bad influence on children now. He just jacked the poor guy's swag, and look what a random twelve year old girl does upon seeing it! Though it could be worse. Imagine if she saw 50 torture the guy! Sends shivers just thinking of it...

On the way to the airport, 50-G gets ambushed, and the skull gets jacked. No, I'm not going to put "Ha ha ha ha jack my swag" for ten more minutes. I'm not that evil. Anyway, guess who suddenly has military training to go with his bulletproof vest? Yessiree, Bob! 50 Cent! I cannot describe how awkward it is too see a celebrity with a gun in a video game, namely one who shouldn't be allowed near one. We don't need a rapper with a gun, because, if music videos are to be believed-- Holy shit... he's holding his gun right! Well, that proves me wrong. Nevermind, then.

What 50 Cent shouldn't be allowed around, though, is bad guys. The enemies range from an Arabic Mobster, a female assassin, a white evangelist, and the guy who gave you the skull, who gave it to you just so he could get it back from the mobster who wants to kill you, who told him to give the skull to you so he could kill you. If that made sense to you, you deserve a gold medal. I also forgot the black army commander, the only person 50 cannot watch as he kills him. He's actually the best villain, because he acts intimidating. He doesn't spout off oneliners like the other villains do.

What he does is sets a standard for the bosses: they're all in helicopters. Not just any helicopter, either. They're psychic helicopters. If you so much as even think of aiming at them, they move out of the way, making them nigh impossible to hit. This is made worse by the enemies shouting things at you. They aren't exactly clever enemies, even if they were comic book villains. How can you not laugh your ass off when hearing a bad guy say this to you: "You won't leave here alive, Mr. Cent!" You cannot sound scary when calling someone "Mr. Cent." You just can't. Can you imagine saying, "I'm going rip your lungs out through your ass, Mr. Cent?" All credibility would be lost the moment before you say anything else. When the hero has to stop from shooting at you to laugh, you're not a villain, you're a class clown.

It gets worse: the last boss sounds like a televangelist from the south. When he shouts at you from his psychic chopper, he says the one thing Unit Cent could ever fear: "I'm gunna make you my bitch!" Granted, it sounded better than "You've got a purty mouth, Mr. Cent," it's no where near as clever as "You lose, 50!" Seriously, no one calls him by his real name, except for a strip club owner who gets yelled at because only those close to 50 Cent use his real name. I really think that the villains would be scarier if they used his name. "You lose, Mr. Jackson!" "You won't leave here alive, Mr. Jackson!"

Okay, maybe it's a little too close to another game, but at least we're pretty sure it's the same writer! The only thing missing was 50 turning into a giant robot fueled by children. Though, with 50 it'd be fueled by "bitches." Every other word from his mouth in his taunts is "bitch" or "motherfucka." It's funny when you realize this, because you instantly wonder if he's over compensating for something. He cusses so much that I was starting to wonder if he realized how... white he sounded. Seriously, I've never hear a black person curse this much, in school, or in my time in the Army. It's usually white people who say half of this shit, only as a stereotype, too.

So, yeah, Gorilla Cent tries to get the skull back, but gets sidetracked several times. I'd talk more about the story, but it gets to a point where you realize there is no story. In fact, it feels like an old Nintendo game in the fact that the story abandons the game. Oddly enough... that's part of what makes the game so bad and so damn fun. It's a "turn your brain off" game in a good way. Wait until I find one where the developers turned their brains off completely. I mean, they went to a bar with Mickey Rourke, and the end product was hilarious.

This Is Worst Than Will Smith In "Wild Wild West:" The "Call Of Juarez: The Cartel" Review

I have had very few questions about some of the games I've played as of late. Mostly, they range on the "What were they thinking?" to the "Is there going to be a sequel?" categories. Obviously, these can be positive and negative. Never in my gamer life did I ever think I'd have to ask this question. though: "Is this some kind of a sick joke?" Never have I played a game as dull, glitchy, and terribly done as Call of Juarez: The Cartel. Seriously, this game makes Saw II: Flesh and Blood look good. That's still the only game that got an "F." Could Call of Juarez: The Cartel be the second?First of all, I need to point out the User Interface. A black and white Killer7 style gun with a DOS font menu highlighted in bright yellow. I want to use the gun to whack the graphic designer in the face who thought this looked good. It doesn't look modern, it looks like a dying Gameboy screen shot in 3D. The rest of the game is just as bad, if not a hell of a lot worse.

You play as one of three characters: Ben McCall, relative of the McCall's in the first two games, now a cop who paraphrases Revelations by adding in random curse words; Kim Evans, an Yale educated FBI agent/ex-gangbanger; and Eddie Guerro, the drug dealing DEA agent who may or may not be a mole for the Cartel your going after. Of course, none of the characters are innocent, one kills an informant, and Ben is, I kid you not, both a cop, and a pimp. Through the course of the game, you'll have to frame other gangs for burning drug stashes, chase after a Vietnam vet/rapist/drug dealer and shoot lots of guns. If this were any other game, like Max Payne, competent writing may have be able to save the game. Unless it's by the same geniuses making Max Payne 3, but I digress. The point is that the story is uninteresting and cliche, so much so that the story gets sick of itself a few times over the course of the game. I went from chasing a drug cartel to a sex trafficking cartel to an illegal weapons cartel, all of them being the same damn gang. Its like the writers didn't know what one another was doing.

I rarely talk about graphics, but it needs a mention here. They're god awful. Pop-ins abound through out every level, including a level that has you driving through a forest as it magically disappears and reappears in front of you. In the same level, a rock was rendered with a side that was invisible, allowing the player to see through one end through to other like a two way mirror. In another level, it was raining, but instead of water hitting objects, there was a visible texture above the tallest object that you could see against the wall. My favorite would have to be the seam for the trailer that let me know that it was going to blow apart... way before it was. I'd say these are amateur mistakes, but that would be offensive to amateurs.

Gameplay could be the most competent aspect of the game, except the fact that the controls are too loose, and the game, being fast paced, seems to love to hinder your progress every chance it gets. Grenades knock you down, leaving you about 45 seconds of time to get back up, if you don't die first. Behind cover, it takes you a minute to regenerate. My personal favorite would have to be when the game glitched after I passed a checkpoint, told me that I need more players to progress, only for it to work when I had to go all the way back to the checkpoint, to the new checkpoint, and then physically grab the AI partner stuck in a fence. I still want to know what happened to the cover system from Bound in Blood. Frankly, I thought that game was boring storywise, but had a damn good cover mechanic. This one, enemies shoot through your cover as if you were behind butter. With as bad as the textures are, it wouldn't surprise me.

You also have driving segments. Here's a science project for you: attach a small fan to a cinder block. Then put an RC car engine on it, throw it, then try to steer it back to a precise point (like on top of the disc of this game). This is easier to control than the driving segments. If you actually did this (what the hell is wrong with you?), you may be saying its impossible. Exactly. The driving controls are intolerable. What's worse is that if you want a trophy, you have to not get hurt in the car... that is magnetically drawn to any object in a ten mile radius.

The theme for the game is even screwed over by itself. It's supposed to be a "modern wild west shoot out." It's another modern shooter, but with stereotypes of Mexicans, and bad guys that looks like an Italian Pimps. Seriously... what's with this game and pimps, were the writers bitch smacked a lot by them? Even better is the fact that no one in the game is likable, period. McCall is an abrasive, abusive ass, Kim is obnoxious, and Eddie is just a scuzball, constantly hitting on Kim. This leads to one funny part in a brothel, where Eddie gets them in by saying him and Kim are married and Ben is there sex therapist. Then it's ruined by the realization that Ben is wearing a bulletproof vest.

In speaking of writing, I have a theory on this. The game was written to be about cowboys, but changed in the middle of production to be about modern police agencies. That's the only excuse I can think of for such subtitle and voice over mismatches such as "It's dark as cow's guts" and "It's dark as fuck." This happens every five seconds. Seriously, I timed it. Towards the end of the game, it happens so often that I wondered if they even bothered rewriting the subtitles at all. Other than the subtitles, the only thing vaguely western is the soundtrack. That is, until the electric guitar steps in as if it was drunk and went to a country music concert and went with the flow anyway.

Everything about Call of Juarez: The Cartel screams of half-assed workmanship. The engine is unpolished to say the least, the sound and voices never sync up (even after the thousands of stutters the game has at points), and even the glitches try to run away from it occasionally. Even after Saw II, I have to say that this is the first game I felt that the developers sent the beta version as the final version. This leads me to wonder why the publisher even approved of the final product that was so blatantly unfinished. Save your money for something more worthwhile... like a root canal.

Overall: F

- Bad Gameplay
- Bad acting
- Half-assed script
- Half-assed subtitles
- Glitches upon glitches upon glitches
- Saw II is better

News, Updates, And Random Stuff

As you know, I'm going to cut back on my game reviews a little bit. The Independent magazine I work for printed my editorial, which caused some unexpected feedback: the publishers demanded that my editor force me to apologize to reviewers, fire me, or they stop publishing and funding us. My editor chose plan "D:" Find another backer and publisher, and keep me on staff. This means that the magazine is changing, which also means that we won't be doing many reviews. In fact, we aren't writing for gamers anymore, and are currently trying to get programmers and developers to buy subscriptions to the magazine. The purpose is to tell publishers and developers what gamers like and hate in games, so that they can get as many specifics as possible to improve their craft, instead of general flaws that are pointed at in most reviews (including my own).

That also means that our reviews on new games will be cut back to a few big names, but chances are that we'll have to play smaller names for research. Thankfully, this means I won't have to review a movie-based game, unless I get assigned an article about movie-based games. Which is very possible, especially with as much of a set back the Thor game was. Also, with my luck, I'll have to review the inevitable Saw III: Tobin Bell Has Bills To Pay, Bitches! At the same time, this gives us some good starting points as well. It's also a good excuse for me to go back to some old PS2 games I've been meaning to play.

One of the series of articles I'm planning is a series on bad games with good qualities, but done poorly. What I mean is this: the games are so bad that they're good, or they're playable and cheesy. I'm not shooting for anything that's impossibly hard or long, gamewise, here, either, so no RPG's. These games are the bottom of the barrel, your Evil Deads and Plan 9 from Outer Spaces of games. They suck, but you have to enjoy them because of it. Instead of focusing on gameplay, I'll focus on the stories more than anything. This is also supposed to be humorous.

On that note, Here's a list of where I'll be starting on it:

Brain Junkfood articles:

1: 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand
2: Dick Marcinko: Rogue Warrior
3: Soldier of Fortune: Payback
4: Mortyr: 2093-1944
5: Most Wanted: Bonnie and Clyde
6: A Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie's Revenge
7: Reservoir Dogs
8: The DaVinci Code
9: Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude
10: The Suffering: Ties That Bind

These aren't in order of when I'll do them, but the 50 Cent game is first up. Just a sample of what I'm working with here, at this point in time, after hearing 50 Cent say "Bitch!" no less than 2000 times, I'm pretty sure he may in fact be whiter than James May. Stay tuned!

Taste This! The "Shadows of the Damned" Review

When I first heard of this game, my first thought was, Okay... it looks boring. Then, I heard about the pedigree behind it. Shinji Mikami. Okay, Resident Evil... sure. Akira Yamaoka. Holy crap, they're the pieces of bread for a potential God Sandwich. Suda 51. There's your proof that God is real. How could you go wrong with a team of geniuses? One created a genre of games, one made the most atmospheric horror soundtracks, and the last one made some of the best games no one played. How could I miss this, now?

Thankfully, Shadows of the Damned is a surprise in itself. The story is a retelling of Dante's Inferno, without the Templars. You play as Garcia Hotspur, a demon hunter, whose girlfriend, Paula, is kidnapped by Sat-- I mean, Flemming, the devil. Teamed up with former demon, Johnson, who can turn into several weapons, Garcia must travel through Hell to save his "angel" from an eternity of torture and deaths. What could easily have been a cliche plot is played in a grindhouse style, complete with over the top gore and weapons.

Yes, Johnson, your gun, has three states: "Skullfest" the shotgun, "Teether" the machine gun, and the pistol. Your pistol is called the "Boner." And they shoot skulls, teeth, and bones. Helping along the way is demidemon Christopher, who looks like something from Pan's Labyrinth. The aesthetic of the game is both stunning and creepy. The demons are mostly skinless people or armored versions of that, but the bosses are where the true bizarre factor is. True to Suda 51, the bosses have weakpoints that glow, but they're done in a way that isn't glaringly painful.

The clear innovation the game has isn't the story, but the duality of light and dark. Johnson has a light shot that can stun enemies that have not been in the dark, and make enemies that came out of the dark vulnerable. It can also light dark areas by shooting at Goat Heads before the dark does damage to Garcia. Yet, some enemies need to be shot in the dark, forcing you to create strategies for boss battles, and even puzzles. As challenging as this is at times, you'll have an abundance of beer, sake, and absinthe to heal you. Yes, alcohol heals you in hell...

The gameplay has a learning curve, mainly because of the somewhat clunky aiming controls. It's easy to hit an enemy the first time, but then they move and you have to move your gun just enough, which can be a pain at times. The rest of the controls, including a dodge that you can use at anytime, work beautifully, especially in the side scrolling shooter parts that are designed like a scrapbook fairytale. The only section of the game that brought the flow of the play, and the story, down was "The Big Boner," in which you call a phone sex line to make your pistol bigger, and then play a level where you can't move, switching directions to kill giant demons with your "Big Boner," while saying "Taste my Big Boner!"

The story for the game doesn't take a lot of turns, but it doesn't really need to. The writing is clever and vulgar, which is expected from a grindhouse type game or movie. At the same time, it pokes fun at the genre, and itself. Bosses are introduced by Fairy Tale books that describe how they became demons in a ridiculous fashion ("He fell with a 'splort!' Hee hee... 'Splort!'") Johnson censors his own language, or shouts out curse words. The game goes forward with its tongue firmly jammed in its own cheek. Yet, it doesn't stop it from being unnerving as well. This is partly credited to Akira Yamaoka's sound work, and the overall feel of the environment. I mean, you shove brains, eyes, and strawberries into the mouths of creepy disembodied baby faces to open the doors they guard, and they laugh as they let you through... looking creepy as hell.

Shadows of the Damned is not a game for the weak stomached, but is a trip worth taking. While not Suda 51's most bizarre game, the effort between him, Yamaoka, and Mikami is a hell of a combination. Possibly one of the most original games written lately, ironically, figuring it's a retelling of Dante's Inferno, it is well worth a playthrough... or two.

Overall: A-

+ Fun Grindhouse setting
+ Good Story
+ Fun Gameplay
+ Good Movement Controls
+ Witty writing and design
- With a mindless section
- Bad aiming controls
+ Actually disturbing vision of hell and moving atmosphere!

Special Top Ten From Hell: Top Ten Video Game Taunts

Back in the day, when Duke Nukem was fighting aliens and John Romero was trying to make you his bitch, FPS games had a taunt button. Now, nearly every game has some sort of taunt, but not a button for it. These quips could be goofy, or fit the theme of what game they were in. Here's my top ten taunts in video games.

10: What are you, some sort of scum sucking bottom feeding algae eater? (Duke Nukem 3D)

9: It's Howdy-Doody time kiddies! The bad man is here! (Blood 2: The Chosen)

8: You are weak as a baby fart! Go live in fear! (Shadow Warrior)

7: Gooey! And me without a spoon! (Blood)

6: Hiro got bitch smacked to oblivion! (Daikatana)

5: Don't make me laugh... Ha ha ha! It's official: You suck! (Mortal Kombat 9)

4: What are you gonna do, bleed on me? (Blood 2: The Chosen)

3: Time to redecorate in brain matter grey! (Duke Nukem Forever)

2: Another Day...Another corpse... Another reason... for me to hmm hmm... (Blood 2: The Chosen)

1: You little tiny dick! (Shadow Warrior)

What Just Happened? The "F.E.A.R. 3" Review

I just played through the single player campaign of F.E.A.R. 3, or Eff-Three-Ar, and I have to tell you people something. It won't be along the lines of "Don't play it, it sucks." It's more along the lines of, "I've had all night to mull over what I just witnessed, and I still have no idea what the hell just happened." I can't even tell you if it was fun or not, because, I'm firmly split in the middle of whether the gameplay made it good or just plain mediocre. What I can tell you is this: It isn't F.E.A.R.

The first F.E.A.R. was about Point Man's journey to stopping the psychic terror called Alma from being unleashed upon a world by her son, Paxton Fettle. The second was about Alma luring Michael Becket to a trap so she could rape him and get pregnant. Logically, this one's about Alma getting ready to give birth... and that's the part that makes sense. Where it falls apart is the central narrative of Point Man teaming up with Paxton Fettle's ghost to find fellow F.E.A.R. operative Jin Sun-Kwon, so that they can kill Alma before she gives birth. Only Fettle doesn't actually want to kill Alma, despite saying so multiple times, and wants the family to be together, despite being killed by his brother and betrayed by his parents multiple times. Following you is Harlan Wade's memory, which manifests into a Silent Hill monster's lovechild with a Predator Alien, for some reason.

All of this comes to a head when you somehow end up in Harlan's house/lab, and destroy his memories, which causes you to fight... a giant Killer7 monster? The levels only have a little sense of cohesion, about two of them actually feeling connected, where the rest of the levels require a long distance transport, and lack any semblance of "why am I here?" up until the the level before the last. The last level just comes out of nowhere, and feels out of place in an action game, and more like a survival horror game. I seriously don't know how I ended up in the house other than magic, which makes even less sense.

That is, at least, until you realize that you may have seen this all before the series was even thought of. A child starts a nuclear blast, destroying a city, and sometime later, another person starts a mental connection with that person, only to end up dying at the hands of his "brother" who is getting advice from a woman who knows exactly what's going on. No joke, if you've watched or read Akira then you've played F.E.A.R. 3. The only difference is that Fettle wants to eat Alma... for some reason, and the story makes less sense. To think the George Takei was worried that Akira was going to be white washed.

At least the gameplay is pretty good. The most stand out thing in Point Man's campaign is a damn good cover system which lets you control how far out of cover you want to be to shoot, as well as rounding cover naturally. Then you get to Fettle's half of the game, and things start seeming like you're cheating. Fettle can possess people, levitate, and shoot out blasts. The problem is that if you possess someone, and start running low on health (or die), Fettle gets out, at full health, and can possess someone else at full health. You go from a challenge to God Mode. Fettle can also stay in a body indefinitely by killing people and absorbing their life force, while Point Man has to sit in cover and wait to recharge energy for his reflexes. It makes the game seem incredibly unbalanced to Fettle, especially in co-op mode.

In speaking of Co-Op mode, it's not exactly co-op. Yes, you work together, but who ever has the highest score, i.e. in game achievements (which ruin the feel of the game), ends up winning the game. This is troublesome when you consider that Fettle is so far out of balanced that unless a player holds back, Fettle will almost always win, which means you get the crappy ending. By crappy, I mean ending that comes so far out of left field that Dr. House would have more luck finding ten people with lupus before seeing how badly the game ends. Seriously, when the big, shocking reveal of what Fettle wants to do with Alma happened, I laughed at how ridiculous it was, not to mention out of character for Fettle.

Then again, I also had to laugh at the last boss, and the fact that the game disregards the first one's story, yet not the graphics engine. The graphics are dated, but not terrible. Guns have detail, but everything else looks pretty much the same as the first two games. Not every game can be L.A. Noire, but they could have updated the engine. With as bad as the story is, though, that's the least of its concerns.

F.E.A.R. 3 is a sad case of a good game with bad ideas and a ripoff story. The core game is good, but tired, made worse by the fact that the story makes little to no sense. Add to it the fact that the added bonus of playing co-op or as Fettle is unbalanced, and you have a game that needs more time in the oven. If you absolutely must play it, rent it or wait for it to drop. Just make sure you ignore the story.

Overall

C-

+Good gameplay
+ Cover system
- Story is incoherent...
- ...and is pretty much Akira
- Last boss is a push over...
- ... and has no place in the over arching story
- Fettle is really unbalanced.

Editorial: How Much Does Integrity Cost?

I have a habit that helps me with my work on reviews, not to plagiarize, but to see if I can find good/bad things in games that other reviewers may have noticed. I've found redeeming factors in awful games, and terrible issues in games that I liked. It helps me see things in perspective, and if I disagree with those reviews, no harm done. I'm a gamer, and I know that games do not need to be picture perfect to be amazing, such as Splatterhouse, Mass Effect, or even the most polarizing game I've seen to date. Oddly enough, it's this one game that got me to seriously think about what is wrong with "game journalism." Of course, it's fitting that it would be Duke Nukem Forever, again that caused a controversy about whether it even existed for 14 years.

As the reviews trickled in, I saw nothing but overwhelmingly negative reviews. At first, I thought it was due to a culture barrier, due to the reviews being mostly European. As the American reviews popped up, they weren't much better. The game was lambasted because of level design, graphics, and, most of all, the character of Duke Nukem not maturing with the times. These reviewers expected Duke "Womanizing, One Liner Spouting, Ass-Kicking King" Nukem to be a mature character instead of what he's been for the past 14 years. These are the same reviewers who praised the game's demo last year, cheering that Duke was returning. I started asking myself, "What the hell gives?"

Then I saw, let's call them... HappyStaff and their review. The first two paragraphs bashed the character, and then the boring gameplay, despite saying that the shooting parts are fun. The rest of the review was talking about how Bulletstorm was a better game, ending it with praising the latter game. The review wasn't a review, it was an ad for Bulletstorm, a game, that while great, has nothing to do with Duke other than being published by 2K's competitor, EA Games. This is where I started smelling a rat. The same day, the game came in the mail. I popped it in, played it it for a bit, and had a hard time putting it down.

The level design is good, the graphics suffer the Unreal Engine Pop-In Textures Glitch, but are still good, and the game is a load of fun. Duke's jokes, also, make references to new movies and games more than '90's movies, which is something reviewers apparently missed. Oh, and the humor has gotten more subtle and adult, while still being an "immature game." I went from throwing poop to getting a joke about Duke being an objectifying ass in twenty minutes.

Comparing games is one thing, but when you're reviewing a game, and end up digressing to talking about how great the game you're not reviewing is, either you don't know how to review, or you're being paid off. I've seen exactly one review that gave DNF a respectable grade (not counting my own) by a professional reviewer. I've seen two negative reviews for it from non-professional reviewers and regular, everyday gamers, and one of those was complaining about people reviewing the game. The gamers are loving the game, while most reviewers aren't. Who are you, as a gamer, going to believe?

I have a few theories about this. Either reviewers are bitter about the 14 year wait for the game, they haven't played it (an Escapist reviewer admitted to not even finishing the game because he didn't want to), or they're being paid off. I can believe that some reviewers honestly did not like it. That's fine, everyone has their own opinions. When every reviewer sites the same flaws, and outright go against the general consensus of what the audience is saying is when it get's truly bizarre. A lot of the time, gamers and some of the more reputable reviewers agree pretty closely on games. DNF has to be the largest schism I've seen between the two parties. At the time of writing this, DNF is holding an average of 8.9 out of 10 by gamers, and a 5.466667 out of 10 by professionals.

You might ask, "Aren't you a game journalist?" I don't think I am. I have always considered myself a gamer first, and a reviewer second. I've been playing games since the Intellivision, and I love seeing how far they've come. In light of recent reviews, I'm proud of that fact, and the one that I will never garner enough popularity to be corruptible. Should I actually get a job offer from a big name magazine, I will decline it on principal of wanting my opinion published, not what the editor or game company want me to say. That's also why I enjoy my job at OSDB; they want my opinion, not for me to broadcast theirs.

Gamers, do yourself a big favor. Find an independent reviewer, it doesn't even have to be me. By all means, shop around, and find one you can trust. Don't give these big names the time of day, because, frankly, they don't deserve it. Their integrity is flawed if they can't help but mimic each other, showing no sign of free thought. Listen to your fellow gamers. They're the ones who should get paid for reviews. Because the professional reviewers care about a paycheck, not the game.