The Gamespot corruption/review story has been floating around the Internet for close to a week now but I have been holding off writing anything until more details come in. It just seems however many more details flood in the story gets worse and worse.

First, a brief synopsis. Gamespot has been hyping up the release of Kane & Lynch for quite some time now. They have had multiple banners around their website, as well as an overall Kane & Lynch skin for their pages. If history could provide any example, it would be that the review of this much anticipated and hyped game would follow suit. Kane & Lynch will receive a top notch score.

But no… Kane & Lynch got destroyed by the reviewers. Imagine spending tens of thousand of advertising dollars with a company only to have that company turn around and completely trash your product. That is their job right? To provide honest reviews? Not this time said Eidos. The developing company put a lot of pressure on Gamespot to make some changes. Completely unbelievably, Gamespot caved. Not only did they make edits to the plain text review, but they removed the video review. The real icing on the cake however came when they fired Jeff Gerstmann, their editorial director of 11 years, the one who actually wrote the review - seemingly without explanation. The implication of this firing? It must be Gamespot policy to be bias on reviews.

Since the original story there have been statements by both Gamespot and Gerstmann. Neither party have either confirmed or denied these rumours - which to me, and most other people, is essentially a confirmation.

What do we do now? How do we find an impartial source? Well I personally started to notice this trend with Gamespot about a year ago now, and have been annoyed with them for some time. I have been using www.gamerankings.com to attempt to get an overall look at games. Generally you do get a better picture, but you still have to deal with the reviews of the major corporations either dragging down or pulling up the reviews (if that really is the case). Over the next few days I am going to do a little research on comparison of reviews among companies.

I am going to start with my most annoyed comparison. Madden 08 vs All-Pro Football 2k8. Most people that know me well have already heard me express my disgust at how APF got mostly obliterated by reviews while Madden was praised. Madden may very well be a fine game - but in a side to side comparison it stands out as an utter piece of garbage. Look for this probably tomorrow.

Following that I am going to have a deeper look at Gamespot vs. The World to attempt to find some other inaccuracies.

Until then, please do enjoy the original Gerstmann Video Review of Kane & Lynch that was pulled from their site.