Spyro Slaughter 2

One rule about articles about video games in mainstream news sources is that they always get at least one thing wrong. USA Today, reporting a treatment for ADHD that involves video games, went to print with this:

"Whether speeding down a virtual street in Sony's Gran Turismo or
slaying Spyro the Dragon..."

Hm, what's wrong with that?*

(Spotted by my eagle-eyed defender of video game justice friend Ely)

*What's wrong with it, in case you don't know, is that Spyro the Dragon is the cutesy, childlike playable star character in the Spyro series of games. And although I have lost track of the series over the years I am fairly sure that there is no game in which you slay him. It may seem nitpicky, but this lack of even basic research in reports about video games happens consistently in major media outlets. When filing stories about how "gee whiz, these crazy computertron games take in more money than the movies" (a dubious claim to begin with) they don't bother to give the games the same respect. Imagine an article referencing "Stephen Speelburg's 'Killing Private Ryan'" and you'll see what I'm getting at here. This lets people like Jack Thompson get away with convincing America that Grand Theft Auto is a game about killing hookers to get "points," which features a graphic sex minigame as part of its normal gameplay. Very often the authors of the article don't even do the most basic of Googling, and report on nonexistant games like Mortal Combat, Shadow Heart and Gunslinger Girls 2.