GameSpot Community Game Night is becoming increasingly more fun each week, thanks to the releases of several games that lend themselves to pure, unadulterated mayhem. I am surprised at just how good GTAIV's multiplayer is; not only are the built-in game modes awesome (Mafiya Work and Cops & Crooks are my favorites) and customizable, but simply tooling around in the city with buddies is cool too. I expect I will be playing a lot of this game in the months to come--and I hope I will see you around.

We've also got a susprise in store for all of you regarding Game Night, so be sure to tune into On the Spot today to see more! In the meanwhile, check out some highlights from this week's games, courtesy of Sidburn19.

On this week's episode of From the Bleachers Aaron takes the helm as Brian and Shanker are in Vancouver covering an EA Sports event. While the dynamic duo are missed, former GameSpot news editor and current TV.com editor Tim Surette makes a triumphant return to the world of GameSpot to help fill the void. This episode is a little shorter than the norm, but that doesn't mean we didn't cover a lot of ground.

Here are just some of the topics we touched on:

- Tecmo Bowl is back baby!

- NASCAR 09 will let you paint your dream car

- You can make some crazy-looking dudes in Top Spin 3

- Crazy Bears Fan Josh talks about how Cedric Benson stinks both at football and at life

- Roger Clemens and Aaron Thomas apologize for "mistakes"

Be sure to stick around for the end of the show when Brian Ekberg gives a truly pathetic pick in a last-ditch effort to get in the win column for our "call it" segment. You've got to hear it to believe it. Come on Brian, step it up!

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As always, if you've got something to say, let us hear it either by leaving us a comment below, sending an email to FromTheBleachers@GameSpot.com or calling us at 1-866-406-2638 and tell us what's on your mind.

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Dear Developers,

The following are not--I repeat are not extras and should not be in an "extras" menu:
- Credits
- Options (brightness, music volume, etc.)

The following may be considered extras, but they're lousy extras and we're really not that thrilled to get them:
- Trailers for other games.
- Big-head modes.
- Alternate costumes. If they're really funny or cool that's fine, but let's be honest, most of them aren't worth the effort.
- Interviews with celebrity voice talent saying how exciting it is to be in a game. For example: Elijah Wood compared Spyro with Lord of the Rings and I almost threw-up in my mouth.
- Cutscenes that we've already seen once that we can now watch at our leisure.
- Almost all concept art (especially when we have to use ingame currency to unlock it). There are some exceptions, but your game probably isn't one of them.

You might be wondering what is acceptable in terms of extras. Here are a few ideas:
- A look at deleted levels or characters. God of War did an awesome job with this.
- An in-depth look at the development of the game, or some behind-the-scenes footage like in Halo 2.
- If you hose us with a cliff-hanger ending, at least give us a trailer or something for the sequel.
- Additional challenges or ultra-hard difficulties.
- In-game commentary like in Portal.

It's really not that hard. We like to find cool things in the extras menu and we don't like stupid things. Just remember: When in doubt, leave it out.

Regards,
Aaron Thomas

Right, so let's talk about that GTAIV score. For those who haven't seen or heard, here's the deal: there was a bug in our publishing system on Monday that caused the incorrect score for GTAIV, a 9.5, to appear for on some pages for a while. This happened hours before we posted the actual score with the review, a 10. This has all led to a lot of talk and speculation so I'm going to set things straight, short answer: it's not true. Longer answer requires me to run you through stuff which I'll be doing now.

Our review process is like so: Once our reviewer has finished the game, he writes his review, submits it to copyedit, and then goes back over the text to look over the changes copyedit made before submitting it to production who then produce the review. Once the review is produced as a Web page on our QA servers, a link goes out to the reviews team for the peer review process. During that time the review score is not final. I'll say that again for dramatic emphasis: During that time the review score is not final.

In the case of GTAIV, that non-final review had a score of 9.5 attached to it--a score which the peer review process is designed to fine-tune and then set in stone. As has been standard GameSpot operating procedure for years, the last step of the peer review process is a discussion about review content and score. The content discussion entails making sure that relevant gameplay features and whatnot are mentioned to ensure the review is accurate as possible--and that said score matches said review.

As Justin noted in his blog, there were enough people in the reviews group who felt GTAIV deserved a 10 that we all holed up in a room to settle the matter....as the review was in the QA process on our staging servers with a 9.5 score attached to it. Ironically, one of the staff poked their head in the room during the at-times heated discussion and mentioned that it looked like a bug on the staging site had caused the QA score to go live for a split second. The importance of this event didn't sink in at first, since were so embroiled in our talks. Why were we so focused? Because we take matters of review score seriously. I'll reiterate what Justin said in his blog: We don't hand out 10s lightly--we've given out just four in GameSpot's entire history.

I've hit up our tech folks to find out what the deal was. After some back and forth, they got me answers because I wanted to post about this and include some info. So here's the tech nitty gritty for those that care:

* a 9.5 score, which as I noted above was not final, was the original score placed on the GTA4 page and became the page that was cached while testing and reviewing the site for quality assurance.

* Due to a bug in our publishing system that has since been corrected, a cached page containing the score and review blurb, but not the review itself, appeared on the Production version of the site.

* The length of time this was up is not precisely known but logs show that changes were made from 4:45PM PST - 8:20PM PST, with the actual review going live at 8:20PM PST.

And there you have it. A publishing snafu + some tremendously awful timing = needless drama. I'm well aware there's a bunch of folks out there happy to add this to the conspiracy theory tapestry that has been woven about GameSpot. Adding to said conspiracy was a blog post from a moderator saying the 9.5 score was deliberately put up as a "red herring" to test reader reaction. The same moderator has since corrected himself, pointing out that in 2003, an accidental score of 0.0 was posted for one of the highest-review games of the year--Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (9.1).

I'm disappointed that, end of the day, one of the best-written and best produced text and video reviews is being cynically written off by some. None of the naysayers know the effort that went into making sure our review of probably the biggest--and so far, the best--game of the year was as bulletproof as possible. The personal attacks on Justin are unnecessary. Apparently people don't realize that Justin's been at GameSpot for 9 years--starting with the original GameSpot UK--and has reviewed all sorts of games in that time.

But so it goes. Bugs and assorted glitches are a fact of life on the web just as misspellings and assorted printing issues can be with print magazines. We take our reviews seriously here and we don't post them until they're ready. This is why GTAIV went up when we wanted it to with the score we wanted it to have. For those that gave us the benefit of the doubt and that didn't jump to conclusions, you have my thanks. To the others? ...

So on Friday, we published a feature article about the recent rash of studio closures coming during a period of booming US retail gaming sales. I was largely grateful for and impressed by the discussion that ensued in the comments section. To be honest, I expected a 3,000+ word industry feature not directly related to the hot game of the moment to be received with a lot more "TL;DR."

That said, there were a couple comments that stood out for me and I think warrant singling out. First, the following comment was posted by stanrule1:

I was recently laid off from Perpetual Entertainment and hit the job market. It was really frustrating every day for months hearing about how well the video game industry is doing, how we're recession proof, etc. But still unable to find a job, things were looking bad. I had to sell some things, move apartments, bum money from relatives, anything and I was out of work for six months. There's a happy ending to the story though, about two weeks ago I was picked up by a small start up and now am happily employed with a great company making fun casual games.

And then I received the following private message from another developer:

Along with over half of the [deleted] team I was laid-off from [deleted] a little over a week ago. [deleted] green-lit our new IP but cut the force in half anyway.

Obviously few if any of your readers have first hand experience of studio and corporate level politics or the rampant mismanagement that pervades so much of the Game Industry. If they did maybe they wouldn't make asinine blanket statements like [deleted], who suggested that teams sucked the financial blood from studios by staying on the payroll too long. And I'd like to ask [deleted] how he suggests we "shop our skills around before the project ends" when we are in crunch mode - working twelve or more hours a day, sometimes six or seven days a week for weeks on end? Or is he also blissfully unaware of or just callously disinterested in the industry's standard crunch time?

While I was impressed with the depth of the article written, Mr. Sinclair, I wonder at the cool and often outright unsympathetic judgements being made here so easily in the comments following the article. As if this were just another game critique instead of the sudden loss of livelihood for [deleted] people…

In this time of financial downtrend, with the market now flooded with my friends and colleagues all looking for work, we who have built worlds for your enjoyment would have valued your support and understanding.

I know the Internet is a big wide world of anonymity and the various usernames and companies we read about often don't actually seem like real people, so it's easy to throw snarky insults around or dismiss developers (or game journalists) as talentless hacks. And to tell you the truth, some of them (and some of us) are.

So it's ok to think that. And it's even ok to say it when the situation calls for it. But given the borderless quality of the Internet, just keep in mind that you're talking about real people, and those people might very well be reading what you have to say. So when you type up a comment about a game or a studio, take a second to stop and think. Think about what it might be like for them to have been canned because their game didn't sell, because it wasn't fun, because they weren't given enough time to polish it, because a handful of reviewers "didn't get it," because there was no marketing budget, because the movie it was based on sucked…

Now think about what it must be like for someone in that position--already at their wits' end from having fought to make something great and failing due to circumstances beyond their control--think about how they must feel to have some anonymous username gloating about their misfortune and rubbing salt in the wound. Think if you'd say this to the faces of the people who worked their hardest on that game or made up the lifeblood of the studio.

Some games just suck, and it's absolutely fair to say so. But take a moment's pause before you start tossing off personal attacks you don't really mean. You never know when the targets of your remarks are reading.

As if you don't get enough poorly considered sports opinions in your every day life... welcome to the THIRD episode of From the Bleachers! In this jam-packed show we...

... talk about playing NFL Head Coach 09 for the first time
... chat about two upcoming Midway sports games: Blitz The League II and TNA iMPACT!
... rock out with our discussion of the soundtrack in NASCAR 09
... check out EA Sports' picks for this weekend's 2008 NFL Draft
... try to figure out Miguel Tejada's correct age
... listen as Josh the Crazy Bears fan makes fun of the city of Buffalo

All that and more. And hey, now you can subscribe to the show! Copy this address into your fancy RSS aggregator podradio thing:

http://www.gamespot.com/misc/podcast/bleachers.xml

Or you can subscribe to From the Bleachers via iTunes by searching for "From the Bleachers" in the iTunes store and hitting the "subscribe" button.

As always, if you've got something to say, let us hear it either by leaving us a comment below, sending an email to FromTheBleachers@GameSpot.com or calling us at 1-866-406-2638 and tell us what's on your mind.

LISTENING INSTRUCTIONS: Simply left-click right here to listen right away, or right-click and save the file so you can put it on your fancy new iPod later. This is a pretty large file, so be patient if it doesn't start playing right away.

As some of you know, we launched Under Review, the GameSpot reviews blog, a few weeks back. It will have a variety of uses, one of which will be to evaluate downloadable content made available after a game's release. We've got plans for this feature, and one of GameSpot's goals, even before I worked here, was to provide better coverage for games once they've been released. Revisited is one of our steps towards achieving that goal.

Please bear in mind we won't be changing any review scores based on how games have changed based on content and fixes added after release, nor can we cover every single World of Warcraft patch, downloadable Rock Band track, or Call of Duty 4 map. However, we're open to ideas on the updates you want to see covered. If you know of an upcoming game update we should keep a close eye on, or a recent patch that dramatically altered how the game performed, send me an email at kevinv@gamespot.com, and put the word "revisited" in the title. We'll use your suggestions to help determine the updates we evaluate.

In the meanwhile, take a look at our first Revisited, in which I take on the recent Lair update. Happy gaming!