Oh Jesus, look at this. Out of the pan into the fire:
http://au.gamespot.com/features/jura...bused-6346288/
Jurassic Park User Reviews Abused
Telltale Games employees found feeding perfect 10 reviews to Metacritic without disclosing their work on the game.
Jurassic Park: The Game launched yesterday, but you won't find a review on GameSpot just yet. Part of that is because our review staff is swamped at the height of the holiday release season, and part of it is because we didn't get any early review copies from developer Telltale Games.
In theory, this would be an ideal reason for interested gamers to check out GameSpot's fellow CBS Interactive property Metacritic. Ordinarily, the online opinion aggregator can be counted on to compile review scores and links from a wealth of professional review sites, as well as assessments from other gamers who wrote up reviews on their own.
However, a quick examination of the Jurassic Park: The Game Metacritic page on Wednesday morning brought up a number of "Telltale" indicators that something was fishy. By mid-afternoon, Jurassic Park had no critic reviews, but it had four user reviews, each with a gushing write-up of the game's numerous virtues and a 10 out of 10 grade.
Between the reviewers' constant lionizing of Telltale Games, complete sentences, proper punctuation, and paucity of spelling errors, we began to suspect that the user reviews were not the product of actual players, but of Telltale representatives. Sure enough, a cursory Google search on the reviewers' user names backed up our suspicions. One of the reviewers was a user interface artist at Telltale; another was a cinematic artist. According to their LinkedIn profiles, both were relatively new to the studio, but they should have more than enough experience in the industry to understand this was a bad idea.
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Is there a smear campaign against Telltale? Is it hard to believe adventure gamers have good grammar?
