I knew shenanigans were going on when I first saw the Kane & Lynch Video Review from Jeff Gerstmann over at GameSpot… lead editor.
I subscribe to GameSpot, and was hanging on their video reviews to steer me in the right direction this holiday season, so I was hitting up the site every 30mins or so while we were waiting for Kane & Lynch, Crysis, Assassin’s Creed, etc. etc. reviews. Basically all the hot games we were waiting for.
I noticed that finally the Kane & Lynch Video Review had been posted on the site, so I checked it out.
Much to my surprised it was a really negative review… Jeff just tore into IO Interactive and EIDOS for the game. Said the graphics were shoddy, game play was crap, shooting was frustrating and squad dynamics were a complete joke. He also mentioned the bugs in the game and lack of anything original made it a chore to play.
I had not seen a review that negative or that “blog-like” from GameSpot, ever. I was a little surprised that rough cut of the review was allowed to be pushed out.
This is where it gets good…
A few hours later I watched the GameTrailers video review of Kane & Lynch, and it was a much more positive review.
So I went back to the GameSpot site to re-watch the original Video Review to see if they had annotated it, or maybe I just missed something… but it was gone. There was no official word as to what happened, and the forums for the game spiked up with speculation. You could tell something was going on.
Now we see that there hasn’t been an On the Spot show for 2 weeks already, normally the host is Jeff Gerstmann and now it looks like the shit hit the fan and GameSpot fired him after pressure from EIDOS and their K&L advertising campaign.
And to top it all off, Penny-Arcade gives us their take on the whole thing.
After this, and the absolute lack of Video Reviews for most of the games GameSpot has been reviewing, and the On the Spot show generally sucking since Rich left, I’m going to go ahead and cancel my subscription. GameSpot can go ahead and figure out what kind of game site they are in the mean time. Hopefully they get back to the Rich-era again of video production and quality… I had no idea he was such a keystone until he left, and everything just started sliding down hill.
