Film Critic Roger Moore (of the Orlando Sentinel) has sparked a mini controversy in his Max Payne review. The blurb quote for the piece, posted at Rotten Tomatoes, says the following:
"As good as a couple of its action beats are, Max still suffers from the heartlessness that makes games emotionally inferior to movies. Nobody ever shed a tear over a video-game character's death."
Naturally, both sentences are pretty inflammatory to gamers, who've taken him to task in the comment section. Moore, who's no stranger to controversy (he earned Kevin Smith's ire a year or two ago) has yet to respond, but this clearly looks like another case of a guy who hasn't played a game since Space Invaders commenting on a medium he has no clue about.
You can follow the comments (which have been fairly civil so far—although that seems likely to change) here.
A film critic by trade, specializing in Euro-horror, cult exploitation, and Asian action cinema, Mike has written reviews for a diverse group of print and online publications. He covers horror news, movies, books, and games at TheHorrorGeek.com and Horrorsquad.com and spent two seasons as The Horror Geek on Comedy Central's pop-culture game show, Beat the Geeks.
Mike's childhood was spent playing videogames any time he got a chance. His parents had a Pong console and his grandmother had an Atari 2600, where Mike cultivated his skills by playing hour upon hour of games like Space Invaders, Berserk, and Asteroids. From those early experiences Mike learned one thing: he loved games.
In 1999, Mike became a staff reviewer at Cinescape Magazine's website where he spent a year learning the craft of game criticism. After internal changes led to Mike leaving Cinescape in late 2000, he joined up with RPGFan in 2001 and spent several years writing reviews for them. Happy, but looking for an opportunity to expound on a wider variety of titles, Mike joined GameCritics.com and hopes to help Chi, Dale, and the rest of the GC staff bring a higher level of respect to the field of game criticism.
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Yeah, FFVII seems to be an example everyone cites. I think it’s pretty clear he hasn’t played a game since the days of Pac-Man.
Speaking of Final Fantasy, someone’s never seen Aerith die…
That’s just idiocy – I know it brands me a nerd (and a sap) to say so, but when you spend half an hour trying to stave off the doctor’s death fin FF3 and he dies anyway, I bawled like an infant.