USgamer Continues to Be a Bastion of Great Games Discussion

Today on USgamer’s site Editor in Chief Jeremy Parish outlined some changes that are taking place at USgamer. Former 1UP alums Kat Bailey and Bob Mackey are now full-time contributors and the site itself will be moving more toward features and reviews and away from news and previews. In short, they’ll be doing less of what everyone else is doing, and offering more in-depth coverage and discussion of games and gaming.

This makes me very happy. And let’s be clear, USgamer has been proving great games coverage since launching a year ago. But now they are focusing even more on the good stuff. I’ve written here before about my love for the way 1UP covered games, as well as the efforts to get back to that kind of coverage that Jeremy Parish made when he became the EIC over there. The spirit of in-depth games coverage and discussion is alive and well at USgamer, and it’s great to see the staff there getting the support from Gamer Network to focus on more feature-based content.

Here are just a few examples of the kind of coverage I’m talking about:

What I Like Most About Tropico by Kat Bailey

Super TIME Force Xbox One Review by Jeremy Parish

Kat’s Quest: Child of Light as the Quiet Successor to Grandia by Kat Bailey

Exploring Game Boy’s True Successor, Bandai WonderSwan by Jeremy Parish

As I have mentioned before, one of the reasons I started Co-Op Critics was a desire to have longer-form discussions on games than most gaming news sites are producing these days. 1UP was a huge influence on my decision to get into podcasting as well as my desire to write about games. I started the Secret Identity podcast in 2006 in part because of my love of the 1UP podcasts. I covered games for Comic Book Resources from 2008-2010, and tired to shape a good deal of that coverage to focus more on creator interviews than news and reviews, because that’s the kind of content I was enjoying from 1UP.

And while there are 1UP alumni scattered throughout the games industry and various gaming news sites, I have always appreciated the approach that Jeremy Parish has taken to games discussion, as well as the people he surrounds himself with whenever he gets the chance. I am very much looking forward to seeing what the future holds for USgamer, and I encourage you to support what they’re doing if you want to see more of it.