Games Toaster

NOTE: Old content being picked up as new

Google News and other sites have picked up some of our old news as new.

UPDATE: This looks like it is happening again for different reasons – on request, Google News changed the RSS news feed they use to obtain our news. The new feed is located at http://www.gamestoaster.com/games_toaster/rss.xml

In order to make our news archive more accessible, Games Toaster is currently expanding the list of categories tags on our news archive; for every new category created a new page is automatically created for the category, apparently because of this Google News and other sites have found our archived news items and listed them as current news – we apologies for any inconvenience caused.

The beast that is Google News picked up at least one new category “e3_2005” at /games_toaster/e3_2005/, this looks to be causing the most redirects.

The most notable other site which has linked to our archive is the Inquirer, who kindly picked up our news article on ‘Streaming music over Live may breach laws’. This article was however published last May; we list the date of publication at the end of articles. We would like to extend our apologies for any inconvenience caused to the Inquirer, and their readers.

Before proceeding with more tags we will publish highly visible banners on this sites side panels which should be seen on any page of this site.

This clarification has been added to all recently created tags, and should appear at the top of the relevant pages.

Clarification: XboxIreland.com article - we used facts, we did not infer or imply

Games Toaster takes complaints seriously, so seriously we are publishing this clarification in the same way we publish all of our content. This post is a clarification, not a correction. At this point, we see no reason to edit the article in question in any way.

On November 28, 2005, we published an article titled ‘XboxIreland.com launches, backed by publishers’, we have received anonymous complaints, apparently but not certainly, from the one person vie our comments system.

The article deals with the facts as we have established. In this case, all such facts are available in the public domain (ie on websites, including Xbox Ireland). 

In the article, we do not give our feelings of support or otherwise for the site, there is one exception to this, after the use of the word ‘Irish’ was wrongly used as ‘irish’ we inserted ‘(sic)’, this is commonly used with in print media to display a grievance distasteful use of the written English language. Besides this we do not infer or imply any thoughts on how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ the site in question may be.

One comment stated, “By linking their staff member to Microsoft's marketing company as if it means that they are biased”, we did not link their ‘staff member’ to a marketing company which works for Microsoft, we merely publicised the fact that such a link is a realty, we said nothing of bias. We did not infer or imply any ethically complicity of somebody working on an ‘Irish Xbox community site’ and working directly or indirectly for the Xbox maker. To infer (to form an opinion or guess that something is true because of the information that you have – Cambridge), is something the complaint did, not us, we just provided what we know as the complete information, which we could not find on Xbox Ireland.

Another comment stated, “This quote: "Games Toaster has identified least one person listed as a ‘staff writer’ [of XboxIreland.com] as being an employ of an Irish marketing company who works for Xbox manufacture Microsoft. The site is billed as an ‘Irish Xbox community site’."… Yas make it sound as if yas have identified him from a criminal line-up! ” To the best of our knowledge, to the term “identified” is not solely generally associated with a “criminal line-up”, or any other “criminal” activity. We do not believe many of our readers will confuse our use of English in this way. 

In this case, the complaints were published publicly in our comments system, if you have a complaint and want to issue it confidential you can email or write to us (see the contact page), if you wish we will only publicly deal with the nature or the complaint without quoting the whole complaint. As always you can also post using our comments system with or without entering a name or email address.

Again, this post is a clarification, not a correction; as such, we see no reason to edit the article in question about XboxIreland.com in any way.

Corrections

Our article ‘Mobile games news roundup’ on February 22 2005 contained screenshots of BitRabbit’s ‘Yukiko’ that we resized, while resizing the screenshots we inadvertently adversely affected the quality of the images.

We apologies for this, as we understand that it could possible do harm to the reputation of the company as it may have reflected badly on their work. We accept that this was an error on our part. The  images in question are now corrected, and we will take steps to avoid any recurrences.

Corrections & clarifications

Welcome to Games Toaster’s corrections and clarifications page. Listed below are corrections and/or clarifications made to our articles.

PLEASE NOTE: To correct errors, please use the comments section on this page, and not the comments on individual articles – list the article in question, and what you think needs correction or clarification. This move is aimed at keeping the comments sections open to possible discussion about the games or topics covered in articles.

Any possible factual errors take precedence, but we are also interested in spelling and grammatical errors - although minor errors may not be listed here. Entrees marked as clarifications are not admittances of errors, and should not be confused with corrections. All text below the word ‘COMMENTS’ may or may not be users’ opinions.

While this groupings of our errors may make it look like we make a high number of errors, it is worth noting the few sites similar to Games Toaster make their errors so transparent.

REVIEW: Zelda: Twilight Princess (corrections)
February, 2007
A reader pointed out two minor errors on our review of ‘Zelda: Twilight Princess’ for the Nintendo Wii.

The sentence “That it does so with the most generic of plots, rescue princess and return peach to the kingdom, is some achievement” has now been changed to “That it does so with the most generic of plots – rescue the princess and return her to the kingdom – is some achievement”. The word ‘peach’ referred to a character in the game and should have started with a capital letter, although in the reedit her name was totally removed to improve the flow of the line.

While the line “The most noticeable aspect the gameplay is how rewarding it fells to play”, should have included ‘feels to play’, not “fells to play”. This was most probably a simple typo and has also been corrected.

In one of the comments the reader says "dude, spellchecker?", unfortunately both ‘fells’ and ‘peach’ are words listed in the dictionary, so a spellchecker would not have found fault with both errors, nor would most grammar checking systems.

The mistakes were due to human error – it was the reviewer’s fault for making such errors and the editor's for not spotting them.

REVIEW: Darkwatch (corrections and clarfications)
February, 2006
Our review of Darkwatch published on February 03, 2006, had a number of errors corrected. Capcom was originally listed as Darkwatch’s developer; High Moon Studios actually developed the game. Capcom was also listed as publisher, while Capcom publish this title in North America, the game was provided by Ubisoft, the publisher in PAL areas, including Ireland. Minor spelling and grammatical errors were also made and corrected. Some of these minor errors occurred after quick fixes to factual errors.

We have apologised to the developer for not giving them credit; we’d also like to apologise to the publisher as they provide a review copy of the game and we had wrongfully not credited them for being the publisher in PAL areas.

Xbox Ireland now under new ownership (clarfication)
February, 2006
Our article about new ownership (and the old editor leaving) at Xbox Ireland caused a number of anonymous complaints. No complaints have been officially received from management at the site. We issued clarifications, not a correction, within the comments section attached to the article. We directly replied to anonymous comments, we addressed all detailed complaints, and at the time of writing this we have received no outstanding response to such. 

XboxIreland.com launches, backed by publishers (clarfication)
December, 2005
Our article on November 28, 2005, about the launch of the website ‘XboxIreland.com’, caused a number of anonymous complaints. The then editor, Cian O'Mahony, also complained, but latter retracted his complaint. We issued a clarification, not a correction, on the article – to this date, we see no reason to edit the article in question. The clarification about this issue, published December 10, 2005, can be found here.

Mobile games news roundup (correction)
March, 2005
Our article ‘Mobile games news roundup’ on February 22 2005 contained screenshots of BitRabbit’s ‘Yukiko’ that we resized, while resizing the screenshots we inadvertently adversely affected the quality of the images.

We apologies for this, as we understand that it could possible do harm to the reputation of the company as it may have reflected badly on their work. We accept that this was an error on our part. The images in question are now corrected, and we will take steps to avoid any recurrences.

Mobile games news roundup (correction)
March, 2005
Our article ‘Mobile games news roundup’ on February 22 2005 contained screenshots of BitRabbit’s ‘Yukiko’ that we resized, while resizing the screenshots we inadvertently adversely affected the quality of the images.

We apologies for this, as we understand that it could possible do harm to the reputation of the company as it may have reflected badly on their work. We accept that this was an error on our part. The images in question are now corrected, and we will take steps to avoid any recurrences.