Surely he should be finishing the game though.. When’s the last time you read a ‘professional’ book or film review where the author couldn’t be bothered to finish the material being reviewed?
At the very least the guy should make a large point of mentioning this in the review!

Most people seem to think this is a very good game, go to reader reviews on gamefaqs, gamespot.

Seems to me this guy just likes to rate good games with s*** scores to get attention. No different than any other troll, except he gets payed to troll and wind you all up. The sooner you all ignore this s*** the sooner he goes away.

Um… now I’m not a reviewer, but if a game doesn’t get good until near the end then I think it’s reasonable to assume it should get a bad review.

Also, I see you’ve been getting advice from a certain someone. Good internet matlock-ing skills there.

Sentence fragments! Possessive apostrophes inserted into non-possessive pluralizations! I see the author is another gamer who wants to add prestige to his hobby by fancying himself a capitalized “WRITER,” but can’t even cough out 300 publishable words. This article is nothing but two pictures with their explanatory captions stretched to the limit. And just to clarify the opening line, Jim Sterling gave Final Fantasy XIII a less than stellar score–but he wrote a stellar review. And that’s the key difference between Sterling and this author, whose name I honestly won’t remember until he makes more of a contribution.

But putting the unprofessionalism aside, this is far more insidious than anything Sterling’s ever done. I became familiar with his back catalog after the pair of ‘Indie Games Suck’ articles he put out a few weeks ago (to paraphrase the titles to match internet perception). Articles that were inflammatory, yes, but only as a rhetorical device to raise the stakes of a conversation worth having. Sterling is a guy with a vitriolic sense of humor who loves getting into people’s faces. But he stays there long after the fact because his criticisms all carry real merit, regardless of the way he packages them.

This piece, in comparison, is trashy journalism worthy of a spot near the grocery store checkout. Instead of raising greater questions about the role of reviewers in general, it dismisses them. Instead of initiating a much larger (and much more serious) conversation about journalistic responsibility, it focuses concerns on one semi-celebrity individual who may or may not be representative of the issue. This “story” forgoes all value and validity for the sake of inciting furor and controversy. O, sweetest irony–the author fits the bill for a public perception of “Jim Sterling,” as a concept, more than Jim Sterling himself.

In terms the author might comprehend: flamebait. After a chilly afternoon on his muddied hands and knees, the author has produced a worm thick enough to catch a Hylian Loach. But he isn’t going to reel in a thing, because there is no strength on his end of the line.

I agree with the sentiment of the majority of commenters on this article, there is simply no point in writing “got ya” articles on the reviews posted on other sites, it is really just in bad taste.

Say what you will about Jim, I know I certainly do, but there is no denying that the man reviews from the heart. He reviews games not as products in need of a consumer rating, but as experiences that are given a simple representation of perceived quality in order to bring a visual summation (in this case with a 1-10 scale) of the authors opinion. You know, the way literature, film, and music are reviewed, not with the pretense that they are providing a public service for potential buyers of a product, but as an insight into one person’s experience with a form of entertainment. If anything, we should be praising the man for being one of the few reviewers who writes in this manner, and for being unafraid to use the entirety of the 1-10 scale rather than the 6-10 “grading papers” style scale used in 9/10 outlets.

As for him not finishing the game in its entirety, well this is hardly news in its own right. Would you rather him use Action Replay/Codebreaker like was standard in reviewing games for so long? Or a review copy with unlocked console tools for tweaking difficulty, or warping past a part of the game giving you trouble? Of course, no one talks about these things anymore because we’re too obsessed with numeric scores to care.

Articles like this just add to the notion that gamers are self absorbed, spoiled, and terrified by anything that goes against the mainstream. This is the sad state of gaming, we’ve bought into the corporate entity the industry has transformed into over the last 10 years to the point where we are writing articles about reviews on other sites, as though defense of the status quo is paramount to gaming’s survival as a medium. Entire subgenres die off, sequels bring market saturation to anything that sells, the cost of producing a game rises so high that creativity is killed off to make way for the cardboard copy world of safe bets, and we indulgent masses sit here on our pile of games arguing over review scores. It’s this kind of braindead number-mongering that drove the industry into the monotone mess of grey action games and minigame shovelware that we all know and love today.

thank you very much Evan Velez and dualshockers.com for Exposing this idiot
Jim_Sterling Is a joke, please stand your ground and don’t back down, someone need to teach him how to be a journalist, he gave assassins’ greed 2 a 4!! That alone is enough to fire him, I hope he shows up

So what you are trying to say is Hell is other people?

*gasps*

I like to suck big wangs and put them in my back door.

For the record, I’m having a good time so far, personally, with FF XIII. Going into it, I didn’t think that would be the case. That’s my opinion. However…

So he played a game for a mere 30 hours and didn’t like it? What the hell could possibly happen after 30 hours that would totally change his final opinion, sir? At hour 31, does the Bluray suddenly pop out of the drive and start tickling your ass with a feather?

he completed ch11 didn’t he? is that what the instrument of hope trophy means?

he made it to ch 11/13

and he has a secret trophy you can’t see

ch12/13

Which means he tweeted truthly that he didn’t finish the game. What else you want?