So I sat there with a member of my editorial team the other day. The conversation went something like this.

"Hey, dude, quick question."

"Yeah, sup, Robert?"

"Well, it's about our rating system. It's got a scale of 1 to 5 stars, right?"

"Yeah."

"Any chance I can give a game a zero?"

"Nah, it's not really built that way. The lowest we can really give a game is one star out of five."

"Hmmmm."

"Why do you ask? What possibly deserves a zero out of 5?"

"Konami's Crime Life: Gang Wars."

(pauses) "Nah, that would require our team to actually put some work into changing the font of the star system just to include it. It doesn't even deserve that kind of effort."

And he was right. As much as it would pain me to hit this game with one meager star, it would probably be a bigger pain in the ass to relayer the HTML to make the rating completely blank. Or maybe even add a picture of a turkey with a bomb shoved up its ass. And Crime Life: Gang Wars is the kind of game that doesn't even deserve that kind of effort.

What surprises me is how Konami would sink to such depths. This is a prominent company known for their Metal Gear and Winning Eleven brands, as well as Castlevania and Contra. Yet at their Konami BBQ a few months ago, they revealed a bit more of this game, and immediately, I could hear the fellow journalists scoffing at its very footage. Its very attempts to try and be something cool along the lines of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas were never met. It's like watching a legendary movie like Shaft on cable, and then putting up with the Poser Mobile commercials inbetween. Nothing about this game is real.

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