I haven't played PGR2, but I think this happened with regard to Halo 3. Not having XBox Live a lot of this title's value is lost IMO. If I were a reviewer I would have given Halo 3 a significant penalty for this (and for being so repetitive), this consindering many people buy the XBox 360 for being a cheap console and about half of its userbase aren't subscribed to XBox Live Gold for online multi-player functionality.

I believe that PGR is a MS-owned IP.

Bizarre was third party to begin with, they are now wholly owned by Activision (I believe that's the case).

PGR was published by MS, The Club by SEGA, and they were in simultaneous development. Only real difference now is that the only publisher Bizarre can work with is Activision.

...and there are miles-long histories of conflicts between those who are actually paying for the game to be made (publishers), and those making the game. No insight into what happened here, but it's rarely only one side's 'fault'.

Good thing you are not a reviewer.

By your logic then Little Big Planet should get dock several points because if you don't have on-line access then you can't get the user created contents, which would be kinda stupid way to review game.  How about let dock point for Killzone 2 because half of the PS3 user base still hook up their system to SDTV with composite cables with out the 7.1 system to take advantage of the Killzone superb graphics and sound.  See where this is going.

Yes, PGR ip still belongs to Microsoft.  Though Bizarr is making new racing game Blur (yeah another dumb single syllable name for racing game ... GRID, DiRT, Shift, Blur what's next CAR?).

Not to mention the fact that FPS players are not the same as *all* 360 owners.  So even if half of 360 owners are not Gold LIVE subscribers, the better question is, how many FPS enthuiasts are not.  Its also dubious to say many people buy the 360 only because its a "cheap console".  A more honest assessment is many buy it because it has a great  game library and is a good value for the money.  Either way, isn't that better than the many people not buying a PS3 because its expensive?  The only measure by which its not expensive is that Sony loses money on them.  The slant as usual is insane.

No, I don't agree. Of course you should primarily review a game with optimal settings (not sure, if that's always the case).

This is how it's done on the PC for decades as well, Doom or Quake when they released wouldn't even run on many PCs of the time. However if a PC game would heavily depend on online play and you would have to pay extra each year or month for this functionality to the game publisher, I think that's worthy of a penality as well. I think many PC gamers would be furious.

LittleBigPlanet is great off-line (both single as well as off-line multi-player), just hooking your PS3 up to the internet provides an enormous wealth of additional user created content (much, much more so then was the case when this title launched and was reviewed).

IMO Halo 3's off-line campaign is too short and repetitive, thus IMO overhyped. Reviewers could provide 2 scores, one for people who refuse to pay extra to play online and one for people who are subscribed.

fixed

All 360 owners can play multiplayer via LAN parties, so no functionality is lost.

A lot of these guys from internal studios were folded into Microsoft's new studio.

M$ has alot of money that's probably why they feel like they can Rush/Manipulate who ever they want but they forget that it doesn't always work like that.