The "Gamespot Debacle" was just a demonstration of what many people already knew ...
There are a lot of publishers who use their massive marketing budgets as a "Big Stick" in order to ensure favourable review scores on their highly anticipated games. There are certain publishers that do it more than others, and certain publishers that push harder than others, and it largely explains why you can (often) find a game that is scored as a 9/10 (or higher) from several sites/magazines to be far less polished and enjoyable than a game that is scored as 6/10 for these same sites/magazines.
I have found that sites like Gamerankings and Metacritic (which are unfortunately owned by Gamespot) to be far better judges because the pay-offs are usually balanced out by smaller sites that are less likely to be impacted by marketing presure; unfortunately, smaller sites tend to be less fair (in general) to games and are far more likely to be biased based on personal preference for a genre or mood of a game.
