Games Thirst – Amazing Life
Eurogamer’s reporting today that it was denied a review copy of Battlefield 3 without reason. DICE and EA simply chose not to give one of Europe’s most respected websites a review copy of their shooter.
“Eurogamer and many other websites only received finished console copies of the game yesterday morning. Our reviewer signed for his at 7am,” reads a post on the redesigned website.
“There were a few reviews online yesterday based on the PC version of the game. When it became apparent last week that there might be a distinction between timings for PC and console reviews, we asked for PC code but were told none was available. We still haven’t been sent a PC copy of Battlefield 3 despite being told it is the leading version.
Throughout the last seven days we’ve also been told that a day-one patch would be released early this week that was essential to reviewing the game. In the event it turned out to be 167MB on Xbox 360.
Under the circumstances, our review is not ready for this morning’s embargo.
However, our reviewer was able to play the game extensively at pre-release hands-on sessions and has been playing pretty much non-stop for 24 hours with the patch installed, so the review will hopefully be ready later today.”
The thread continued: “We don’t know exactly why we’ve been put in a position where we can’t review the game at the same time as other websites, but we have asked politely.
We’re obviously disappointed by the circumstances, but we don’t harbour any ill feeling towards DICE, for whom we have infinite respect and affection, and we won’t let any of this nonsense cloud our analysis of a game we’re really excited to finally play.”
For those of you who may think we’re a bit hard on EA and DICE, please don’t make the mistake of thinking of this as biased. What’s happening is very dangerous and someone needs to report it. Eurogamer’s arguably the biggest European website and yet you fail to send a copy of your game for it to review, yet you’ve made available the PC version (superior version) to other websites, all of which who scored the game high 90s?
It’s rather obvious what’s going on now. I HOPE Battlefield 3 is good. We’ll review the game without bias, and send it live Thursday morning.
