Haze

Ah, a consolation review!

What does that even mean?

Cheers

Tim

Do you know what the word 'consolation' means? Or is it the word 'review' that you're having difficulty with?

It means that this mildly positive review might just make Free Radical feel slightly better about the plethora of highly negative reviews.

Let me know if there's anything else you don't understand.

I also know what 'plethora' means. If you do, then you are claiming that there has been an excess ("From the Latin 'excessus' meaning a "departure, going beyond the bounds of reason or beyond the subject") of negative reviews?

Mark's review provided a balanced and necessarily subjective look at the game. Did you read the review or just look at the score? I hope it was the former.

I am also inferring that you mean, for some reason, that Mark's review was aimed at consoling Free Radical rather than giving his own appreciation of the video game.

(When using 'appreciation' in this context, of course I mean, "The act of estimating the qualities of things and giving them their proper value". Tricky devil is the English language when context is not provided.)



I don't understand your apparent need to make baseless statements regarding editorial on my site. You could clarify that.

Cheers

Tim

Hey calm down Timmy.

In football there's a well used phrase "consolation goal", used when a team gets soundly thrashed and scores a goal right at the last minute. I was suggesting that if someone from Free Radical saw your review they might feel in the position of someone scoring a goal in the dying seconds of a 7-nil thrashing.

I wasn't insulting the editorial on your site for a second. Having said that though, I think I might stick to Eurogamer in future, where the editorial staff don't feel the need to wave their grammatical penis (or "phallus grammaticus" to use the original latin) in the face of the only reader who felt like leaving a comment.

As a fan of Bristol Rovers, I'm sadly well aware of the 'consolation goal' and thrashings in terms of your definition.

I can understand your footy-based analogy. Point taken. However, the lack of context in the first two postings did indicate that you were accusing SPOnG of pandering to Free Radical. That - like seeing Bristol City in the Championship play-offs - is guaranteed to raise my hackles.

Our policy has always been not to read anybody else's reviews before writing our own. We've certainly not pandered to any developer or publisher.



Okay, but I would say that your first line in your second post:



was just a little on the "Oi, Tim, you are an idiot who doesn't know words!".

Can't expect a bloke not to respond in kind to that kind of a thing, can you?

I'm more than happy to debate a point with a reader who - as you did - bothered to leave a comment.

All the best

Tim

"Phallus grammaticus" :-)

Well I actually didn't realise that you were the editor, so I kind of responded as if you were just "random guy from internet".

I'm sure you've met that guy before, he's an ass!

Personally, the fact that editorial is willing to engage in discussions with it's readers is one of the reasons that I come to Spong every day, and rarely any other site.

(That's meant to be a good thing, by the way)

I hate that guy.

Cheers

Tim

hah!

I love it, keep on swinging...

I feel quite moved by that, and I've not even had my first vodka of the day.

Cheers

Tim

Now I have.

I guess it's about time I stuck my oar in, having written the review in question.

Firstly, I haven't read any reviews of Haze (other than my own). Since it went up, though, I have taken a look at Metacritic to see some of the scores. My feeling is that Haze is getting a bigger kicking than it deserves.

Haze is, unfortunately, less than phenomenal. That doesn't mean it's not a really solid title, however. It just doesn't live up to the hype. I can't help but wonder if the oodles of hype have provoked the bad scores in reaction to it... But, like I said, I haven't read them yet, so I can't say for sure.

In any case, I'm standing by the review I gave it - flawed, but still decent.

Say what now?

oh, that grammatical wingwang of yourn...couldn't help envisioning Eddie Murphy from RAW swinging his microphone over his shoulder.

Having read most reviews around and finally getting my hands on a copy yesterday I thought your review was teh most accurate I've read. Yes its flawed but it's still a game I'm more than happy to own. Haze has suffered by people being overly critical (some reviews have flat out lied about it) and there are other sgames liek gta4 and halo 3 which have received the opposite treatment of getting reviews that they simply didn't deserved. I can't understand how a game like gta4 with so many flaws can get so many perfect scores or high 90's. It's hard to find unbias reviews any more but Spong seems to be one of the few out there.