By Pentadact

Jeff Gerstmann – whose firing from GameSpot, er, doesn’t particularly coincide with his only partially complimentary review of a game which is advertised elsewhere on GameSpot – is sort of like Saddam Hussein. You’re glad he’s gone, because he was clearly terrible, but you can’t help but wonder if the reason was even worse. A few things:

1. I genuinely don’t believe he was fired for giving a low score to a game for which they were running a large amount of advertising. Even the people who say they’re certain this was precisely the case generally go on to admit that it makes no sense for any party concerned. But much more fervently, I believe it’s childish to get angry about a situation about which you have no reliable information.
   
    

   The one party that stated it outright as fact, as if their source were the firer themselves, later clarified that they’d heard it was an ongoing problem with his ‘tone’, but that “it’s firmly believed internally” that he was some sort of sacrificial offering to the gods of Eidos. That’s the level of journalism they’re conducting when slamming another company for unethical journalism.
   

   
    
2. When Jeff Gerstmann is too opinionated and vitriolic for your publication, you are essentially voiceless. Milk has stronger convictions than that man. I can think of no-one who says less or sounds less convinced of it. The most he can muster about Kane & Lynch is that “You probably might not want to buy it at full price”, and a score of ‘Fair’.
   
    
3. For anyone who failed to memorise the formula I provided for how to convert Gamespot scores to true percentages, 6.0 works out as 56%. Remember that because they can’t go below 1, or give decimals ending in digits other than 5, they’re marking out of ninteteen with a Gerstmann-stupidity offset of 1.
   
    
4. Generally, I think that if your advertisement is more than two-million pixels large, you might be overdoing it. It’s always slightly embarrassing when it becomes clear the marketing blitzkrieg for a game is out of proportion to gamers’ excitement about it, and I think the ability to “make your own INSANE TRAILER!” for a dated third-person shooter that so far no-one has liked strayed pretty deep into that territory. They sent out little promo videos to all of us in e-mails that actually referred to them as ‘virals’, and I felt like replying: “If you actually call them virals, no-one’s going to post them.” Kotaku, of course, posted them.

   In the same rather optimistic way, I often get reader letters for our mag with the subject line “Letter of the month” – for which there’s a decent graphics card on offer. Wow, is it? Phew, one less decision to make this month!

   
    
5. Thanks, Tycho, for damning everyone in my profession to at least another five years of constant, vehement accusations of corruption every time we like something. Gamespot haven’t even changed their score or removed the review, they’ve given a 60% game a 6.0, and even though that really works out to 10 out of 19, it’s as close to sanity as they ever get.

   But thank God you made sure to tell the two million people who read Penny Arcade every day that although previously they only had “intuitive knowledge” that reviewers give high scores to appease publishers, now that you’ve revealed a flimsy suspicion of an unnamed source that one of the multiple reasons for a bad writer being fired “is firmly believed” to be the tone of this review, they can enjoy “objective knowledge” that this goes on.

   
    

   Personally mild fatigue is the strongest effect of this delerious slander, but I know first hand that some – John Walker in particular – find it truly, genuinely offensive to see themselves or friends accused of being corrupt amoral hacks every time a reader disagrees with their judgement.

   My fatigue is because every time it happens, I force myself to try and imagine a person who literally cannot conceive of another human deriving genuine true joy from a game. A person who is forced to conclude that praise, however passionately written and heartfelt, can only be the forgery of a professional liar constructed against his true feelings for an extra lump sum. I can do it, but Christ these are sad, sorry people.