It all started with a Kotaku post under “Rumor” that Jeff Gerstmann, longtime editor and game reviewer at Gamespot, had been fired because of pressure from Eidos, publisher of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, after Gerstmann gave the game a 6.0/10. Eidos has a huge ad campaign running on Gamespot that had to be redirected from pointing to the review to pointing at the official Kane & Lynch site after word of the review score got out.

A Penny Arcade cartoon later, the Internet was full of gossip and no comments as everyone sought to get to the bottom of it all. The text review of the game was edited, and the video review disappeared under fishy circumstances.

Since then, there has been some moving and shaking, but nothing has been really determined. Gamers seem to be coming to a boil all over the Internet about this latest controversy because if indeed Gerstmann was fired mainly for not catering to the advertiser, it threatens game journalism’s integrity.

The most disturbing piece of the whole mystery comes from an anonymous commentator on Valleywag known as only “gamespot.” Kotaku summed up his several comments. Together, they paint the picture that Gamespot is becoming more and more advertiser-friendly and business-controlled with less editorial control. That’s not exactly what gamers want from their game review houses, so it is really getting people riled up now.

This whole situation is disgusting with each new bit of info popping out through the cracks. Enjoy your brand-building CNET family, you just pissed off your core readerbase. Have fun living that down. When you start wondering why your hits are plummeting into the crapper, just look back to this.

-Nikilii, commenter at Kotaku.com

My personal take on this whole situation is that there must be some hidden facts that we just don’t know yet about this situation. Even though the timing seems right if Gamespot was going to make a drastic move like this and get all the gamers upset–considering the big game push for the holidays is on a down swing–I don’t think that Gamespot would have overlooked the timing in relation to the Kane & Lynch fiasco. They would have had to realize that they should wait just a few weeks simply to offset any suspicious correlations.

Most journalistic institutions also understand the need to keep the business end of things away from the editorial side, and I wouldn’t jump to blame Gamespot of trying to combine the two until there was more hard evidence.

Rumor is that more will be heard officially on Tuesday.

Until then, gamers can only wait, argue and speculate over whether they should be suspicious of one of the major gaming hubs of the Web.

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Gamer 2.0 put together a nice little vacation guide for Guild Wars on where you can go to step back from the crazy world of battling guilds.  I mean, who can do that straight for 9-hour shifts without taking a break to stop and smell the roses?  or at least gaze at the Bone Palace?

Take a break, man.  Step back and just appreciate the beauty…

Don’t get too close to that Bone Palace though.  The whole “souls still scream in pain” doesn’t sound like relaxing rain drop sound effects.  Do visit the Mouth of Torment though.  It doesn’t bite.

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I don’t think I have ever scrolled down to the bottom of a videogame review to see how many out of ten it was awarded and based my decision on what game to by on that number. In fact, I think the only reason numbers are present in reviews these days is so fanboys can know which comment boards to flame.

Back in the day, I used to use scores as a basis for comparison–How good is the new Zelda in comparison to last gen’s version? How good is GoldenEye in comparison to Perfect Dark? How good is Halo 3 in comparison to Solitaire? You know, that sort of stuff.

The HDR Knowledge column on GameSetWatch about game ratings and reviews. The column tries to find the meaning behind review numbers in the world today.

While that may be nothing more than conspiracy, there is incongruency in the text of the review itself. Is a game that is not for everyone a bad game? Not every person enjoys action games like Halo, yet the series (deservedly in some regards) receives superb reviews. Why then does a game like Dodonpachi or Ibara receive disappointing reviews for the same reason? Does a small audience for a game mean the game itself is bad? This cannot be the case, as some “diamonds in the rough” such as Treasure’s Sin and Punishment, and Sega’s Panzer Dragoon Saga received fantastic reviews in their time, largely attributing their lack of success to either lack of exposure, or poor marketing.

Some good games do still go under the radar even after receiving very high reviews of scoring. Psychonauts comes to mind.

Scores are not terrible, but they are inherently flawed. Something is seriously wrong with attributing a numerical score to a subjective activity as reviewing, especially when, past graphical and aural prowess, the gaming rating criteria are in many ways, unexplainable. Not many can explain why Halo, a game series with uninteresting and often terrible single player level design is still so incredibly fun, nor can anyone explain why Super Robot Wars, a series that has largely remained unchanged for 15 years, is still so addicting in each installment.

I am a supporter of a world without numbers on reviews. Many top gaming outlets have tried at one time to do away with them, and I applaud the ones that have succeeded. Even if one reviewer absolutely hates a game, their comments and description may sound appealing to a reader who is a fan of the genre. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

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