Should you trust reviews?

GAMES AREN'T CHEAP. Especially those created for the various leading consoles. So, it’s financially prudent that you do a bit of research before you splash out your cash. After all, a dud can set you back £30-40.

That’s why you rely on reviews sites and magazines, whose professional reviewers will, on your behalf, spend hours and hours sitting on their arses getting paid to play a game that was sent to them for free, combine that with their extensive knowledge of other games in the genre, and then produce a distilled verdict on whether the game you are thinking of buying is better or worse than what’s already out there. That’s the theory anyhow.

We read this week how long-time Gamespot reviewer, Jeff Gerstmann's negative review of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men for the Xbox 360 might have played a role in his dismissal – something Gamespot has flatly denied. However, because the company took its time clarifying the affair, gamers have freaked out and accused the biggest games site of being cowed by the game’s publisher, Eidos. Either way, Gamespot has lost the trust of many gamers and is desperately trying to spin itself out of trouble. It doesn’t help that today’s rumours talk about a possible walkout by other Gamespot editors over what is being fondly called ‘Gerstmanngate’.

It would be unfair to assume that a game publisher like Eidos, which spends boatloads of cash on Gamespot advertising, would have exerted some displeasure over the lukewarm review of a game that it has spent millions of pounds developing and advertising. Unfair indeed. After all, it got 6 out of 10, even if Jeff’s video review here was more negative than positive. But advertiser pressure is all too real. Big advertisers have been known – a lot more frequently than you might think – to threaten to pull massive ad campaigns from Web sites, magazines, TV stations and newspapers after they appear in a story that – how should I put this – casts them, or their products, in an unfavourable light. As you can see by all the big, flashy ad campaigns we run here on The INQUIRER, it’s not a problem we encounter all that often. In fact, we have an editorial policy of never, ever, ever upsetting anyone.

I’ve worked on plenty of publications where publishers have crossed the invisible Editorial - Sales line – a blurry thing at best these days – to influence editorial in order to pacify a ruffled advertiser. It might not be right but that’s business. However, the real problem here is not hacks getting fired or dressed down over negative reviews, but games companies creating their own version of reviews and lying to the public. Now this is something worth firing someone for. Eidos has been caught ‘massaging’ reviews to transform them from lukewarm poop in to red-hot crap on its official Kane & Lynch web site.

On the US Flash site, it was noted that both Gamespy and Game Informer seemed to give the game a fantastic five gold stars out of five. Wow, I have to get that, where’s my £40? Whoa there Sparky! You see, it’s just not true. Gamespy gave it three stars and Game Informer, 7 out of 10. I admit to not being a qualified Star Professor, so the complex process behind how three stars become five and what the exchange rate formula is for converting numbers into stars is somewhat beyond me. You may note that the stars have now been removed.

Worse, there was a little tweaking, for want of a better word, of the actual reviews. On K&L site, the review pull-quote attributed to Gamespy read: “It's the best emulation of being in the midst of a Michael Mann movie we've ever seen”. In fact, they said that a long time ago at an E3 2007 preview of the unfinished game. The Game Informer quote reads: “A mercenary, a psychopath and a bundle of cash…what could go wrong?” That quote does not appear in the review so I’m not sure where it came from.

On the UK Flash site, the glowing quotes are culled from Nuts and Loaded, neither of which you should use to wipe your arse, never mind trust with regards to good or bad games. It’s like believing movie reviews from tabloids – most of which are great - especially when said movie has taken out advertising and is running a promotion. In Sony’s case, it just wrote its own. Remember that? Back in 2001, Sony was found guilty of promoting rubbish movies like The Animal, A Knights Tale and Hollow Man by using quotes from a reviewer who didn’t actually exist. The invisible reviewer, David Manning of The Ridgefield Press, gave glowing reviews to the above tat. When rumbled, Sony had to stump up $1.5m in order to give upset viewers back $5 each if they wanted. Would that cover the damage caused by The Animal? I’m not convinced.

The fact is that the reviews you read on video game [and movie] promo material, posters and boxes are the best bits. Snippets. Words like ‘stunning’, ‘realistic’ and ‘heart-stopping’, could have been culled from something that read “This game is so bad it’s stunning and despite its realistic setting the most heart-stopping aspect of this dud is the price.”

With Christmas coming and games on the shopping list, it might be an idea to increase your reviews circle because somebody out there is actually paid to pull ‘great’, ‘exciting’ and ‘stunning’ words from bad games reviews in an effort to get your cash. µ