Hello I’m Some_Jerk here on the Cblogs, and the views I’m about to express are my own, but as you’ll see they may be yours too.

In the past 48 hours there’s been a rash of controversy surrounding the firing of one Jeff Gerstmann for giving Kane and Lynch a score lower than what the website or its parent company c-net decided Eidos’ advertising dollars were worth. Two things disappoint me about this.

1. Kane and Lynch apparently isn’t that great

This is a shame, because the previews, hype and generally awesome high-concept had me excited. Having main characters that I didn’t necessarily feel I needed to admire, like or even tolerate would be an awesome way to have any random killing done by the player feel like it wasn’t breaking the story. A 6.0 isn’t that bad though, nothing great, but not crap. That score isn’t to say that Kane and or Lynch should be caned and or lynched. It’s not to say that Eidos is a bad company for making it, nor it’s fans bad people for playing it. At the end of the day everybody here wishes every game developer the best of luck in producing AAA landmark game-of-the-year titles because we want to play them. Even reports of Duke Nukem Forever are met with a secret twinge of hope. Close but no cigar for Eidos. Give up? Throw in the towel? Continue? Join the Nintendo Fun Club Today?

2. Eidos taking their ball and going home.

What disappoints me most about all of this is that it wouldn’t have happened if Eidos took the review in stride. Jeff Gerstmann isn’t a gaming god who’s every decree becomes a law for fans of interactive media. He wasn’t born on the planet Criticon and sent to Earth as a baby to save us from bad games. Although he’s being treated like a martyr for the industry as a whole right now, he’s really just a funny fat guy who likes videogames. You might know a few. A bad review from him shouldn’t put you off a game that you might have fun with. Some of my favorite games are critical failures (not a lot, but enough to justify testing the waters for oneself). If Eidos had any sort of confidence in their product to begin with they wouldn’t have batted an eye at his review, or at least taken it as constructive criticism for future reference. I can’t really say I’m surprised though, after-all they haven’t made anything particularly landmark since the first Tomb Raider and even then it was 50% polygon tits.