Shame of the Week - A Video Game Review Incident

Hey, I finally posted something new! I actually wanted to express my feelings on something that's been happening for the past few days, and it felt like this was the only place I can think of to spill it at the moment.

I like Thunderbolt, I think the website has a bunch of interesting articles and reviews, and I like frequenting its forums because its users normally have interesting things to say about the current state of gaming. One of the things I always find the most amusing, though, is reading the comments section for certain reviews, due to how silly some of the complaints are. A recent example can be seen in this BioShock Infinite review, where two comments (as of this writing) trash the review because of the 8/10 score. "The score you guys give this game is sickening." "Oh come on. 8 out of 10? It’s sad when some don’t realise the importance of this game claim to be an authority on video game quality. Gamers aren’t all 13 year old boys." Priceless. Some reviews get a stronger reaction than others, and I always took the Thunderbolt's staff lack of response to these comments as a sign of the obvious: that these comments are amazingly stupid.

However, something of note has happened within the past few days, when a Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes review was posted on May 22. The days that followed the review's release has seen an influx of comments denouncing the review. No surprise there. BUT, I started taking real notice when the lot started complaining that the review was hurting the Metacritic score, and that they all started begging for the review to be either taken down or rewritten to accommodate a higher score, so that the Metacritic score wasn't "damaged". Just in case this review happens to disappear (I doubt it, but you can never tell with human nature), I took the liberty of capturing some choice comments on the matter:

 The first time I read that comment in the first image, my jaw nearly dropped. REGARDLESS OF THE QUALITY OF THE REVIEW, for someone to tell a reviewer to change the score or remove a review just so a game can sell better is an amazing statement. He's not even trying to sugarcoat it. Also, "It's completely different from my experience playing the game." Really? You mean a completely different human being, with different tastes and views, happen to have a differing opinion of the same game than you? And he expresses this in a review, aka one guy's personal view of a product, AKA A REVIEW? So I figured the Thunderbolt staff was gonna do their usual silent treatment of the comments section, but the reviewer in question posted a few times, and actually took the comments like a champ. However, another staffer chimed in:

So that's it. You get a few nerd-tantrums from the Internet and you cave in. What, were you afraid of bad publicity, afraid that Metacritic is going to remove you? So much for sticking to your guns, and not to mention letting one of your writers out to hang like that. I don't know what the submission process is like over at Thunderbolt, but if one or two people oversee what gets put up.... then why was this put up in the first place if you feared such a "backlash" as the one demonstrated in the comments section? You let the whiners win, and from now on, every time there's a low-rated review on the site, they'll think that enough bickering is going to get the review removed or re-rated for the sake of a Metacritic score.

Damn you, Metacritic. You'll be the death of us!