In light of all of the recent malarky with Jeff Gerstmann and Gamespot, it'd be really easy to just make a disparaging comment about where certain parts of Eidos's anatomy are in relation to certain parts of Gamespot's management, and call it a day. However I like to think I'm classier than that, so instead I'll take a trip up the ranty high road.

For those who don't know, you can pick up the story here

I guess it was inevitable, capitalism being what it is. Advertisers want to protect their investment, and when their hands are so far in your pocket that you have to store your keys somewhere else, there's a certain amount of interest in protecting your own investment. Still, the idea that one can be fired for posting objective content on a site that's supposed to be about objective content is disturbing at the best, and outright infuriating at the worst.

Infuriating indeed. And the most infuriating part of it all is that opinions on the matter are mixed. What could potentially be the death knell of the credibility of online reviews is being obscurred by the cheers of overzealous fanboys. You see, Gerstmann is the one who gave an 8.8 to Twilight Princess. It's an injustice, they cry, he's had this coming for a long time.

Yeah, the injustice isn't that a reviewer was fired for a perfectly decent review on the account of money. It's that he wasn't fired earlier for a different review that they didn't like! And when did 8.8 become such a horrifyingly bad score, anyway? Last time I checked, that's still far above average.

But that's another rant for another time. Right now, it's all rumors, of course. Though it's been all but confirmed that Gerstmann has actually been fired, the reasoning is still 'in question'. But the timing is so suspect that it seems dense to not be skeptical.

And I'm nothing if not skeptical. Is that what the reviewing community has become?

Well, mayhaps not. One of the reasons I stick to this little corner of the net, aside from the fact that I actually like most of the community, is the fact that it seems more...well, honest. Borderline sap aside, I think that the kind of work seen here is what the internet needs at times like this.

Maybe I'm not so much distressed as I am resolved. If Gamespot can't do it right, then someone else has to. And before I turn into a coach giving the boys a halftime pep talk, I'll just say that honesty is important, and it's something we have.

It's something we should hang onto as well.

Note: Edited after cooldown time for general coherence.

The gimmick is simple. Go to the right and win. You can jump, you can shoot, and you can invert gravity within a certain radius of the character. And that's it. There's no plot or villain, just you, a plasma rifle, and a hellish maze of circular saws, moving platforms, and angry robots.

Think back to a normal day in high school. Specifically, remember the routine. Every day, you wake up, you go to class, eat lunch, take tests, talk to friends, and do the same thing you've done a thousand times in real life. Yet through some trickery, it's actually a great game that excels in taking the mundane and making it exciting.

Nifflas makes a very specific kind of game. You can generally pick them out at a glance, it's the kind of game you can sum up in a single sentence.

Somehow, this deceptively simple fighter with fewer than 10 moves per character has the depth of an ocean. Even the story mode is deceptively complicated, and all the more rewarding for it. Moreover, the combat is complex, and the characters are interesting in battle and out. Blazblue is a fighter of the highest caliber, and a truly rewarding experience.

Capcom has always kind of been the premier name in fighting games thanks to Street Fighter, but I've never thought that was their biggest strength. There are plenty of other games, each with their own merits that make them debatably better or worse. Capcom's real strength instead lies in the one niche of the genre that they have almost completely cornered, the team fighter.

A persistent question throughout both Aion's beta and the early days of live was "Will this game kill WoW?" It popped up in the world chat channel more often than "Can I borrow 10 gold?" That by itself is pretty mind blowing, but really, it's a stupid question. No, Aion is not going to kill World of Warcraft. No game coming out in the foreseeable future is going to knock WoW from its throne, but that's the wrong question to ask anyway. Why should it need to?

It frequently surprises me just how broad the range of concepts are that get made into full fledged games now, especially on the PC. It probably shouldn't anymore, but if I was asked, I would probably list concepts for new games for several hours before getting to 'realistic simulation of the Indian spice trade in 17th century Europe'. And yet none of my ideas are being made and here's a realistic simulation of the Indian spice trade right in front of me.

Modern day RPGs could stand to learn something from Lunar, though it's not immediately obvious why. It's a PSX remake of a game with graphics that would be embarrassing on the Super Nintendo, and a battle system that was already standard fare when it originally launched on the Sega CD. What could such an old fashioned title possibly show our modern huge budgeted masterpiece? Well, all that pizzazz aside Lunar is a game that's good for the soul.

Knytt Stories is a little hard to define because it's not technically a game. In actuality, it's a custom made level editor built by freeware genius Nifflas, the guy behind Within a Deep Forest and the original Knytt. He then used that level editor to build a simple story about a girl named Juni, prefacing it with the following:

But anyway, the game is an RTS in the same way that margarine is butter, which is to say it's not, but it looks similar! The overhead camera is old hat to the genre. The piles of units marching together toward their objective is familiar. The hud, with its point-and-click interface and minimap, leaves no doubt. Any given screenshot tells the RTS story, but it's only when you play the game that you realize that something has gone horribly wrong.