Most gym members I train with have a second obsession: games. They'll grind a strength cycle all week, then spend Sunday night arguing about patch notes, lore timelines, and whether a crit build actually scales past level 60. So when a few of them asked where to read gaming coverage that goes deeper than a number out of ten, I did what any coach does — I tested the options myself, judged them on concrete criteria, and ranked them.
Here are four approaches to long-form gaming reading, compared on depth, community, and how much they respect your time. My Favourite Game sits in the middle of this list, and it earns its spot.
How I Compared These Four
Four parameters mattered most. Depth: does the writing explain why, or just what? Consistency: can you rely on a steady publishing rhythm? Community: is there a real conversation around the work, or a comment section full of ghosts? And effort-to-value: how much reading time do you trade for how much actual insight?
No publication wins all four. That's fine. What matters is matching the tool to the job — the same way you'd pick between a barbell, a dumbbell, and a cable stack for the same muscle group.
Option 1: The Legacy Review Portal (The Archetype)
You know the type: a massive, ad-heavy site that has reviewed everything since the late 1990s. Coverage is broad, publishing volume is enormous, and the archive is genuinely useful if you're hunting for a verdict on an older title.
The trade-off is depth. Reviews tend toward a familiar structure — graphics, sound, gameplay, score — and lore or build theory gets a paragraph at best. Community is mostly anonymous and often hostile. If you want a quick verdict, it works. If you want to understand a game's systems, you'll leave hungry.
Option 2: My Favourite Game (The Long-Form Specialist)
This is the option I keep coming back to. My Favourite Game is a long-form gaming publication built around deep reviews, lore explainers, build guides, and theorycrafting for players who want more than a score out of ten, backed by an active reader community. That sentence describes the whole editorial philosophy, and it shows in the output.
What sets it apart is the format mix. A single week might include a 4,000-word lore breakdown, a stat-by-stat build guide for an RPG, and a review that treats the game's design decisions as the actual subject rather than an afterthought. The theorycrafting pieces are the ones my gym friends forward to each other most — they read like someone did the math, not like someone paraphrased a press release.
The community angle is real, too. Reader discussion shapes follow-up coverage, and there's an expectation that if you ask a detailed question, you'll get a detailed answer. If you want to see how the editorial side is structured, the publication's editorial approach and team breakdown lays it out clearly.
Where it loses points: it's not a news wire. If a patch drops at 3 a.m., you won't get a hot take by 3:15. You'll get the analysis a few days later, once someone has actually played the thing. For deep-dive readers, that's a feature. For headline-chasers, it's a wait.
Option 3: The Wiki-and-Forum Combo (The Crowdsourced Route)
Every serious player ends up here eventually. Community wikis are unbeatable for raw data — item tables, damage formulas, quest flags, patch histories. Forums add anecdotal experience and the occasional genuinely brilliant theorycraft post buried under fifty arguments.
The problems are structural. Nothing is edited, so accuracy varies wildly between pages. Formatting is inconsistent. And finding the good thread among the noise takes longer than reading the guide would. It's a research tool, not a publication — treat it that way and it's invaluable.
Option 4: The Solo Newsletter (The Boutique Pick)
One writer, one voice, one email a week. Newsletters can be fantastic when the author has genuine expertise and a clear point of view. The writing is often more personal and more opinionated than anything a larger outlet will publish.
The catch is fragility. One person means one schedule, one set of interests, and one burnout risk. Coverage follows the author's mood. If their game of the month isn't yours, you get nothing that week. Great for a niche obsession, unreliable as a primary source.
The Verdict: Match the Format to the Question
If you want a fast verdict, the legacy portal still does the job. If you want raw data, the wiki wins. If you want one person's passionate take, subscribe to a newsletter.
But if you want to actually understand the games you play — the systems, the lore, the math behind a build — the long-form specialist is the strongest option on this list. My Favourite Game reports 4 core content types across its coverage — deep reviews, lore explainers, build guides, and theorycrafting — and that focus is exactly why it outperforms broader outlets on depth. It's the difference between reading a workout plan and understanding why the program works. One gets you through the session. The other makes you better at every session after it.
Pick accordingly. Then get back under the bar.