Sites “Blacklisted” Over Heavy Rain?

With only a Twitter message to go off and a language barrier I can only overcome in a Parisian bar, you’ll forgive my light footsteps here – but apparently Sony France have “blacklisted” one site for a “low” score for Heavy Rain and asked another to “modify” its review.

GameKult’s review of Quantic Dream’s experimental title is the main source of discontent, apparently, with Thomas from the site starting off the report.

“Sony France en forme  blacklist de Gamekult, et fait modifier 1 note de JV.com pour Heavy Rain. Mais le JV est mature hein,” says the Tweet, which basically infers that Sony have “blacklisted” the site after they reviewed the game.

JV.com refers to JeuxVideo.com, which the Tweet alleges was asked to ‘modify’ their review.

GameKult’s Thomas later qualifies his Tweet by saying that blacklisted isn’t the word – more of a “step back” clarifying by suggesting that the site won’t get review code so far in advance in the future.

Chance would be a fine thing.  TheSixthAxis hasn’t had the chance to play the final game yet, so we can’t pass comment on anything in the review or give validity to the rumours above.  If they’re true, though, and there’s nothing else going on (for example, an embargo) then this is shady practice indeed.