Your Hot Cup of Rant

I really want to be happy right now.

I would love to do a little dance of joy around this wonderful world of ours.

I want to grab a little party hat, run around in the streets with a boombox blaring “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead”, occasionally doing that stupid little dance move from Singing in the Rain where you jump in the air and click your heels together all happy like. I REALLY REALLY do.

But these fuckers can never make it easy, and this is where the problem comes in. Because no matter how happy I WANT to be, I am forced into the uncomfortable position of defending the indefensible, because I WANT to talk about this, but I am not afforded an opportunity to be smug and amused, because the entire situation just reeks of stupid bullshit.

Okay. I suppose it behooves me to try and explain exactly what I’m so torn about, so here you go: according to all registered reports, Jeff Gerstmann is no longer a Gamespot employee.

And I WANT to be happy about that, I really do, but the situation is rather… tainted. Specifically, tainted by the knowledge that the REASON he is no longer an employee of Gamespot may have something to do with the fact that he gave a bad video game a bad score, and that this act may have cost him his job.

And that’s something of a problem. Because, you see, Jeff Gerstmann is, and I’m not going to even try and be kind about this, a pox upon the industry he was, until recently, parasitically attached to. He is an idiot savant whose talent du jour is writing terrible, factually inaccurate reviews, and that I am not the first person to say so does not make the assertion any less valid. He is a fool who is admired by fools, and in a fair and just world, he would be working at some middling nine to five job somewhere far, far away from the public eye and not out there poisoning the collective consciousness of the gaming public.

I really, really loathe Jeff Gerstmann.

To be fair, there are absolutely reasons for this thing. Let us assume, for one moment, that Gerstmann was fired for reasons other than giving a bad game a bad score. If that were indeed the case, I would wholeheartedly be willing to, should I happen to meet the guy or gal who made the final say on the matter, buy that man or woman a drink and toast them as an asset to their company. I mean, don’t get me wrong; I’m not celebrating the fact that a man’s primary source of income was snatched from his meaty fingers; I’m saying that Gerstmann was the worst reviewer on Gamespot, even behind the guy who looks like he dresses himself in a subway tunnel and thinks polygon boobies are scary, and the asshole who thinks farming is the best part of Monster Hunter.

Discarding the above-noted Wario Ware stupidity, the man has a track record of dumb following him around; so much, in fact, that you could essentially pick any review he’s ever written and say “Hey, something’s wrong here”.

I know everyone got miffed about the fact that he gave Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess an 8.8, but I couldn’t care less about that (and I also don’t think this act was the move of some gutsy maverick who plays by his own rules; it’s very nearly a fucking nine, people, stop being stupid). What I do care about is the fact that he spent two pages analyzing every minor detail of the product and never once mentioned that more than a few of the elements within bore a striking resemblance to the PS2 game Okami (which came out a full two months prior). I mean, we were all aware that Okami was more than a little bit “based on” the Zelda concept, but that LoZ:TP seemed to share so many elements with Okami, when Okami had kind-of sort-of done them first… well, that’s just the teensiest bit of an oversight, especially when that sort of critical thinking is YOUR FUCKING JOB.

This is a guy who made the observation that WCW/NWO Thunder was a game that LOOKS like wrestling ought to, but plays perhaps a bit… not so good, which is a viewpoint that is echoed by absolutely NO ONE. Thunder is, without question or exception, regarded by virtually everyone who has played it as one of the worst games ever made, regardless of console, genre, or age of the product. It is an abysmal, horrendous pile of shit, and virtually no one would tell you any different, except, perhaps, for Jeff Gerstmann.

In Gamespot’s history, they have managed to avoid the urge to give out “perfect” game scores, with four exceptions, and they’ve not scored a game a perfect “10″ score in the past seven years. Of the four “perfect” scores the site has awarded, two were handed down by Jeff himself. One, for LoZ: Ocarina of Time, is at least vaguely flirting with sane, rational thinking and is generally a score that most people wouldn’t argue against too strenuously; but the other “perfect” game was Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3, which is either the work of an asshole or someone who is barking at the moon mad. When this sort of thing is your career, you will inevitably be expected to defend the scores you give out to games, sometimes several years after the fact. The idea that Gerstmann looked at this score, for this game, and thought it a defensible score to give is either ludicrous (in the sense that he didn’t even think about this possibility) or the work of a douchebag (because he really, truly believed that A FUCKING SKATEBOARDING GAME was among the pinnacle of gaming achievement). I mean, let’s be reasonable here: titles that are parts of constantly updating and evolving franchises (Madden whatever, Smackdown whatever, Tony Hawk whatever) are, by their very existence, not going to be “perfect” unless they are the very first title in the series because, honestly, THERE IS NO ORIGINALITY TO SPEAK OF IN THAT KIND OF GAME. At the end of the day, the most recent Tony Hawk title and the very first Tony Hawk title share a strong amount of similarities, so much so that someone who had never played a video game before in their lives and was not even remotely aware that such a franchise existed, could readily identify both games as being part of the same series in minutes. That the third one, specifically, did so many wonderful things that the second one somehow did not do that it needed, nay, DESERVED to be considered perfect? Bullshit. Kay?

(Oh yes, before I forget: while only four titles ever earned a perfect ten score, another seven achieved the near perfection that would be a 9.9 score. Two are also Tony Hawk titles. Three were reviewed by Gerstmann. I think you can connect the dots without my help.)

This is a guy who reviewed Sega Classics Collection and didn’t mention but one time, more in passing than in actual evaluation, arguably the best game on the damn disc (and, while we’re on that subject, wrote a review so vague on the product that you could Babblefish the damn thing into Russian and back and it would be about as informational as it is right now). This is a guy who, when asked what games make you cool, took the topic seriously (seriously, compare his answers to those of Greg Kasavin, the only person on the site with any sort of actual, you know, credibility before he resigned to go actually MAKE games for a living). This is a guy who apparently decided it’d be mad sexy to dye his hair blonde, as if looking like Eminem Peanut was going to attract the ladies.

Fuck him. Seriously.

That said…

Look, Kane and Lynch is a shitty game. Most everyone who has reviewed the game acknowledges this thing. It does not play well, it is not enjoyable, it should have spent more time in development, whatever. Assuming that, yes, Gerstmann was terminated for properly noting that a weak game was, in fact, a weak game… well, that’s the sorriest load of bullshit I done ever heard.

Is this really where the gaming industry is at this point?

Everyone ASSUMES game reviewers are corrupt (assuming they care at all). It’s an assumption that’s not very hard to come to; after the third GTA title in a row wins all sorts of video gaming accolades despite the fact that it’s more or less functionally identical to its older brethren, we kind of clue into this thing. Very few games are TRULY deserving of a score greater than 8, and I can think of, MAYBE, one or two that came out this year… which would be probably ten percent of the actual amount of games that recieved such a score. It is, it seems, simply a part of the business: if you review games, you are either being bribed or bullied into scoring some of them higher than you would normally consider, because that is how the industry works.

But come on now. If a fuckton of your advertising budget for the year is coming from a company, and they hand you a high-profile title to review with the expectation that said game SHOULD get some sort of a “reasonable” score, doesn’t it behoove you as a corporation to at least PRETEND you have some sort of credibility? 1UP seems to think this is important; they scored Assassin’s Creed below the “normal” level, they had one of their paid shills (Dan “Shoe” Hsu) come out and publicly denounce the notion that anyone on 1UP is taking bribes, they more or less seem intent upon convincing the average gamer that they are beyond being bribed and coerced so as to convince each and every one of us that THEY are a shining bastion of objectivity.

They also pulled a low scored review of Neverwinter Nights 2 for dubious reasons, but they, at least, claimed that one of their non-contract writers wrote it and not an actual permanent staffer; this doesn’t make the situation any better, but it DOES, at least, say “Hey, we’re not doing it because someone bribed us; we’re doing it because this review isn’t so good”.

Right.

IGN is more or less accused (more so than any other game review website) of having a 7-10 review range, but they’ve largely managed to avoid any sorts of significant scandals related to pulled reviews or fired employees through this. They, too, claim objectivity to a certain extent, though they’re not nearly as defensive about the situation as many others are, presumably because they feel they have little to defend; after all, they haven’t pulled any reviews or fired any staffers for giving a game a lower score than the parent company wanted, though the fact that most people consider their scores artificially inflated doesn’t seem to register with them.

The point I’m trying to make is this: the various and sundry game review websites that exist seem to actively desire that we perceive them as fair and objective in their video game ratings, Gamespot included. This specific act, the act of canning someone because they were, perhaps, a little too hard on the games they reviewed… it is a slap in the face of quality and objectivity, no matter who the target. That the target was someone who had been with the company for over a decade and had (inexplicably) managed to attract a fanbase who would really only read the site for his reviews only makes the act more blatantly obvious.

Assuming this was an act that was committed exactly for the reasons we’ve been supplied, the intent was to show other staffers that towing the company line is not an option, but the results are that the corruption of the gaming industry has been made incredibly apparent, to the point that we can see nothing else but the comical dollar signs in the eyes of the chief executives as each 8 and 9 score is handed down to the hottest new titles on the market, regardless of actual quality or value. We are left with little option as consumers in this case: do we continue to trust a company who claims objectivity but speaketh with forked tongue and fires employees for saying what they think? Do we move on to another site, where the integrity has proven itself to be no better and, in some cases, seems to be even worse? Do we invest our trust into indy sites, who have no superiors to answer to but also have no quality control filter and may well review a good game in a horrible manner simply because there is no hierarchy for the reviewer to report to?

One longs for the days of magazines like Diehard Gamefan… though their fanboyism was rampant and apparent, at least we could believe that, perhaps, they were not so jaded as to give terrible games fantastic scores without SOME sort of reason behind it (which may or may not explain their demise, oddly enough).

In the end, though, the point remains: Jeff Gerstmann was terminated from his position that he had held for over a decade. Management says that he was terminated because of “tone” considerations (he was too much of a dick, too often, when doing his job). Others say it was because he refused to tow the company line and spoke his mind about things he shouldn’t have. Me? I know damn well he’ll have another job in the industry (if he so desires it) by the end of next year, but I can only hope that he might perhaps find a job doing something, anything else, not because I think he should be revolted or disgusted that the industry has done this horrible thing to him, but frankly, because I never want to see his name attached to another video game review as long as I live.

Fuck it. The world might need an enema, but ding dong, the asshole’s gone. Hurrah.