You may come to feel that you share a reviewer's taste in games if you've been reading their reviews long enough to compare your findings against their own. If they had the same problems with a particular title that you did, or enjoyed the same elements that you did often enough, then it might be worth listening to that reviewer's opinion on games that you hadn't picked up yet. And really, even though all you're doing is the equivalent of choosing to believe a review is valid just because it matches your own experience, that might be all you need from a game site: corroboration of your already-made judgment.

However, bear in mind that the specter of corporate funding is always near, casting doubt over the pedigree of the reviewer, or at least the originating site. In fact, Jeff Gerstmann's recent history is a great example of this. After awarding the game Kane and Lynch: Dead Men with a poor review score, despite Gamespot's conspicuous K&L brand integration that same week, Gerstmann was shortly thereafter fired from the site, causing the Gamespot audience to connect the two events and cry foul play. To this day, the actual reason Gerstmann was fired remains in doubt, but it isn't too much of a stretch to believe the worst: that Gamespot was pressured to fire Gerstmann for the negative review by Eidos Interactive, who had already spent a (presumably) non-trivial sum on the site-wide advertising for the game. All parties involved deny this, but the damage had been done. Within months, many prominent Gamespot writers and personalities quit of their own accord, citing the Gerstmann unpleasantness as their motivation.

More than anything else, this speaks to the tight bond between staff members, but it also exposes the just-below-threshold suspicion that large corporate game websites are for sale by game publishers with the willingness to pay for a good review. How, then, can any review from a tainted source be trusted?

To be sure, there are no end of personal blogs devoted to video games, and there is probably no better source for unbiased -- or put another way, completely biased -- opinions. These sites have no editorial pressure, nearly no particular call to be responsible to their audience, and thrive on complete transparency with regard to how they operate. With no editorial mandate, however, the quality of writing tends to be wildly variable between sites, and therefore of very little worth.

Giant Bomb does seem to provide the best of all worlds: knowledgeable writers, a history of content that proves their credentials, a passion for gaming that's echoed by their steadily growing community -- but they've made a point of saying that they do not and will not review every single game, just the ones they think the larger audience will find of interest. So if they don't touch the game that you're most interested in, where should you go?

At the end of the day, it's going to once again come down to doing the work and finding voices whose opinions you trust. Whether that's here at Big Download, our sister site Joystiq or any of its spin-off sites, or any of the other innumerable sites currently covering games, it doesn't matter. The Gamespot/Gerstmann dust-up hurt every site by calling into question the integrity of the editorial, which is something that can only be proven over time. Gamespot had that integrity, and it was dashed to pieces by the events described here. Years of slowly building up an audience and its expectations of reliable, solid content, vaporized in a matter of days. Is it worth your time anymore to read a game review? That's for you to decide, but the landscape isn't what it once was, and whether this will change, only time will tell.