My Two Bits!
(Editorial)

Every Month, the Editorial Page with one-quarter byte

April/May, 2001's "Two Bits" are titled :

Off the (Daily) Radar...

Daily Radar.com, in case you haven't heard yet, has closed its doors for good. Among dozens of similar other multimedia review sites --Techtite.com included-- few could have expected the black-background news byte that substituted for Radar's main page on Monday, April 30th. "The internet soufflé has collapsed," they claimed, with an overly jovial top "dozen" list of reasons for their departure. For a site that claimed to be so informative, their farewell page was quite uninformative. What happened...really? 

Before going through the long, bad history that was Daily Radar, let's admit this much; its original concept was a noble dream; a merger of some of the best multimedia review sites online in the late '90s. This included the often-praised Next Generation Online, which many miss to this very day. Such a merger of all these sites, would include enough staff to have separate critics, for each entertainment system: PC, Sega Dreamcast, Sony Playstation, Nintendo, and so on. In theory, this would mean equal time for each system. Could this possibly lead to another dream in multimedia; "no favoritism"...? Well, if this was the case, that was a noble dream.

You may retort, "Why didn't readers tell Daily Radar how they felt?" Believe me, they did...and such feedback was treated like dirt to walk on. Take, for example, Radar's Unreal Tournament "versus" Quake Arena balderdash. Sure their Unreal Tournament review, and their review for Quake Arena, gave both games the same grade. While this is a fair tie, the folks at Daily Radar needed a "winner," for inexplicable reasons. This is as inane as declaring a winner between Pepsi and Coke, yet Radar was obsessed; their Quake Arena review would even claim --oh, really?-- that they stopped playing Unreal Tournament altogether. When objective letters to Daily Radar gave their fair, impartial input on the matter, a mature web site would've simply said something like, "Cool, all our reader's opinions matter; thanks for the input!" Daily Radar, by severe contrast, made a ridiculously long-winded "feature story," officially declared Quake the one, true "winner," only to tell readers, and I quote, "We're not trying to bring the two sides together here, we're just trying to get one side to shut the f#*k up." This is journalism?

Such arrogance quickly went from bad, to worse, to totally stupid . Radar's movie review site once claimed Blair Witch Project 2, a box office flop, was a better sequel than even Empire Strikes Back or Godfather 2. Elsewhere, the same staff would insult every respectable (and even not-so-respectable) actress in the business, from Gwyneth Patrow to Traci Lords.  While on the subject; to be blunt, "showbiz" editor Chris Bushnell should have been given the boot from year one, when his hormonal imbalances led to him asking in a review with Traci Lords when she'll decide to do porn again. In case you forgot, Traci's porn "career," prior to her controversial departure in 1986, was almost entirely performed while she was an underage teenager. She left the interview in an understandable huff, with Bushnell merely musing that she must be in "denial." Let's just say, it was a good thing for Bushnell that he was the editor, or he would've been canned like a tuna.

Such inexplicable cockiness reached its peak this year, when Daily Radar decided to pick a fight with Nintendo! Parent "Radar" company Imagine Media was given a lawsuit notice from Nintendo, about their Unofficial "guide" to Pokemon. While most web sites would treat such a lawsuit with kid gloves, answering all Nintendo's comments with "Yes sir" and "No sir," Daily Radar decided to pout like babies instead; they would cease reporting on all Nintendo products as a whole. In short, they were huffy about not being able to mooch off Nintendo's most popular game, so they'd seek "revenge" by no longer discussing Nintendo at all. You might ask what the online comic strip Penny Arcade, --whose opinion of Radar was already quite "colorful"-- thought of Radar's attempted boycott. Their daily comic for January 19th offered an opinion best summarized as this; Nintendo makes all the fun games, you simply review them, so if we have to pick sides...goodbye! As you'd expect, Radar's "boycott" was very short lived. For all their purported loyalty to the parent company, however, it didn't result in thanks, as much as farewells; Daily Radar would be dismantled for good, less than 4 months later.

I can hear Radar's staff --checking this web site in a free web browser in the shopping mall-- asking what's my point? Well, I guess this is my point; for a web site that was supposed to have a "radar" quality view of all the action in gaming, their opinions were off the map. If they are surprised at such comments against them, they apparently had their "radar" shut off for years. Here's a nickel's worth of free advice: telling readers to "shut the ---- up" is not a good plan. With Radar disregarding this simple rule of thumb, it's no surprise that response to their demise is little more than snide remarks and shrugs. Why not? It's always fun to have the last word. Daily Radar felt they were the final word on everything, and as is made apparent by now, they were clearly wrong.

As always, I'm Techtite, and these are My Two Bits...