lebkin

I am curious to what harm you see in the change. It takes very little effort to appease those who are offended, with no harm to those who are not. This is not even a content change - the game itself is exactly the same as it always was.

On a broader note, this is NOT censorship, despite the general please as such. Censorship is "suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body." No one forced Sony to take this action. They did it merely as a voluntary response to public pressure, not as a dictated action from on-high. Sony changing a trophy name as a PR move is no different than any other voluntary PR action, ala giving away free games as an apology for PSN problems.

Umm, not quite sure what you mean by "they". Whoever this "they" is, they didn't change the score in some disrespect to the reviewer of the game. If you actually look, Polygon did a good job labeling the changes to the score. Oh, and what a surprise: every single update and change to the score has been from Russ Pitts. You know, the guy who reviewed the game. His personal opinion and experience has changed over the course of the week, and the score has changed to reflex that. No scary "they" running over his opinion.

That review went up over a week after the game launched, when most of the server issues had passed. It wasn't posted for the launch turmoil, so it didn't have its score adjusted.

@magzine said:

Or you could just build your systems such that they don't require external servers? Most Xbox 360 games don't need them - everything is handled by Microsoft. That's what you pay for when you buy Gold. But EA wants everything to go through their internal systems, which means they have to run severs. This is ENTIRELY the fault of EA at least on the 360.

(Note: I am less familiar with how PSN works when it comes to games. Maybe EA has no choice there.)

This is so absolutely awesome. Well done sir.

As an improvement, it'd be great to have regular Quick Look guest as a search option. It'd be fantastic to easily pull up everything Brad Muir has been on.

Metacritic puts the emphasis on only a few things in a review: score, outlet, and popularity. This is a valuable tool if all you want is a general sense of a game - "do a lot of people like this game?" It's as useful sales numbers - "lots of people thought this would be good." Neither are great gauges for an individual's needs and desires (unless your opinions always follow mainstream lines).

The important thing for any individual is the nature of the reviewer and the words that reviewer uses to justify their opinion. Telling me Giantbomb gave Tomb Raider a 4 out of 5 tells me nothing. Telling me that Brad gave it 4 of 5 is actually useful - I know his likes and dislikes enough to compare them to my own. Explain to me that he had complaints about it's inconsistent tone and lack of "tomb raiding", and I start to be able to form a value judgement on the game. Metacritic white washes all that nuance away.

For me, I tend to look at what the equivalent cost gets me. Comparing a $200 Xbox to a $1000 computer isn't really fair - they are two completely different beasts. For the PS4, I'd say comparing it to a $600 computer seems fair (assuming the high end of the potential price range).

$430 screams literal conversion from yen to dollars, without any adjustment for US pricing standards.

The new site is entirely adaptive - there is no "mobile" site per-say. Try shrinking the size of your desktop browser. You can watch all the adjustments get made to the layout as the width shifts.

I don't have access to a Kindle Fire to test it, but I assume it is looking at your screen width and assuming your screen is big enough for the main site (rather than squeezing it down for a smaller format). That's what happens on my iPad Mini.

Don't use a homepage. Just leave it as Chrome's default grid of most visited sites.