Kane & Lynch

I always felt badly for this game. The screaming army of brats that rose to defend Gerstmann may have had good inte-, you know what, I doubt they were thinking much of anything. At what point was someone going to point out that developer and publisher are not always the same thing? That the people who work in PR have always treated the people who work at game magazines like shit? You have all of these people trying to justify a critic's opinion panning a game by screaming that it sucks and none of them stop to realize that the developer is not responsible for getting him fired. But they're the ones who are going to suffer.

Disagreeing with a critic is nothing new. But in this case it was particularly irritating because although the game has flaws, several of the negatives Gerstman brought up are precisely what makes the game so great. These are awful people, who do awful things, and they pay for this horribly. It's a hard boiled crime game that was ahead of the next-gen pack by saying that no, not every game has to be about melodrama and good triumphing.

I incorporated it into the ZA essays, defended it on a Brainy Gamer podcast, and now I'm giving it one more spin.