TestamentUK

There are advantages and disadvantages to going first and going second. Somehow Microsoft managed to take hits on all the disadvantages (months of no-comment on bad rumours, seemingly matching next generation functionality in their console instead of introducing it etc.) and not make the most of any of the benefits granted by going second.

I feel like the majority (/all?) of the really negative reaction came from the tech press. Specifically, people who wouldn't buy a game-focussed console anyway, or at least wouldn't make much use of one (along with the majority of their audience).

They cover consumer electronics. They see the announcement and think of a number of previous consumer electronics announcements they believe to be much better. Based on this viewpoint, they declare the announcement to be a failure. When it's finally released and doesn't sell as many units as the latest iPhone or Galaxy phone they pat themselves on the back on their great insight.

Meanwhile, as a console gamer I couldn't care less, I'm excited. If it doesn't sell as much at release as the latest smart phone then fine - I already have one of those for completely different purposes.

There was a thread on the beta forums about the forums not showing local time. Sounded like it was something they didn't have time to implement for launch and may look at in the future. The forums show relative time stamps instead.

I presume it's the same issue for the 'Coming up on Giant Bomb' feature. I asked about that part specifically but didn't get an answer at the time (it was pretty close to the site launch). It's a shame because it is clearly designed to give you at-a-glance schedule information, but instead gives you at-a-glance-and-a-quick-time-calculation schedule information which actually makes quite a difference.

I tried viewing the youtube video (here on the site) earlier and it came up with a message saying 'This video has been removed because it is too long.' I guess it was uploaded but has since been removed by a bot.

This weekly column is fast becoming one of my favourite features on the site.

Good work, @Alex !

1. Write an article about a horrible PR campaign which causes huge amount of comments/views
2. Horrible PR campaigns continue because of how successful they've been in creating publicity through such articles

Repeat these steps for continued $$$. Both the game sites and the publishers win! Genius!

...

Valve will be announcing their brand new original franchise with the exciting first entry: Diablo 3. The sequel is going to be named Starcraft 3.

12 minutes in and already a game has been described as 'visceral'.

I stopped going to Kotaku when their redesign got in the way of me reading their content. However I was subscribed to their RSS feed for a long time (the full article one, which was difficult enough to find after they decided that much like web design they clearly knew how RSS feeds should work better than 99% of the Internet). No more though, they've completely lost the focus they used to have which is why I would visit the site. Now instead of getting extremely fast reporting of emerging games related news every other post is some poorly written, link-bait opinion piece, something completely irrelevant like a movie review or a post bordering on softcore porn. 
 
Never mind advertising, their just isn't enough worthwhile content.