http://www.destructoid.com/rumor-gamesp … 6683.phtml

That's a damn shame, and it really shows where the industry as a whole is right now: it's all about dirty money and shitty third person action games. Bah. Regardless of whether anyone has agreed or disagreed with Jeff's actual review content or final grading, I find it hard to believe that anyone could agree with Gamestop's almost immediate firing of one of their top guns because (apparently) Kane and Lynch sucks and he wanted people to know about it.

Wow, this is some twisted $hit right here. It's funny because I actually read this review last night and it's not like he took a nail bat to the game - yeah, he poked holes into what it presented but he also pointed out were the game really worked (multiplayer scenarios).

This reminds me of the seventh grade when I answered a question that asked my opinion and I got it wrong because the teacher didn't see eye to eye with my answer.

I think Gamespot sucks regardless, but when it begins to kowtow to advertiser pressures, it cleary reaches an all-time low.

"I think Gamespot sucks regardless, but when it begins to kowtow to advertiser pressures, it cleary reaches an all-time low."

I'm surprised they didn't reach this point earlier.  The whole site is a goddamn ad, and I mean that literally, I mean, is it possible to sell out even more ad space then they do?  Its not uncommon to see 50%+ of the screen covered in adverts.

Today:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic

This's the main reason why I don't rely too much on "game journalists."

Back when I used to subscribe to EGM, it actually discouraged me from buying games.

Then I stopped buying their damn magazine, and actually taking a look at the games myself, and then actually started spending my money on games.

Besides, when even decent games are $20, and an issue of EGM is $7, as are game rentals about $7, well...I think you see where I'm going with this.

If I'm going to spend 35% of a game's price tag, I might as well at least have actually played a sample of the game. Then again, why pay to rent a game, when you can rent a game for free?

OF COURSE, that's all THE EXACT OPPOSITE of what you're talking about.

Then again, it seems that "game journalists" have the exact opposite opinion that I do; then again, their opinions often reflect what the publishers supporting them think, and these "journalists" can feel free to bash a game when the publishers aren't giving them any money to talk about it.

...

On the plus side, if you're actually legitimate "games journalist," all sponsors care about are number ratings; I doubt they actually bother to read the actual review written, so the way around this, would be top give the game a favorable number rating, but to blast it in the writing. After all, if you think the game's a piece of shit, and you see a surprising number rating, you're more likely to read the review.

I don't know about anyone else but when a site tries to shove that much advertising down my throat it just turns me off. The only reason I go to gamespot is to see them trash the latest movie to video game translations.

Of course, opinions are like a$$holes, everybody's got one and they all stink.

And I agree about gaming mags... why pay for opinions when yours is the one that matters to you and ultimately decides what to buy.

Well, you know, a company spends millions of dollars and 1-2 years development time in making a game, they figure they should get some leniency when the reviewers tell them their game stinks. I totally understand that line of thinking. I just don't work for Eidos and as an unbiased game fan (I couldn't care less about the game), their politics just outright suck. If you're going to ask for reviews, you better be able to live with what the people put forward. The people behind Lair need to learn that lesson, before they invest time and money in a game that sucks.

So now we have:

"Our game is art, dammit!"
"No, your game sucks...Live with it"
"...You're fired"

Question is, who's worse: Eidos for trying to get the guy fired (at their expense) or Gamespot for being chickenshits and giving in?

In any case, check out the user review score for Kane and Lynch. 2.3 from 2000+ user reviews. LOL.

I like to think of my magazine subscription as buying a player's guide and getting a free magazine subscription as a cheap bonus.

Edit: Well, scratch that, spoke too soon. Nintendo Power doesn't seem to offer your choice of Player's Guide anymore--the only option I see is "The Legend of Zelda®: Phantom Hourglass Strategy Guide - Special Digest Version!" which probably means a 30-page pamphlet that ends with " to find out what to do after completing dungeon 1, pick up The Legend of Zelda®: Phantom Hourglass Strategy Guide - Special Deluxe Version!"

I guess this is the "not much" in the "What does this change mean to you? Not much, really" portion of the Future US takeover announcement.

Edit2: Or maybe it's because they apparently stopped printing their own player's guides. "Officially licensed Player's Guides are being published and distributed by Prima Games." For a while they were publishing their own in tandem with Prima versions, which I always thought was a little weird... too bad, I used to swear by the Nintendo guides.

...sorry for derailing the thread.

I don't know about you, but bad reviews could work just the opposite - you WANT to play the game to SEE what makes it so BAD.

The more outrageously a person blasts something, I should think any skeptic's first response would be "It can't be THAT bad, can it?" just given the nature of being a skeptic.

I mean, people check out Rockstar's games because of all the bad news press they get, if only because your thirteen year-old is just discovering the joys of guns and sticking-it-to-the-man, if only for pissing their parents off.

A bad review for a game can actually still work in the game's favor, but it's going to be hard to spin suspicions that this reviewer was blammed for nothing less than giving a game a bad review; if anything, blamming him sends the signal that the reviewer was right, and that he actually carried any semblance of power.

Yes and no...Depends on how much interest I have in the game. I bought X-Men vs Street Fighter on PSX despite horrid (and well-founded) reviews, but I'll never bother with the likes of Unlimited Saga or any of the recent Mana games because I'm not expecting miracles and if I play an RPG nowadays, I expect it to be really good. Frankly, a good review of a game I have no interest in is just as worthless.

I do admit...I always did want to play Deadly Arts, Mortal Kombat Advance and Superman 64 just to see if they warranted scores near zero, but I'd never pay actual money for the experience. And I'll never understand the bashing Atari 2600 E.T. gets nowadays...Not the greatest game ever or even a great game, but it's stupid to think it's responsible for an entire crash of the videogame market. I rather enjoy it.

I remember renting that sucker.

If he was in fact fired for the rumored reason, obviously Gamespot is the worst of the two.  Eidos is doing nothing wrong in trying to further its interests.  Eidos is not expected to be unbiased.  You would expect Eidos to behave this way (especially after seeing its recent financial troubles).  A game review site is expected to be unbiased and both Gamespot and parent CNET have repeatedly made this claim.

One thing that I think is interesting (and may or may not be related to the above) is that game reviewers have far more power than reviewers of other media.  Think about it.  Finding out for yourself if a game is good is a lot harder than finding out if a movie, book, or CD is good.  And by harder, I mean both more difficult and more costly (cost measured in both time and money).  It's really a pain in the ass, especially if it's a brand new game.  Rental stores take forever to get new releases in stock, demos aren't available (save for XBLA titles), and that's if it's a major title.  If it's a niche title, you're pretty much never going to know unless you buy the thing yourself.  With a model like this, it's no wonder people rely on game reviews so heavily, especailly with $60 being the standard on 360 and PS3.  If companies want to take reviewers out of the equation, one "easy" way would be to simply cut the damn prices down to $20.  For $20, if it has a decent premise and looks cool, what do I care if it's not the greatest thing ever?

I sort of agree with the above, but that's also why I say personal accounts are more important than magazine reviews. Really, if a magazine reviews 20 games and 17 get scores in the 7-10 range...Are they really telling you anything? Especially when a number of games get the crappy mini-reviews or the "I'm only reviewing this because I have to and I'm not happy about it" treatment (you can normally tell when they start nitpicking things). On the same hand, you go to a message board and a topic on the game and you find people discussing the pros and cons of the game...You get more useful information that way, as long as you filter it (in other words, don't believe everything "FFFanboy4life!!!" says about Dirge of Cerberus).

Frankly, I've found magazine and most large-scale professional gaming site reviews largely bogus since the end of the 32/64 bit generation and only pick up a magazine if I want the cover stories or the pretty pictures (one of the benefits of a free Game Informer subscription). I don't really care about the guy who got fired, but I see this as a good thing because I feel the industry has been this way for awhile and it's good to get the dirty laundry out in the open a little bit.

If people hear more, please share. I am interested to see how this pans out. Has Gertsmann made an official announcement?

cheers,

-avatar!

I just think the way they mechanically review games these days, or how they're expected to do so, is TGDBFGS. Let me tell you why.

Number ratings are shallow (We give Steaming Pile of Goddamn Bullfucking Goatshit a 7...out of 10!) and especially how they've extended to rating people on social networking sites.

Number ratings mean nothing by themselves. When judging something, you have to provide the guidelines you're judging it by.

Sometimes this's done by giving headings, "Gameplay," "Plot," "Music," etc., but then, what makes a good game, plot, music, etc.? What criterion are they judging those components by? And, more often then not, they don't even separate info by headings anymore.

It may be possible that Gerstmann may have been expressing discontent with his job more than anything.

I don't know about you, but I think he said that Kane & Lynch's characters were uninteresting too many times. It's hard to argue with how shooting controls or covering may have been stinted, but whether you like the characters is a bit more subjective.

I think reviewing games, movies, art in general is subjective. There are probably people out there who think Kane & Lynch is wonderful, but so what? Gertsmann is entitled to share his opinion, and I actually appreciate the fact that he said the characters are uninteresting, because that's huge for me! No, I don't think he said it too many times, and in fact I thought his review was very good.

-avatar!

It seemed to me that the tone of his review(s) was mostly the result of how disappointed he was that the game failed to deliver upon its potential.  Otherwise he just gave his honest opinion and he even brought up how Freedom Fighters, a game from the same developer, had handled things better.  If anything it could be what he said at the end of the video review about how people shouldn't pay full price for it that was deemed too controversial.  Even so, I can't believe that Gamespot would fire him just to appease Eidos.  That's just terrible.

mr.gerstmann was one of the funniest people on the gamespot crew, to many he was mr.gamespot/main reviewer.

This is still a rumor right?

But it reminds me of Nintendo Power awarding all the Nintendo releases with the highest scores of the month (wait they still do that don't they?). Sure most of them might've been the console's best, but you couldn't help detect that ugly poison of self-promotion within.

If this is in fact true, Eidos shouldn't have been too disappointed by the Gamespot review. Most of the industry seems to have arrived at the same conclusion as per metacritic... (http://www.metacritic.com/games/platfor … nchdeadmen)

/long-haired dude looks like a local radio talk show guy here in CT sans the 80's specs
//game looks like typical trash that passes for gaming today and total, utter violence junk anyway

Actually, EGM is $12 for a year, and Nintendo Power subscriptions have gone up and include less incentives now that Future US took over just a couple issues ago.

As far as Gerstmann coming out and talking, people have said he was given a severance package in exchange for signing an NDA not to talk about the circumstances of his firing.  That's pretty lame in itself.

"But it reminds me of Nintendo Power awarding all the Nintendo releases with the highest scores of the month (wait they still do that don't they?). Sure most of them might've been the console's best, but you couldn't help detect that ugly poison of self-promotion within."

I don't know about this... pretty much every game NOA published was at the top of its class.  The only time I distinctly remember them giving a score that I felt was undeserved was F-Zero X, which I felt they placed too low!  I've come across the point of NP's blatent self-promotion, but honestly I can't remember when I felt that a really bad game got a score it didn't deserve.

Has anyone read Gamespot's official announcement on this yet?

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6183666.ht … s;title;2#

I don't know about anyone else, but I got sick of seeing the words "absolutely not"

If he was fired for the review GS was really stupid about it... they should have kept him on staff a few more months, creating some buffer room and then fired him. Not trying to write a pamplet on how to fire someone for the wrong reason(s) but it's that simple to avoid a firestorm.

Regardless, it seems like a pretty see-through PR statement.

Yeah, that official statement wreaked of damage control from the first sentence.