Master Moderator

Lord of the Mods.
The Few. The Proud. The Jaded. mMods have been there and done that. They've seen it all and lived to tell the tale, and they use their considerable knowledge to lead the GameSpot community. Also, they floss daily.

I have just received the privilege of a promotion to Master Moderator along with 5 of my fellow mods

DrFish62
solidruss
JordanElek
princesszelda
CodingGenius
Krall

Joining the esteemed list of current master moderators.

duxup
CaseyWegner
MAILER_DAEMON
Robbie_IV
uglyduck-uk

What does this mean? A little more responsibility and a few additional powers. Plus my suspension stick has been upgraded to a ban hammer and it always rolls a 20. Hopefully I won't have to use it too often.

And hopefully I can verify to the hard working community staff that they made a wise decision.

Has been a good couple of weeks. My smilies come back and now this, I think tomorrow I might just go and buy myself a lottery ticket

Explained in detail here.

Anybody else having issues with this or just me?

I really do hope there are more to these rumours than meets the eye. The implications are disasterous if true. This is not something that will go away either. It will hang over Gamespot for a very long time.

You simply cannot have a credible review system whereby reviews are influenced by how much a publisher spends in advertising dollars.

edit:

What we know so far.

1. Jeff Gerstman was fired from Gamespot, he apparently contacted Joystiq.com himslef and confirmed this. Link

2. The Video Review (seen here) and the advertising for Kayne and Lynch have been removed from the site.

Now these two pieces of information do not confirm the story but they certainly paint a very strong picture. And its not a pretty one.

Some one at gamespot needs to clear things up and soon.

Mysteriously and Miraculously, at 12:02 GMT, Weeblchu vanished from my signature. No note was left and we are greatly worried for his safety. Early signs suggest he might have been eaten by the glitch monster.

If anyone knows his where abouts contact me on 555-lostweebl.

I have strongly considered buying a PS3 many times to date, walking into various stores and seeing what offers they have. Always however when I come to the brink of buying one, two things hold me back.

The first is game selection. Most package deals in the UK promiise 2 free games with the PS3 and as I browse the shelves looking for what I would choose the stark reality of the PS3s library (at least for anyone who already owns a 360) comes to light. Warhawk and um........,maybe I'll look again next month.

The second is knowing that I am buying an inferior model of the console. This has always been the case in the UK, where the PS3 launched without full backwards compatibility. Now I don't know about anyone else but it seriously urks me to have to pay £425 for a console I know isn't fully featured. Now a new 40gb model is replacing the 60gb and is a much more attractive price point but has even more is taken away. With backwards compatibility now all but gone and media functionality getting more and more reduced look how far Sony has turned from its original stance back at E306. "PS3 is not a games machine it's a machine with supercomputer calculation capabilities for home entertainment" and "backwards compatibility, as you know from PlayStation One and PlayStation 2, is a core value of what we believe we should offer".

Who the hell are they marketting this thing at anymore? Your more casual gamer isn't likely to spend £300 on a system than they were £425 and most with a more involved interest will likely share my stance on wanting full features. Far from convincing me to purchase a system the 40gb model has put my interest on hold untill SCEE release another sku re-adding all the bells and whistles. And even then with the rate new models and price changes are coming out I might still be tempted to wait just to see what Sony will do next to try to shift more PS3s.

Bottom line, until enough compelling software exists to warrant a purchase it doesn't matter what Sony do with the PS3. All this sku changing is achieving is putting them in a bigger mess for when they get there.

How can it take so long to localise games for Europe? Sure for some it is understandable that there would be some delay. Your Paper Marios and your Final Fantasies have a lot of localisation to be done with all that text and in the latter's case voice acting. But Why did Trauma Centre only come out last month (9 months after the US release!) and why do I have to wait 3 extra months for Super Smash Bros Brawl? The game has next to no text, and they aren't going to be re-voicing anyone. The minimal menu translations should be able to be done in a matter of days not months. I mean give me a French Dictionary and a couple of hours and I reckon I could have that game completely translated by myself. Instead it seems Nintendo would prefer to sit on it and miss out the Christmas Rush, the mind boggles!

Then there is the fact that the UK gets lumped in with all the European languages. Surely it would be simpler to release the UK version at the same time as the US. Why have millions of gamers wait whilst you translate a game into languages they don't understand?

Now I know what some of you are thinking, what about the broadcasting formats of the different television standards? (NT-SC, PAL etc). Well Microsoft manage to get their games to Europe nearly every time within a matter of days and at most weeks, never months. Sony are considerably less good, with games often coming out months after the US, and Nintendo.............Well you just never know what they are playing at! Sometimes it feels like they have calender to throw darts at and other times, having completely forgotten about us over the pond, walk past and atlas and have and epiphany.

I'm fed up of waiting months for my games, we live in a global economy now and the game publishers, particularly Nintendo, need to realise this.