The magazine tendency to review Live play in a later issue has always struck me as being a symptom of the fact that magazines still frequently review games from beta code, due to their long lead times – and Live play is very often the last element of a game to be fully implemented, and tends to be missing or broken in beta code.

The 20 quid prizes were odd. They were presented in a jokey way, a sort of laddish “adding interest to the multiplayer” thing – and I don’t think there was any intention to outright bribe anyone, just to add a bit of a spark to things. However, there were still people walking away with 20 or 40 quid of Microsoft’s money in their wallet, which doesn’t sound like much, but recall that the majority of them were probably only being paid around 80 quid to write the review…

And as to where my arse was placed… Well, Microsoft seemed to care, otherwise it wouldn’t have gone to such extravagant lengths!

The 20 quid prizes seems very odd – It’s hard to judge without having seen the way it was presented.

As for where your arse is placed when you review a game, seriously, who cares?

You learn something new every day – the Internet informs me that it’s a horse-racing term which suggests that a horse is so certain to win a race that it’ll do so even if it’s just gently shooed across the finish line. Ace!

I’ve been on the receiving end of such corporate hospitality before, and it is undeniably effective at generating goodwill towards the people, if not the product, and the two inevitably become conflated.

Still, of all the problems to have…

You’d really wonder if it was all necessary, considering the purported quality of Halo3. But then Microsoft seem to be tripping over themselves to spend money promoting the game.