GameSpot

GameSpot is not to be confused with Gamestop, a retail gaming store.

Gamespot is a website launched in 1996 by Pete Deemer, Vince Broady and Jon Epstein originally as videogames.com. GameSpot presents video game (and since recently, hardware) reviews, previews, news, and information and is usually regarded as one of the more prominent gaming websites on the Internet. As of 2004, GameSpot is owned by CNET Networks.

GameSpot is credited with being one of the most reliable and sometimes brutally honest resources for gaming information in the Internet, leading in reviews, previews, and news coverage. GameSpot also recently won 'Best Gaming Website' as chosen by the readers in SpikeTV's Video Game Award Show.

In April of 2004, the website's message board community was merged with the community from GameFAQs (another company owned by CNET), gaining the use of GameFAQs's FAQs, walkthroughs, and codes. The game-specific message boards were merged into GameFAQs also.

Main Site

All games reviewed on Gamespot are judged on five different categories: Gameplay, Graphics, Sound, Value, and "Tilt" — more or less a benchmark of how much that particular reviewer enjoyed the game. Each category is assigned an integer score from one to ten, and these five integers are roughly averaged to arrive at an overall score. Should the game score higher than or equal to a 9.0, it is designated to be "AAA". Although many games achieve this status each year, only four in Gamespot's history have ever gotten a perfect ten — The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64, Chrono Cross for the PlayStation console, Soul Calibur for the Sega Dreamcast, and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 for the PlayStation 2. It should be noted, however, that Gamespot's expectations for games they review consistently increase as games become more and more advanced. Thus, a game that may have scored highly in the past may not hold up as well against more modern games.

Greg Kasavin is one of the more renowned editors on GameSpot, leading up nearly every major game's review.

Message Board Community

Bethany Massimilla was appointed the manager of GameSpot's newly created forum community. GameSpot uses the meta-mod semi-automated moderation system for the community which is maintained by an excess of 30 appointed moderators.

Key figures among the moderation staff include Jordan Bisasky, Jeremy Yerby (commonly referred to as Y2Jer or TheRagingGamer), Casey Wegner, Jonathan Leard, and Patrick Mifflin (commonly referred to as DarkCatalyst).

GameSpot has a premium membership service called GameSpot Complete. This means that when a user pays a small price, he or she gets access to a dedicated download service, a different colour scheme (only "Ice" at the moment), removal of all advertisements, 10% off all games at EBgames.com, and the option to make a message board of his or her own.

There has been a feud between the Complete users and Basics due to the features the basics have been getting. When GSC was first introduced in 199?, a majority of the features became GSC only. The only features Basics could get at the time were the first 10 screenshots of games and basic forum privilges and could only use pre-made avatars. After a few years however, the Basics had the restrictions eased and while some things like the creation of UCB(User Created Boards) are still Complete-only, some features that have been introduced like message searching and Unions, have been given to Basics as well (But they have to earn it by going up the level ladder, excluding the message search). This has angered Completers because they are losing incentive to keep their Complete membership.

External Links

• Gamespot's Home Page
• GameSpot Forum Community