To my knowledge……all of those are third party.

I personally feel the 4.5 review is a shocking piece of journalism. It’s a 7.5 game, it’s not amazing or trend setting but it isn’t bad and certainly not 4.5 bad.
Most reviews tend to focus on it not doing anything new, but what did Halo 2 & 3 do?

Of course no-one in the UK can see bits of the internet outside the British Isles.

Don’t get me wrong: it can mean the game’s shit and the publisher doesn’t want to ruin its chances at retail if it can help it

Is that specific to first party releases though such as Gears, Haze and Halo?

I think Mark Ecko’s Getting Up was sanctioned for review before it’s release date. That was wank. I can’t think of other examples, but in my experience, it’s never a positive thing when reviews are delayed. It’s a cynical tactic, but understandable if the product is poor.

It it is demonstrative of a lack of confidnece in the game. I thought Haze looked OK and it might still be, but this doesn’t bode well.

A publisher has a lot riding on the release date and information of a game. Promotions, campaigns and so forth. Information or details about game contents (not necessarily about quality - but about plot details or game secrets etc) may be crucial for the publisher to NOT appear before a certain date because they have umpteen millions of dollars and a marketing schedule planned out all around a single product.

Things are not as simple or as black and white as many folk would like to assume.

And there’s enough negative rumour and speculation doing the rounds anyway, that this seems rather pointless - IGN have posted their review - would they rather we just had one bad review to go on? Is it so inconceivable that other reviewers might like it? Frankly, if Ubi/FRD think that, they really don’t deserve to sell many copies of this.

I’ve all but crossed Haze off my wish-list of games-to-buy-once-I-get-a-PS3 anyway.

So. When are they doing the next Timesplitters?

What have you come to when you need to stop people from finding out what your game is actually like in order for them to buy it?

Rubbish!

Who knows what happened with IGN. Maybe they’re big enough that they said to Ubi that they wont review the game if they can’t publish it when it’s ready.

edit - Actually I’ve gone date mad recently and the above comment is absolute bollocks
/hears Tom Jones singing ‘What’s new pussycat’

No embargo on reviewing the demo is there? How about doing that instead