There's a site out there called The VG Press and you might want to give it a look. The reason it exists is due to an excess of overmoderation, lack of freedom, and technical difficulties plaguing other certain forums. Additionally, there has arisen out of this the best collection of gaming news aggregated in one place as you'll find. Of course, it has the staples of gaming sites. User blogs, reviews, friends lists. Along with a weekly podcast called The Press Room. So if you haven't been by and you think you'd enjoy a more relaxed and free environment while still within the gaming community, drop by. http://thevgpress.com Oh, and you can say c lass and s tyle without it breaking the site.

I've been a GameSpot member for over 2 years, 7300 forum posts, 160 blog posts, and 60 reviews, counting my first account. Sure, I stuck around despite an account dying via glitch. I've been here through the utter collapse of reviewing quality preceeded by the utter collapse of site quality. But finally GameSpot has dropped the bomb big enough to shatter the community, beckoning my final leave of this shadow of former glory. My very first blog post was The Meaning of Reviews, so it has an interesting sense of closure for this site taking such a blow because of its complete loss of integrity on this very point. If you're looking to find me, I'll be at 1up.com under the same name. And with that, I will conclude with a history of my complaining about GameSpot. Goodbye. The State of Reviews - GameSpot, you're on Notice Foresight was 20/20 - Twilight Princess Review GameSpot, For What are you Good? GameSpot, you make it too easy That was quick 8 months of complaining has finally done it Sequels - There's no pleasing everyone So I say thank you for the glitches, the bugs I'm seeing You're killing me, GameSpot GameSpot Reviews - Always Interesting Are You Kidding Me? GameSpot is Officially the Mr. Burns of Games Journalism Baten Kaitos Origins - GameSpot review and ripping off GG Oh. Snap. Sad but Hilarious

Well, I and those around me have bemoaned GameSpot reviews for a long time, among the state of other things. Well, it's come around in a sad way, yet strangely in comic form, And according to Penny-Arcade's Gabriel, "The comic is true. You should see the news breaking soon." "Jeff G. got canned. Tycho will talk about it more tomorrow. We have a couple sources inside that gave us the whole scoop. I'm not sure if the news sites even know yet." You may also have noticed that the video review of Kane & Lynch has been pulled. It's sad because this is a terrible thing to happen to someone, even if I think little of his reviews. It's hilarious, because GameSpot has hit rock-bottom. A fuller explanation of the rumour is seen on Kotaku and explains that it was basically money from Eidos that shoved Jeff out the door. Welcome to the end of credibility, people. I may have disliked GameSpot's reviews before, but the weight of their words are worth less than the US Government's. Equally hilarious is that this comes in the wake of the GG suspension fiasco in over criticising a GameSpot reviewer. Pretty hard to defend them now, people. EDIT: More staff gone. Tim Tracy. Unknown if it's related, but given the timing, it seems likely.

I've been baffled by this for a while, and wasn't even quite sure whether my observation was correct or if my taste was deceiving. But I am positive: There is a Mini-Wheats imposter. Inexplicably, if you buy Mini-Wheats, you will get one of two kinds. One is the same as it has been for the past 20 years -- fresh, wheaty goodness. However, you may instead get the imposter, the plastic wheat. The wheat is more separated and looks a little plasticky. It has more of a tang typical of cheaper products. It's seriously as if the grocer took the cereal from a no-name brand and put it in a Mini-Wheats box. It has been going on for far too long for it to be a permanent switch in manufacturing, as it would have happened already, and other boxes would have expired or sold out. Unless they switched some facilities. They could also have a bad facility or something. I'm in the midst of a good box now, of which I will take a picture of one of the good ones. Then I'll do the same at a later point with a bad one. The conspiracy must be known!

I just scored Hamtaro higher than Zelda. What can I say? Four Swords and CD-i aside, Phantom Hourglass was the worst effort in Zelda history. People can like it all they want as long as they'll say it was worse than every other Zelda, because it is, and in every way. My review will cover my extensive complaints, but summarizing, the controls do not work, the sailing remains annoying, the item selection sucks in both functionally and numerically, the dungeons are simplistic and fire whoever insisted we return to the same temple SIX TIMES. Phantom Hourglass the best argument against the DS' functionality. It's full of the first-year gimmicky crap that plagued the system and whatever it uses seriously moves the series backward. Great, now it dropped my average Zelda score from 8.95 to 8.65. Just so this blog isn't pure depression, I'll inject some Happiness with my new sig gifs

I've gotten enough done on my new Y-REVIEWS (http://yo.knows.it) site to consider it relatively complete despite continual improvements. You can now register if you're sick of GameSpot's rating/review system. Features include: -A sortable page of your summarized reviews -Write/Edit/Delete reviews (naturally) -Personal RSS feed -Comments on every review page -Review system choice (mine or free-form) I'm looking into a friends list and searchable reviews and users next. Now that I'm done my sales pitch, even if you don't really care, keep the suggestions coming. Maybe I can win you over :P Also please note any glitches you find. Right now I'm only aware of Opera scrolling horizontally despite my insistence that it not.

Someone out there is either listening to me demand sequels or mocking me for doing so, but either way, the rumour mill is spinning with earthly delights! -Super Mario RPG serait de retour, cette fois-ci sur Nintendo DS. Il est même précisé qu'au cours du jeu, notre héros ferait la rencontre de différents personnages emblématiques de l'univers de Final Fantasy (Super Mario RPG returns, this time on Nintendo DS. In the game, our heroes will encounter different notable characters from the Final Fantasy universe) -Ogre Battle pourrait faire son retour sur Wii, et qui plus est avec un opus inédit. Yasumi Matsuno, qui est à l'origine de cette série, ferait partie de ce projet. (Ogre Battle could make its return on Wii, bigger and better than ever. Yasumi Matsuno, who is the creator of the series, may head the project) http://wiiz.fr/article.php?a=15171 If someone's making this up, that is just sadistic. And seriously, it's as if this is made for me. Check my old Next-gen Wishlist. The only thing missing here is if Nintendo announced Miyamoto was creating a Wiiware 2D Mario, but I don't think I could handle that.

It's time for another update on my predictions list I made up way back in January. Ok, so I was a bit off on Battalion Wars, but... Galaxy managed AAA (I put 9.0, it took 9.5. Not bad, I do say!) And this is a quote from a comment on my blog: "man those are just so wrong...mass effect 8.2?" Mass Effect - 8.5 :D I'm almost through the list, and I'd say I've done pretty well. The most I've been off is 1.1 on Motorstorm, and that's the only instance of being off more than a point, and I've done best on the big-name titles. Next up is Super Smash Bros. Brawl! 8.5, possible 8.0? :o Tune in next time!

As most of you probably know I like rating games, and I like to be precise about it. Now, GameSpot a while back decided it didn't like specific ratings and enforced that belief on everyone else by changing the rating tool on each game page, restricting everyone to increments of 0.5. Where am I going with this? Well, if you'll look at my "Latest Ratings", you'll see my last one, which I made a few minutes ago, is a score of 8.3. This is a guide to scoring games in increments of 0.1 instead of 0.5. First thing's first, you'll need the web browser Opera. It's free and it's a great browser, so you may consider switching in general. Secondly, you'll need to save this script. It will show up in the browser as text, so click File then Save and save it. Lastly, you'll need somewhere to host the file since JavaScript doesn't have permissions to read from a harddrive. I have my site on Freephpwebhosting.net. Ripway.com and DomainDLX.com are also fine choices. NOTE: I suggest setting Opera to not use a cache. This is done by going to Tools-Preferences History on the left Advanced Tab And for memory cache, choose Off. Ok, now we're ready to get down to business. Open the .js file and either scroll to about the middle for the clearly marked line, or CTRL+ F and search for rating = 8.3 Change 8.3 to whatever you want the score to be. Now upload the file. In Opera, go to the game page you want to rate then choose View - Source. CTRL + F to search gsRater.js This should take you to the line script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.gamespot.com/js/mootools/gsRater.js Change that address to URL of the file you changed and uploaded earlier. Click Apply Changes. This will cause the game page to refresh for the new source. Now rate the game anything. It doesn't matter. Go to your profile and check your ratings. It should be what you specified. It's complicated at first but simple after you know what to do. And everyone should know that 8.25 != 8.5 :evil: And guess what? Reviews use the exact same system, so while I haven't tried it, I'm positive this will work for user reviews, too :D (and just because I can, I'm going to plug my site: Y-REVIEWS (http://yo.knows.it))

For the past week, I've been working on replacing GameSpot altogether... Now behold, Y-REVIEWS! http://yo.knows.it Yes, my college programming course has managed to make itself somewhat useful and I've written the site in PHP to minimize the amount of work I have to do to update and maintain it. It's almost sad that it was as much work as it was to make it look so simple >_> Feedback is appreciated--no, demanded! UPDATE LIST: -Various bug fixes -Presentation update (background) -Comments can now be posted at the bottom of reviews -RSS Feed is up