finbogg

Now that Gamespot is changing over to subscriber service, I look back at the grand old days of free internet information. In my musings I found a sad empty place that used to be occupied my favorite video game site....Daily Radar.

They had the best reviews (where else do you hear that the high point to a game was that it was easy to uninstall) great commentary and the always hilarious Daily Picture.

Even better, they expanded beyond vids and reviewed movies, TV, comics dating and daily life.

Looking at it now, I would have subscribed to them in a heart beat if it meant they would still be here today.


Long live Daily Radar....You are missed

Tuan Jim

I've said it before and I'll say it again: What kind of POS gaming site reviews a game/movie out of a maximum of +2 to -2??? What company buys a brand new PS2 at the height of scarcity and then drops it out a window to see if it breaks real pretty-like???

As witnesses for the prosecution, I call Penny Arcade:















The prosecution rests.

Tuan Jim

Josh H

And I thought I hated Daily Radar.

Chris_D

Well in defense of DR (which I thought was an okayish read every now and again), the ps2 they smashed was actually a japanese ps2 that no longer worked (which they admitted after). I guess it looked pretty bad at the time but I'm sure some DC owners, including myself, got a good chuckle over it (which was the whole point of it).

Re: their reviews, well you can argue about the quality reviews for most publications. I remember one example where their review of Chrono Cross basically said it wasn't quite all that (which although I like the game I tend to agree) and they got heaps of hate mail over it.

And as for penny arcade's take on things.. well I think both the xbox and halo are great, yet I pissed myself laughing at PA's comics on those. *shrugs*

Chris

finbogg

Wow, excellent evidence for your case Tuan. In my defense (or at least in defense of my taste and reason) I never did read their PS2 stuff. I just loved the reviews because I thought they usually had some hilarious quotes and seemed like no holds barred if the game sucked.

Almost like "The Onion" for video games

Outlaw

heheh, I never saw those comics but they were amusing. Though I didn't visit the site often I remember hearing about that time they threatening stop posting nintendo information, then a few weeks later they resumed . I didn't really care for Daily Radar, it didn't come close to the awesome next-generation.com, the site it was spun off from, but it was still an ok site with news.

AgtFox

Anything that has Dan Egger as an employee (Daily Radar, PSM and now OXM Magazine) will suck. The man jumps on bandwagons depending on where the money train is. He sucked up to the PS2 so much, then he got the X-Box side of things at DR and he had nothing but bad things to say about PS2. Great journalism, and now OXM suffers from it as well.

jeffdsmith

I miss fgnonline.com

Dan does suck.

mtucker

Well, I never cared for their reviews, but I did enjoy the daily Q&A section. And I believe it has been stated several times that the PS2 they destroyed was a non-functioning unit.

DJ_Spyder

I sure miss daily radar as well the reviews on certain games were questionable but their articles like direct hit were very funny it really is a shame that they closed that website down and yes I don't really care much for Dan Egger either what a piece of work he is and I have to agree with AgtFox this guy just goes where the money is or what console is currently hot at the moment talk about a lack of journalistic integrity.

outer-edge

OR, when they pulled their lame-ass stunt and got MAJOR negative PR over it, they resorted to the "um, yeah, it was already broken... yeah, that's the ticket" excuse. Wouldn't you?

But, long beofre I have had a general distaste for DR.

nick-tdi

I for one miss them. They had a very funny site and there themes of the weeks where always good for a chuckle. I also thought it was funny that they smashed that PS2. They will be missed, and ign was never the site that the DR was.

ecwfan

I miss that site as well. The news and Q&A sections were the best. While I don't care for Dan Egger, they had Chris Charla (former editor of Next Gen and the Dreamcast Magazine) and Kevin Rice who were very informative.

mr.snowmizer

Miss Daily Radar? No way!!

Miss next-generation.com, the vastly superior site Daily Radar eliminated? Absolutely.

ClarkKentKY

???? How did i miss this? ... When will they change over?

ScandalUMD

I liked the Daily Radar rating system. It was no less arbitrary than giving a game, like, an 8.6, and the hit/miss distinction really gave the reviewers the nudge they needed to label bad games badly.

I actually wrote freelance TV reviews for Daily Radar for a while, and at first, I e-mailed the editor, saying that I thought there should be something between "Hit" and "Miss" but he explained that their editorial staff had designed that system because other systems were wishy-washy.

When given a 1 to 10 scale, reviewers tend not to really use them anyway. They'll often give a bad game a 7.5. Daily Radar's idea was that, if a game or a movie wasn't good enough to be called a hit without reservations, then it should be a miss, and it should be stated as such in language strong enough to convince readers not to waste their money on it.

Personally, I won't trust a film critic who doesn't loathe at least 4 out of every 5 movies. Likewise, it's very hard to make informed consumer decisions about games when reviewers have such an annoying tendency to talk up the good points of bad games.

I've come to suspect editors at these sites of getting too friendly with developers. They get a game, and it sucks, but they don't want to say it sucks because they like so-and-so who was always nice enough to drop by with preview builds of the game.

Basically, the ratings seem to go from "pretty good" to "orgasmic" at these sites, and if you trust them too much, they'll sell you on some pretty poor games.

Daily Radar sometimes erred on the side of being a little tough, but I'd say that's the better side of the fence to fall on, all things considered.

As for the console they broke, I don't know if it really was a broken machine, but I'm sure it was a Japanese unit. Apparently, they had a bunch of import units, and the import systems just didn't have much use after the US launch. I always thought Daily Radar had a pretty good sense of humor about things.

Gamespot acts like they think game news is real news, and IGN used to have a sense of humor, but not for the last few years. Anyway, DailyRadar's British counterpart is still going at it, at http://www.gamesradar.com.