Nahh, it's really a personal thing, don't think they have a bad reputation and admittedly I've used them for walkthroughs and stuff like that myself. But in my opinion it's a highly commercialised website that addresses a mainstream audience. And somehow they have to come up with something that their audience can live with.
We're highly commercialised?
Well...ehm...no, not really. I mean, we're commercial in the sense that Jon makes money and the editors are paid, sure, but the choice of games to follow has always been "games the boss likes" and now I add suggestions.
We cover exactly the same games as RPGWatch and there's not a day when the GB and RPGWatch frontpages don't look nearly identical. We do the same kind of interviews and reviews, though indeed GB does less with indies and is slightly more positive about some modern titles. But that's taste, not commercialism.
(and besides, Jon hired me, an angry curmudgeonly old lover of old RPGs with no interest in consoles whatsoever. What does that tell you about the mass appeal nature of the site?)
And let's be honest - they can say whatever they want, but Bioshock is a linear shooter and nothing else. There is not even a remote relation to the rpg genre.
Most, most true. And yet we picked it. I wasn't perfectly content with it myself, and consider it a borderline pick, but again; it only won because this is such a weak Action RPG year. That's it. HG:L was nearly our disappointment of the year, so not much of a chance of that making runner-up, so what's left? Two Worlds? Well, ok, maybe Depths of Peril would've made a better pick, but the editor who played it didn't seem to say so.
We also specifically stipulate we feel the action RPG label has always been one that's stuck on games that often have only remote relations to RPGs. How is Diablo an RPG and BioShock not? Character development? Hardly significant enough. Action RPGs are empty husks with RPG wrappings about them, and BioShock fits in their fine.
I've always been one two sides for BioShock, myself, I do feel the game is redeemed by its setting and even its somewhat good story. But as a game it is a failure, mechanics and gameplay wise. Should I really judge a game only by that? Not really, because I'm not just judging mechanics, I'm judging the experience.
Did BioShock side-saddle into the Action RPG category injustly? Sure. Is that a big deal? It wasn't to me, but perhaps 't is to you.
- By calling things by the wrong genre, you very often end up with a distorted view of what is going on in a genre. For example, the influx of action-RPG's and MMO's in the early 2000's gave a distorted view of what else was happening in the genre.
- Inclusion of non-genre games tends to take away attention, coverage, and therefore mind-share of true genre games.
This is a good point, though.
My counter-argument to it when it comes to BioShock is basically: the action RPG genre was born watered down. It was never a full-fledged, "true" genre of gaming, it was born a hybrid, malformed and all. While it's true action RPG as a genre has some expectation patterns built on it, what's the harm of including BioShock in the malfeasance?
Besides, we also included Mass Effect in the Action RPG category