So today has seen the launch of Gears of War 3 and during that build up every big source for gaming reviews has managed to give their opinion on the finished article. Bitparade is obviously not amongst those sites, and I'm yet to play the game. What has come to my attention is review scores for the game, or to be more precise the "shock" in some quarters in regards to specific scores.



To be honest I've seen the relationship between gaming media, publishers, PR reps and developers going this way for some time. For smaller sites, and I'm probably not doing us any favour here, theres an element of pressure to give a favourable score to games in order to win the publisher and PR people over, I'm pleased to say bitparade has never ever been one of those sites and fortunately we've never had one of our reviews questioned openly or privately through email if we've given a poor score, although some publishers have stopped "taking or calls" so to speak. But the reaction from figures such as Cliff Blezinski amongst others is rather laughable, their annoyance and "disbelief" that some websites would even dare score a behemoth such as Gears of War 3 as low as 8/10 shows just how out of touch or over-expectent developers believe their products to be.

Make no mistake, Gears 3 will sell and it will sell incredibly well. In fact the Blockbuster store I work at is expecting to sell every single copy it gets in before the weekend arrives and over half of those are to people who have pre-ordered, thats with a Sainsbury's literally 5 doors away that will probably undercut us on price, so Cliffy's claim that he is merely protecting people from being misinformed about his game is not only disrespectful to professional games journalists but also belittling of the very people he is trying to sell the game to. What Cliff has to realise is that most of the people who are likely to buy it will already have decided that they're going to do so within that all important two week period that the industry focuses on so heavily now, it will not be another Bulletstorm (which Epic appear to feel sold poorly as it was slow seller) although it will also be treated as a stop gap until Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 arrives.

Maybe this is the underlying issue here, back when Gears of War launched, it (along with Halo) was the major title for games playing folk to be playing on a regular basis, now everythings pretty much a filler until Activisions latest arrives on store shelves and takes up permanent residence in a large number of consoles disc trays the world over. It's certainly frustrating from the point of view from someone like myself who see's other high quality games worthy of peoples money go unrewarded and even on occassion the developers find themselves out of a job, thats the one thing I've found enlightening about the success of Dead Island. No doubt we'll see more and more copies traded in at various different retaillers over the next few weeks, but a small publisher like Deep Silver and an even smaller developer like Techland will take heart from very favourable reviews (alot of which were 8/10's I might add) and a couple of weeks of high chart placement and actually feel greatful for the reception their title has recieved from games playing folk whilst those at Epic sit and Tweet that Eurogamer and Destructoid having the audacity to give their game such a lowly score is a real "WTF!" moment in gaming journalism.