Nothing triggers a fanboy frenzy like when a magnificent game with a running streak of near-perfect review scores finally gets tripped up with a rating that yanks its head down out of the clouds. After a series of scores ranging from 95%- 100% at metacritic, Gamespot dashes the hopes of those seeking perfection with an abysmal rating of 90%. Oh, just shut down the whole site now as it is obviously teeming with incompetence (give me a break).

This is not the sort of uneducated/satirical review posted at Sony Defense Force yesterday. This is the vastly-experienced opinion of Gamespot’s Editoral Director Jeff Gerstmann, who has been with the site for ten years. Also, to be fair, Jeff has most likely played System Shock 2, and those blessed enough to have experienced that little stroke of genius will most likely be merely impressed, rather than amazed, by BioShock. Now there may be some foundation to the debate that the console on which the game was tested may have been malfunctioning, as Jeff criticizes in-game “freezing” that has not yet been mentioned by those who snagged early Toys R Us copies nor by journalists who had reviewed the game beforehand. Nonetheless, all of this has generated some interesting reading in the rapidly-growing flame war that was corralled into a sticky in Gamespot’s BioShock forum. (UPDATE: The topic has since been removed.)

Some people have a standard complaint…

After reading this review iam convinced that gamespot writers love to shoot, shoot and nothing more, they don’t care about the story or the variety of a game, the 9.0 score would have been good if games like “gears of no story justshoot war”had receive an 8.0. Graphics are good, but not everything–“

…others take it a bit more seriously…

I am writing the better business bureua on jeff seriously his reign has gone on dfar too long and i personally think he uses the fact that we call him phat and stupid as a disgiuse to how menicle he really is and how he wants to spin the media his way.”

…and finally there are the elite wordsmiths who manage to stagger us all with their profundity:

THE REVIEW SUCKS DONKEY”

In all honesty, I do have to agree with one person who complained that–gameplay differences aside–BioShock got the same score as Perfect Dark Zero. Anyway, just had to share all this before spending my day off in Rapture. I’ll let you know how it is. See you all tomorrow.

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