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The guy who gave a negative review to Battlezone 98 Redux after playing 8k hours

Scott Smith is a kind of living Battlezone encyclopaedia. Obviously, I had to speak to him.

But not a single irritated MMO player is a patch on my own personal icon of this genre: Herp McDerperson—real name Scott Smith—who I discovered one day when I stumbled on the negative review he left on Steam for Battlezone 98 Redux (BZ98R), Rebellion's 2016 remaster of the original RTS/FPS hybrid from 1998. Over the course of an hour-long call including time-stamped chat logs and audio files from the game, which Smith has unpacked on his computer, he tells the tale of the time he played Discord detective, rubbing some feathers the wrong way and—if such a thing were possible—perhaps souring him even further on the remaster. But the question remains: Steam the eternal tattle-tale says that, even after he wrote that review, Smith poured almost 600 extra hours into BZ98R, a game that had destroyed the multiplayer scene he was part of and that was still riddled with bugs he considered unforgivable.

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