Stay away from Gamespot - since Honesty is out and Bias is in!

We have all heard about how may news organizations push certain agendas or stories usually as the result of pressure from their parent companies. The days of honest unbiased reporting seem to be dead.

I guess then it should come as no surprise a story I came across earlier today about Gamespot.com.

For years I went to Gamespot to get reviews on games. Their staff seemed to give the best unbiased reviews of games and covered everything from game play and graphics, to story and experience. They compared new games to similar genres to give a complete picture of what to expect. Mostly they were honest. When they felt a game was not up to par, they said so, giving sometimes brutal reviews, but always backing up their score with fact they experienced in the games.

That is until one reviewer gave a less than savory review of a game, and was fired a week later. Of course the parent company says the review had nothing to do with it. However it was then leaked the parent company CNET, which owns Gamespot.com spent tons of money on an advertising campaign for the game, just to have Gamestop tear it a new a-hole.

What has added to the “fact” that they incidents were related is that within the past 2 months 4 more of the senior reviewers, long appreciated for honest reviews, have left Gamespot.

Last week in an interview one said flat out that they were approached about their reviews and told that certain games should warrant higher scores. Amazingly these are the games being advertised by CNET and it’s children companies…

But the firing was unrelated, yeah right!

Well I am sorry to say I can no longer go the website for new game reviews, knowing the new review staff are mere puppets giving higher then average scores to mediocre games. This really sucks since there are very few robust review sites that are not also game manufacturer or retail sites, which you know leads to skewed reviews.

I guess the all mighty dollar agenda wins again.

On a side note, the advertisements must have worked as the game, Kane and Lynch sold over 1 million copies since December, and yet the user forums and player reviews all gave the game “HALF” the score as what Gamespot did with an average score of 3 out of 10. Too bad we had to lose a great site just so another crappy game could sell a million copies and lead to a probably just as crappy sequal.