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There is a huge buzz circulating on the Internet now about the controversial review of the popular real-time strategy game Supreme Commander written by GamePro's Australia division. Most reviews (as seen on ranking sites like GameRankings.com and MetaCritic.com) have been very positive about Supreme Commander, with reviews averaging around 80% - 90%.
GamePro Australia, however, gave Supreme Commander a score of 5 / 10 (50%), stating that the game was, "virtually unplayable" and that Supreme Commander represented the "saddest moment in the history of the [RTS] genre." The review was so controversial that GameRankings.com and MetaCritic.com have pulled the score from their respective sites. Now, while the review is accurate in that SC does have very high system requirements, we had no real issues with the shift key or the frame rate in general when playing on a relatively new system (Dual Core Intel, 1GB RAM, 7800GTX).
Gas Powered Games, developers of Supreme Commander, were understandably upset about the review, as it was one of the first Supreme Commander reviews to appear, and may have swayed some fans from purchasing the game.
Apparently, although this has not been confirmed as of yet, the controversy only became worse when rumors of a bribe began to surface. Electronic Arts, in competition with Gas Powered Games (EA's own RTS, Command & Conquer 3, ships near the end of March), supposedly offered a large sum of money to Game Pro Australia in exchange for the low review score of Supreme Commander.
There are now more rumors that GamePro Australia is being shut down, although this also is not yet confirmed.
If rumors of a bribe are indeed true, this represents an all-time low, not just for Electronic Arts and GamePro, but perhaps for the video game industry as a whole. Who knows if this has happened
