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Rumors are flooding the online videogame forums that Jeff Gerstmann, editorial director of CNET's Gamespot, was canned for criticizing an advertiser's product. A tipster informed us that Gerstmann, who had worked at the company for more than a decade, was greeted with a locked office yesterday morning. While there's no official explanation (apparently, it's being kept very hush hush even inside the company) as to why Gerstmann was escorted off the premises, the evidence gathered so far is pretty damning.

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Eidos Interactive took out a monster ad buy on GameSpot that, alongside game banners and a microsite, prompted visitors to skin the site with a Kane & Lynch theme. Unfortunately, critics don't think that the combat game is very good. It's averaging a 68 on CNET-owned review aggregator Metacritic. Gerstmann gave Kane & Lynch a 6 out of 10 and was rather critical of it in his video review.

The video review has since been pulled, and the ad campaign went offline around midnight. Suspicious. But any outlet worth its salt wouldn't allow an advertiser to dictate editorial policies, particularly in the videogame press which already suffers from an uncomfortably close relationship with the companies it critiques.