The bottom line is it’s better to have ten good writers that require very little editing than ten awful ones.

–Chris Buffa, GameDaily Biz article “How to Fix Videogame Journalism”

If video game journalism were a Shakespearean play, they would be the clowns. (Kotaku would be the homicidal, naval-staring stepson.)

First thing: You can’t say “if (it) were.” You either have to say “if it was” or, as I suspect was the intent, “if’n it were.”

Second thing: There is no second thing. The abstract concept of Brian Crecente’s day-to-day mental activities is in fact best illustrated by the metaphor of gawking out into nothing while floating in the vast, empty sea. This perhaps unintentionally seaworthy train of his thought lays track in the portion of the brain most writers reserve for actually knowing the very basics of the language they are paid to write in.

Well, so says the U.S. Official Playstation Magazine, anyway, according to Eurogamer as well as Computer & Video Games. Your guess is as good as mine who cribbed from whom; too much time zone stuff happening and too little me caring. Probably Eurogamer grabbed it from C&VG though.

You can bet that they didn’t both just independently read about co-op in the magazine, though, because it’s not in there. I read the preview myself, and also spoke to one of the editors just to make sure that they didn’t somehow have a copy of the mag from a European print run with an error in it.

A nearly bilingual NeoGAF poster made the assertion that this is a mistranslation of a news item on German site GameFront, and he appears to be correct. Das Gee-Eff (ja) have un-pimped their website to not even have anchor tags for individual articles, but if you search for Assassin’s Creed at this link you can find the article.

I decided to wait until the next day to see how it had spread. All of Thursday, though, I could only find two more sites with the story: Pro-G (who had run it Wednesday, also crediting the magazine as their source instead of their real source), and Joystiq.

Though now that Penny Arcade has made the mistake of believing something they read on an internet news site, other internet news sites are sure to run with the information. Unless, you know, they actually read this site and decide to have a look at the magazine themselves. What are the odds of that happening, though? Monday I’ll run a final tally of the damage.

But I sort of skimmed the interview myself, so I’m not too sure if there really is a part where, as Fancy Florian points out, Randy says he was fired for pushing too hard to keep Thief 3 more like the first two. I’ll have to assume that it’s after the part where he says that’s absolutely not the reason he was fired, and having no idea where that rumor came from.

Not to say it didn’t happen. You can change your mind mid-interview. He just would have had to go back on that part, and the part before it where he said the idea to make the gameplay “support sophisticated interaction, planning, thinking, and slow pace, in addition to supporting more traditional action-y stuff” was a goal “that I agreed with and helped drive.”

I’m also looking for the part where Hufflepuff’s Flying Broom Wrangler Florian says Randy “bluntly points out that Deus Ex: Invisible War sucked.” Maybe I just can’t read between the lines here: “I actually have a lot of respect for the product they made. I played an early version and really enjoyed it – more than DX1, I’d say.”

I don’t think he can be sued for libel, mostly because our non-wizard laws don’t apply to him, but also it’s hard to libel someone when you link to the interview so people can read for themselves that it says pretty much the exact opposite of what you say it does. But I am not a lawyer.

Read – Why Thief 3 Sucked: Interview With Randy Smith [Kotaku via #1 Tipster Andrew]

Though 3D Realms has now got to take some of the blame for this continuing, because George “The Decider” Broussard himself can’t even be bothered to know for sure what the deal is. Or maybe he really does, and the plan is to let this story ride until even Take-Two starts thinking that they owe 3D Realms $4.25 million when Duke ships. Naw, that’s too clever, or at least too not-cribbed-from-a-Bruce-Campbell-or-other-iconic-gamer-movie.

[Editor's note: GameSpot originally misreported the figure 3D Realms would be paid upon completion of Duke Nukem Forever. It has since been corrected. We regret the error.]

Keep regretting, fellas, because the amount 3D Realms is getting paid is zero.

It’s the new Highlander Style Fact-Checking Method: when you are notified of an inaccuracy in an article, stop as soon as you find and correct it, as there can be only one.

Joystiq has also fixed the erroneous $4,250 dollar figure, and also still have that money as going to 3D Realms. Can these almost assiduous all-stars pull off another screw-up or will they get it right the next time? And what about sites like Next Generation that haven’t made any corrections yet? Will they just crib from GameSpot again and stay wrong, like Ponyboy stays gold? Did Robert Frost ever write a poem about being wrong that makes fictional greasers a little gay for each other?

Joystiq’s update, with ironic jab at GameSpot’s acumen *UPDATE 6/13* …is now completely fixed (I think, it’s 90% unreadable now)

The new deal was referenced as being reported in Take-Two’s most recent SEC filing. SEC filings always report figures in thousands of dollars. So Take-Two actually brought the payout down from $6 million to $4.25 million, stupids. It takes very little time to get the SEC filing off of Yahoo, and then CTRL-F to search for “Duke”. Less than a minute. Then you would have had a chance to see you were being dumb.

What you couldn’t have known from reading that, though, is that a) this is two month-old news, or five months if you were good at connecting old dots, and b) the payment isn’t going to 3D Realms, but rather has already gone to DNF’s original publisher, GT Interactive, now part of Atari. If you’ll recall GT also had gotten $6 million when they signed over the publishing rights to Take-Two in the first place, too, aka the smartest deal GT Interactive ever made. The truth is, 3D Realms is going to get nothing from Take-Two for shipping except a a royalty check or two before the game is laughed off of shelves.

You guys did nail the part about the $500,000 bonus if it ships before the end of the year, though! Except it also goes to Atari. Great blogging!

Quite a list of blogtardedness involved here:

GameSpot, probably Patient Zero, who passed it on to

Joystiq, whereupon

Destructoid got it, and got a typo mutation that left Take-Two offering themselves the $4,250.

Slashdot and Voodoo Extreme got caught by GameSpot, too.

Evil Avatar didn’t repeat or dispute the number but did have the money as going to 3D Realms.

Kotaku actually got the $4.25 million right but also said it would be going to 3D Realms.

As did Next Generation.

Again, “good job” to all of you, for getting stale news almost completely wrong.

Why the lack of interest? Because it was a cel-shaded tycoon game about running drugs with card-based battle sequences. Sure, that may sound interesting— until I tell you that this was not the idea of a lovably crazy Japanese man, but rather a company whose previous release was an expansion pack for Tropico 2. It’s quite probable that a random number generator figured heavily into the design phase, and in fact Snow was the one picked over the other finalist, a first-person survival horror game about running drugs, with battles resolved via horse racing.

Of course a plausible reason for the game’s cancellation, therefore, was obviously…that Rockstar felt the game was going to be too controversial. So instead of making it run-of-the-mill controversial— like their recently shipped PS2 port of the decapitated-with-spurting-neck simulator Liberty City Stories— and raking in cash, they decided to scrap what was surely a profitable game to avoid their public image taking a beating beyond their current comfort level of “embodiment of the culturally mephitic evil of the game industry.”

Here’s a more plausible conjecture derived from the events: Rockstar cancels Snow. Snow cancels school. Therefore, Rockstar wants there to be more school, and Bully is currently being re-worked as an edutainment title to be provided free as a public service. Post that, Kotaku, Joystiq, Destructoid, etc.