Smart & Angry

"Remember SimCity? Remember what a joy it was to build up a fully functioning, living, breathing city, full of life and wonderment? Then, at some point down the road, after you've built up your city to the peak of its productiveness, you'd start mashing the disaster button and a wide variety of tornadoes, earthquakes, and fake Godzillas would come tromping through, laying fiery waste to every bit of what you'd worked so painstakingly to create? Yeah. It's a little bit like that. Except someone hit the disaster button for me." -Alex Navarro Editor of Gamespot

Cnet and Gamespot are in a situation where things are out of control. For those who haven't kept up with the Geek tabloids, here is what is going on:

Jeff Gerstmann is a Controversial game reviewer that has history of giving harsh scores. His latest review was for game Kane & Lynch: Dead Men. Immediately Jeff was fired from Gamespot stating that his tone of the review didn't reflect the company (or whatever excuse corporates give). However the website had heavy campaigning and ad supporting the game, therefore the public is speculating that Gamespot is in favor of their advertisers, rather their employee's opinion.

While Gamespot hasn't admitted the accusations, they have taken down the review and put up another review, while disabling the comments section. (Actually if you google thru the site rather than searching thru Gamespot, it will be there)

Gamespots biggest mistake is that you don't mess with an audience that has too much free time to argue on messageboards and have fanboy anger.

Gamers have hacked into GameFaq's website and changed their polls. The backlash hasn't stopped there, Reports also include:

• A tidal wave of backlash descends on GameSpot and Eidos (Kane and Lynch now rated a 2.0 on user rankings.)
• GameSpot subscribers began cancelling their subscriptions.
• More than 350 pages of comments pour onto the GameSpot forums, mostly condemning the website for its actions.

On a personal note applied a few times there for a few job positions but didn't give me the time of day. Do I feel that this is retribution for not being hired? ...... not really but I am kind of glad that they didn't hire me since I would have been dealing with the Fanboys at the Forums.

Moral of the Story, Internet has so much power nowadays that it is starting to bring balance back to the customer.