A new installment in my ever-popular series.

Todays installment will concern one of the best performance enhancing tricks in python: list comprehensions.

Most beginning pythonistas will produce code like this:

lst=[]
for i in range(0, 10):
     lst.append(i**2)

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Recently there has been a bit of an outroar over a few issues in games journalism; mainly game reviews. Jeff Gerstmann was fired from Gamespot, for unpublished reasons, and ostensibly the reason is that he gave Kane and Lynch a low review. What is interesting here is just why are people so surprised and angry.

It stems from a basic concept: hope. The audience hopes that the reviewer is a good one, someone to trust, to learn from, even to emulate. They trust that the reviewer is being honest, and forthright about any issues with the game.

That creates a pretty intractable situation for the reviewers since, companies do not like it when their product gets panned. Companies love to use game reviewers, knowing the full power of a good review. Tech companies will send out cherry-picked pieces of hardware, restrict testing and benchmarks to pre-approved standards, and anything else possible. And the same goes for software companies as well. Particularly game development companies.

And so, when a reviewer is (rightly) bluntly honest, companies hate that. They see it as lost money, as a potential red mark against the product. So, to ensure short-term profits, they will do anything they can, as per the laws instruction, to make the bad mark go away.

For game reviewers, this produces a conflict of interest, since they often advertise games as well as review them. And when a game reviewer pans your game? Why not pull your advertising dollars out, since they obviously “don’t care about us as a customer, or for our products.”

The readers hope and believe that the reviewer is being honest solely to save time, money and effort. Why waste time mastering some weird game if its a bad game? Why waste money on it? But as seen, the reviewers have placed themselves into a quandry, by taking money from the same people that make the products they review.

When this is discovered, readers feel its a betrayal, of their trust and sometimes even money. You expect the reviewer to know so much more than you do, and thus to save you time, effort, and money. And this betrayal is simply because of greed. The reviewers want to have free games, as well as advertising money to come in.

Now, if only review sites would advertise and partner with games they would not be ashamed to own… there would be less firings, and more money around to spend. It means being selective, which most advertisers don’t let you do. You can only set up a banner, and the advertiser fills it.

But, look at Penny-arcade. They will only advertise games they personally enjoyed and feel proud about. Because of that, they can review games however they wish, as harsh, or as pleased as they want. And they make money because of it!

At the very least, I am not going to gamespot anymore. Perhaps anyone of you could suggest a better game review site?