When a developer submits a game for review, there is an understanding , in most circles, that their generosity in giving us the game in no way affects our published impressions of said title. (Getting us drunk, however, certainly doesn’t hurt).

I’m not breaking news here.

Sadly, as we just learned from Mission Critical, the folks behind Dr. Nano for the iPhone, this isn’t always REALLY the case.Shanghai Six played Dr. Nano and submitted his review to me a couple of days ago. To it, he attached a note saying essentially it killed him to have to pan it after the PR folks had been so nice, but he just really didn’t like the game at all, and his review reflected that sentiment in SARCASTIC GAMER fashion. This means, essentially that if we love a game we’re going to compare it to something ridiculously awesome, and we’ll be working just as hard to find an entertaining way to pan it, so that our audience of rowdy gamers get more out of the review than a stupid score… which we don’t typically assign.

When his review went live, it actually didn’t perform very well. Nobody even commented until Dave Gonzalez, the CEO at Mission Critical, took exception to several of Shanghai’s remarks about the game. Gonzalez set about arguing the review point by point casually attempting to discredit Shanghai, which we all know that Shanghai does a pretty good job of by himself.

I’m not going to puke up a play by play here, you can read it all HERE in the comments of Shanghai’s review.

To the folks at Mission Critical, I am sorry that the review did not reflect what you thought Dr. Nano worthy of. While I admire the passion with which you’ve defended your work, I can’t help but notice that you turned what was at first a review almost no one cared about into an extremely discussed and mostly negative reflection of your studio and the game itself.

We promised to review the game.

We didn’t promise a happy ending.

Besides… since when does ANYONE care what WE think?

What I DO care about is what YOU think. Did Shanghai’s review seem out of line with  our normal content? Did you find it especially harsh?

Tell you what. I’ll buy the game for 3 people that convince me in an email that they can be objective in 3 sentences or less. Then YOU review it, and we’ll publish the review right here.

Crap. Now Dr. Nano for the frickin iPhone is officially going to get more coverage on Sarcastic Gamer than frickin Batman.