Roy

This MUST be a joke. It's to far away from April Fools, though. Will it be staffed with school lunch ladies, too?

That's wonderful. Since the demise of CGW (or GFW - YOU pick your favorite gaming magazine acronym!), my EGM subscription got extended to about December of 2010. That will be worth about 1/10 of a cent real soon.

It would be a Massive improvement in my tv cabinet over my plain-Jane elite!

The answer is no - I canceled my subscription (actually, it works by failing to renew)about 3 days after Jeff got fired.

It's kind of like catching your girlfriend cheating. Sure, she may say she'll never do it again, but you'll never be able to really trust her again. Damn you, Gamespot! Why did you have step out like that???

FWIW, I've really been enjoying the game, and the level of immersion is probably the best I've seen since Thief (please, someone, pick up that franchise and make more of them!) First, it's absolutely beautiful - sometimes I wonder if gamers are getting so jaded that they can't appreciate how terrific this generation of games is starting to look. Secondly, I love being able to crawl up on practically any building (except for rocks, for some reason...) I've actually been playing it more like a sandbox game, trying to find Assassins Flags and picking off Templars when I can get the drop on them. As far as criticism of "blending" and the AI, let's not forget we're playing a game here. If it were reality, after you killed a guard, they'd shut the town gates, line up the citizens and start burning houses to find you. That doesn't sound like fun gameplay to me.

I honestly don't understand why people get so worked up about review scores. I guess I must be one of the 5% of the population that cares more about the text of the review and whether it's my kind of game. COD4 can get a 10, and that's great, but I don't care for military shooters, so I'm not buying it. Same goes for racing games. I'm as guilty as anyone about trying to get through a game quickly so I can get to the next one, but as long as I'm enjoying this (and this is heresy), Mass Effect may have to sit on the shelf for a bit after it arrives next week.

Sony defenders make me laugh. Sony could put out a press release saying that all PS3 buyers had to eat a turd before they would be allowed to buy a PS3 and a hundred fanboys would come out of the woodwork talking about how great an idea it is.

The fact is, removing BC is a STUPID idea - I don't care how much the chips to do the software OR hardware emulation cost. Sony needs to move units - PERIOD - every one of these decisions is giving their competitors a nice new present every 3 months. Microsoft was moronic for marketing a 360 without a hard drive, and this idea is just as dumb. Every consumer out there with a PS2 knew they could play PS1 games on it, and Sony is too far down the road with the PS3 and BC to pull an EXPECTED feature out of the box now. I can't imagine the meeting where this was discussed and it was agreed that this was a good idea - with executives this sharp, it may be time to start shorting Sony stock. Why would you pull this feature - doesn't Sony want anybody to buy PS2 software to play on their PS3?

It would be one thing if Sony wasn't still selling the PS2 and there wasn't still good software coming out for it (unlike Microsoft, which let the original Xbox die on the vine), but 90% of the buyers of the new PS3 aren't going to read the fine print about "no backwards compatibility" - they're just going to be confused and angry when their PS2 titles don't run. The majority of the buying public doesn't sift through Sony press releases, so they're not going to know about this.

There's only one positive thing about this - it makes me happy for buying my 60 gig unit at an inflated price a month after launch - at least I have hardware BC and was able to kick my PS2 to my nephew. If it wasn't for BC, I wouldn't be playing anything on it at all.

The Brutes!

The Brutes!

Dem Brutes.

The Brutes.