Eurogamers weird 5/10 review for Grand Slam Tennis has been taken off the site. The reason? They were playing with faulty hardware.


From Eurogamer:

"This morning we received a tip-off from our colleagues at Eurogamer.de that they had encountered substantial differences in Wii MotionPlus performance on their Wii debug review kit and their retail Wii console. Obviously this set off alarm bells - Kristan Reed had reviewed Grand Slam Tennis on a Wii debug kit.
With the gravity of that in mind, I went out and bought a boxed copy of Grand Slam Tennis and a WMP and hotfooted it round to Kristan's, where we both tested it out. Our German friends were absolutely right: there's a substantial, immediately noticeable difference between the responsiveness playing the game on a retail Wii.
As a result, I'm immediately withdrawing Eurogamer's Grand Slam Tennis review until we will publish a new review based purely on retail console play. The existing text will remain online with big whopping signposts on it that highlight the above, and once the replacement review is published, it will redirect to that.
Furthermore, while Virtua Tennis 2009 was reviewed on a retail Wii without issue, the text published today makes numerous references to Grand Slam Tennis, so until such time as the EA game is reappraised, I'm also withdrawing the VT review.
Both the new Grand Slam Tennis review and an updated Virtua Tennis 2009 review will be published on Monday. "


I am reminded of Lost Odyssey here. Why do these things happen?

It was a pretty damning review, I posted a link here a little while back.

Would they have had a functioning unit to start with that review would still be terrible, perhaps by now they know that they missed about 3/4 of the features of the game. Reading that review gave me the impression that they did not even know that you can/are supposed to play the game with the nunchuck.

Seems to be they got backlash for yet another clearly uninformed review (they're notorious for doing it on a bunch of games, from Wii titles they can't bother standing up for to MMORPGs they don't play for more than a couple hours) and this is an excuse but whatever works to get them to properly rate it. I wonder what score it will get since even though they praised Virtua Tennis as much better it still only got 7/10.

Its good that they post this explanation and say they will go back to the game.  What happened with Lost Oddyssey?

Lost Odyssey review copies had significantly longer loading times than retail copies, resulting in generally lower reviews that all complained about the very bad loading times, which are in fact no bother at all in retail, and even less so when installed to HDD.
 A few reviews were adjusted when that became known, but not many.