Ok, So...

Here's the thing. It's coming up to the holidays, and since I work in a place that manufactures kosher poultry, it's more of a busy time than it might be if, say, I worked for GM.

Honestly, I have a stack - literally, a whole folder of bookmarks - all set for upcoming blog posts, that I just plain haven't had time to write.

I have:

• Possibly the greatest discovery in the history of...well, ever; some guy in California has advanced a theory that is testable, and if proven accurate, SOLVES PHYSICS. A Theory Of Everything.
• A developing scandal, in which the Republican debates are being seeded with planted questions - by the Democrats. Quite literally; in a couple of cases, the plants in question were actually employees of Democratic candidates' campaigns. Go Hillary '08!
• Nintendo has had their biggest sales week... ever. Thanksgiving / Black Friday 2007 officially is the highest grossing single week in the company's history.
• And, last but not least, some blogger is being sued by a city in New Jersey because he blogged - apparently factual - information about corruption in the city's conduct of a lawsuit; the city is quite openly trying to shut him up, and the EFF is defending him.

As you can see, fun fun fun. But tonight, what brings us together is Gamespot.

See, for quite a while, Gamespot has operated a semi-reputable gaming review website. In the last couple of years, that reputation has been gradually eroding, and the editorial staff has been diminishing.

They've done something - allegedly - which seems to have driven the final nail in the coffin of their respectability; they've fired one of their most prominent reviewers, because after he gave a game a negative review, the game's parent company pulled their ad funding from Gamespot.

This says all kinds of things to me; first - since this is by no means the first game to get a bad review - this says that the manufacturer, Eidos Interactive, Inc., KNOWS GOOD AND GODDAMN WELL THEIR GAME SUCKS. How so, you ask? Simple: they're trying to browbeat their way into positive reviews, because they're hoping to capitalize as much as they can on good reviews, before word of mouth inevitably relegates their garbage software to the giant dustbin of history. To give you an idea, the Gamespot review in question gave the game - Kane and Lynch: Dead Men - a score of 6.0 out of 10. Users, on the other hand, rated it 2.6 out of 10 - in Gamespot's review parlance, "2.0-2.5: Terrible Beware, for a game in this range is almost entirely devoid of any remotely decent or fully functional features."

This also tells me that Gamespot has lost the last shred of respectability they had; if they are willing to fire reviewers, and remove "offensive" reviews, based on ad revenue and the anger of publishing companies, they might as well start issuing every game an automatic glowing review and a gold star award, like Game Informer and PC Gamer do.

At any rate, this is something that not only should never have happened, but should be dealt with by means of gamers voting with their wallets; don't buy anything Eidos makes for a while. If they can shut up a review site for honesty, then we can shut them up with bankruptcy.

Just for your edification, here's the review that got removed: