As some of you may - or may not - have noticed, I've effectively removed my reviews. I've resigned from my unions - one of which I was an officer. And this is the final note, the final say, the last word.

I've been a member of gamespot for 3 1/2 years. For 3 of those, I've been writing amateur reviews, and for over one of those, I was an officer in the Candid Collector's Union - which is by far one of the best group of people I've ever met online or off.

And I'm not bragging. This is what I've chosen to give up because of the current scandal here. At the same time, I'd like to believe I'm not throwing this all away. But other than the friends I've met here - with whom I can communicate with in any form of IM software - what am I losing?

An insider information site? I can always go to IGN, Kotaku, Game Informer, 1Up, EGM, Gamepro and Game Politics for that. You're not the only game in town - no pun intended. I'm certainly not losing a review site; I stopped taking reviews seriously a long time ago.

I know that I am leaving a place of corruption. I know that someone lost their job so the company could save face with an investor - an investor often plaguedwith money troubles, at that! But that's what happens when you've already sold your own soul; you have to find someone else's as collateral.

If I were a paying subscriber, I might actually be talking to a lawyer right now; if someone says their product is red when in fact it's blue, and I bought the product based on that pretense, you have a duty to either give me what I paid for or give me money back if I reject your substitute.

Speaking of substitutes, there is no substitute for integrity. If Eidos tasks you, CNet, with a glowing review, you should have given it if you were so inclined, not handed it to Gamespot to see who'd fall for the trap.

CNet, you have earned every ounce of illwill aimed toward you. And that's not my problem. Nor will it ever be.

Now, for those of you who enjoyed my reviews, they're pretty easy to get; just e-mail me and ask; my contact information is in the "about me" tab, and I'm not going to change that.

Also, to those who I've tracked and who have tracked me, thank you for all the articles and reviews; it was good to read some real perspectives.

I wish you all the best, no matter where you go.

NWC.

P.S. This will be my last post. After I finish this letter, Gamespot and CNet will be blocked on my router; if you wish to contact me, e-mail/MSN is pretty much the only way. Just the way it goes.

You just might get it.

I've been wishing for the last two years that Gerstmann would get kicked right to the curb. He had a tendency to write reviews that were unprofessional not only because of what seemed to be a personal bias (some seemed like he wished he wasn't "stuck" reviewing the game, so he'd give it a lower score out of pure spite - Scarface is a great example - especially the Wii version), but there are reviews of his that also made me question whether or not he even played the title, such as Capcom Classics, Vol. 2

I so wanted to see him fired for these, and every other game he hit because he seemingly either didn't want to play it or decided to play part of it and then write the review.

You don't put down a game for artistic license (changing the ending of Scarface to create the sequel - IMO, that was bloody brilliant because it put you right in that scene), and you don't promote something you think looks cool on paper but is totally broken (CCV2; Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo's emulation is broken; controls are terrible and the audio emulation is ruined) - especially since the latter brings a reviewer's integrity into question because you start wondering if theyplay the games they review.

If this Kane & Lynch debacle is true - and we have little reason to believe otherwise - Gamespot has put themselves into a very, very bad position.

One, you can be sued - not only by Gerstmann (wrongful dismissal), but paying subscribers (false advertisement; you don't say you're the most unbiased and then prove otherwise for firing a reviewer that doesn't bend to your advertisers/investors).

Two, you have no credibility. None whatsoever. Your readers are dropping their subscriptions (because it's not worth taking you to court), your reviewers seemingly don't want to write and the forums are abuzz with how you can't be trusted. Your opponents are having successive orgasms, and your allies...well, other than the CNET network, I don't think you have any anymore.

If I were in your shoes, this is what I'd do:

1) Come clean. Man up. Spit it out. The truth really is vindicating. Keeping quiet only builds suspicion, and Eidos can't legally sue over the truth.

2) Refund every paid subscription for the year; You just publicly violated your number one policies (objectivity and integrity).

3) Issue a public apology to Gerstmann and offer him his job back - despite the fact that he'll more than likely tell you where to shove it, or worse.

Jeff, I dislike you as a professional reviewer; I have yet to agree with one of your reviews (that are based on a game that I've actually played) and as much as I wanted to see you turfed, it most certainly was not for this reason; I've never had to eat words on wishing someone lost their job; this is one of those few times.

I do wish you all the best in the future and I hope you can find another job in your field that will treat you much better than this; no one deserves to be sold out like you were.

One of the family dogs, LG, passed on last week. He had to be put down because they'd found a tumour and couldn't fix it. He was a sweet little guy; dumb as a post, rarely came to his own name because I don't think he ever realised that he had one. But he was so adorable.

Last I saw him, which was...I think August, he was perfectly fine. While, as fine as he could be I guess; he wasn't exactly the most active dog; he'd rather lay on his back spreadeagled and snore through most of the day. He only really got active when there was another dog that he could try to screw. Yeah, that was our LG.

We got him when I was 18 - on my birthday, actually, though not as a gift. He was a 2 year-old stray that had been found by one of my dad's co-workers, and apparently my dad and stepmom were looking for a second dog (I think I'd heard them musing about it, I can't remember). No, I got a Terry Goodkind novel instead. That was also the first time I forgot it was my birthday, but that's another story for another day.

Obviously, he was pretty lean when we got him, and our other dog, Buster, was anything but. So, we got to work on attempting to spoil LG, only to find out that he was a picky eater. No wonder he was skin and bones Buster was picky, too; LG, though, would only eat certain things -dogfood, meat and dog cookies. Buster would only chips with dip on them They did have one thing in common, though, which was a love for watermelon; Buster taught LG to eat it down to the rind.

LG's favourite pasttimes involved digging up my stepmom's garden...lawn...oh, and under the porch. And then eating the dirt. Unfortunately, he had to have a lot of teeth pulled because of this past time. As I said, dumb as a post.

Heh, he'd usually only even come if you called him by something else...he seemed to like being called "f*ckstick". But for all his faults, he was the sweetest, most docile animal you could ever meet. He wasn't a neurotic mess, he loved to cuddle and he loved to goofy - one of his more amusing habits was mooching for food he didn't even like.

I'll miss ya Little Guy.

I liked Ubuntu, despite its terrible inflexibility. I wanted to like 7.10. However, I can't like something that installs and then corrupts my boot sector byseemingly installing a SCSI driver. I didn't tell it to, it just did Screw that. Buggered 5 hours of OS reinstallation, there's only so much crap I'll put up with.

After getting everything fixed (actually, just makign sure that 98, 2k and XP were installed and working), I get a driver crisis with Windows 98; my goddamned sound card driver pack installs a driver not only onto the motherboard soundchip, but the PCI caqrd as well. Chaos ensues. Even after I disable the onboard...98 was still screwed. I had to fix it with 2k because the FILE SYSTM had to be repaired. Christ on an effing crutch! The funny thing is...the drivers I installed were specifically for the onboard - I even specified in the install that that's what it was for And yet I had two entries...ugh.

And after putting a NIC in my 10 year old DOS gaming PC (I was going to try my hand at setting up internet and network printing using my router and school PC as the testbed server), it cacks. Mind you, I had to take it apart, hwoever, I consulted a whack of web resources to make sure I set the cabling back up properly. No dice. Hey, for all I know, I could just need to change a jumper or flip a connector (the power connectors are set up propery, I quadruple checked that one) around. But it's behaving exactly the same way it did when 2 of its four sticks of RAM fried. And EDO isn't exactly common. I have neither hte money nor the time (patience I have, time...no) for EBay...It was a good machine, better than most. It will be missed. But hey, I can scavenge the hard drive, burner and even videocard

Today, as of 3 PM EST, I finally finished getting all of my drivers for Windows 2000 and 98 SE. And no, I didn't just do a double boot, but in fact a multi-boot with each OS on a different drive, and the 3rd OS being Ubuntu Linux. I still haven't had much hands on time with Ubuntu, although I've had enough time to say that from an end-user perspective, I like it. From an administrative perspective...it's nothing short of a pain in the ass.

But after the install (which comes with an absolutely kickass partition tool -GParted - that you can use without installing the OS), actually adding things to it is quite a chore if you don't know Linux Commandline. So that's next up on my list of things to do.

I also circumvented the old custom of old OS being installed first. I knew if I installed 98 first, it would just use up my hard drive, and the FDISK program that comes with it won't let you partition more than 2 gigs at a time. SO, I manually partitioned with GParted, and took a Ghost image of 98, put it in the partition and all was fine. Then after loading all my OS's, I realised that i need a larger second drive so I can load XP Pro on later this year for school.

Sometimes I hate this stuff, but it was a hell of a learning experience. I mean, I circumvented the step of doin gthe traditional Windows dual-boot, and just went full out. Took 7 tries and about 25 hours to get everything just right (and even then I might have to re-install 98 due to a certain program installation that has something ot do with USB keys, ahem - oh not to mention bad Radeon drivers from my card's manufacturer, but ATi's work fine), so when I go back to redo it using both a Ghost image of 98 SE and 2k because 2k's installer won't recognise a drive bigger than 137GB, which is in turn screwing my OS over. So yeah, I'll remake my partitions and all will be well. And after that, then I'll take the effort to learn Linux commandline.

Well, teh Ghosts are better anyway. 98 only takes about 5 minutes to install from an image. Go figure. 2K will take longer, though, but not as long to install. Christ, I swear it takes at least 2 hours ot install 2k.

On another school-related note, I just had my first midterm fo rthe A+ component, and I scored 98% So I went and played pool, had a glass of scotch and bought a large pizza to gorge on