User blog comment:MarkvA/PlanetSide 2 Review Roundup/@comment-1486311-20121210232956

There's nothing wrong with a little honest critique.

To be fair, my PC was considered top of the line back in 2008, and I get such inconsistent FPS in PS2 at lowest (and ini-tweaked) settings that it's frustrating to play in battles of 200+ people. This is with shadows disabled and draw distance to 5000.

//rant//

Most top-tier game reviewers don't even consider how well a game performs because they're handed top-of-the-line equipment by their bosses for free, with no consideration for how the game might run on a mid-range spec. PS2 has reportedly performed excrutiatingly poor in performance on even mid-range rigs, because it is heavier on the CPU than it is the GPU.

I also never take mainstream gaming magazine scores seriously, not since a majority of them were caught giving high reviews to mainstream games for payoffs from the publishers. What a complete mockery of objective journalism.

Perhaps once these publications were legitimate - I held a subscription to PCG and CGW then - but now they've become too large for their own good and have succumbed to the typical process of business school graduates entering their company fresh out of business school. These "gentlemen" have never played video games, but come in pointing fingers and giving orders as if they understand what it takes, lured by the billions the industry rakes in.

The same thing happens in game publishing companies. Ubisoft and Activision are chiefly guilty of this; Robert Kotick has probably never played a video game in his life. Not once have these executives looked at companies like Valve and realized that respect and honesty for the consumer pays off many, many times more than playing some financial poker game with your customers.

//endrant//

Oh well! That all being said, Planetside 2 is damn-near perfect gameplay-wise, and I'm not complaining about it! In any case, I recently dumped $650 USD on hardware for an upgrade, though. Once it gets here, I'm gonna have myself a PS2 all-nighter. Mmm. Dat i5. Dat 16gb RAM. Dat solid state hard drive. No lag, no fuss.