Don't wanna hijack this thread and turn it into a "reviews" thread, but just a couple of comments:
The writers I know and respect, especially in the Sims genre, are hard core simmers. Most, like Andy Mahood (a very cool guy, hard core simmer, and real life race car driver) are as experienced and passionate about sims as anyone here, and really WANT sims to be great, because they don't just review them and toss them, they play them for years. This generally, for the major outlets, is not some kid thinking "cool, free games" reviewing. Again - for the major outlets (CGW, CGM (rip), PCG, Gamespot, etc.) There's a lot of crappy stuff on a lot of less professional sites (incuding a fair bit of plagiarism and laziness, like when you can tell they spent about 5 hours total on a game.) And the writers do not give a flying fatooie who advertises and who doesn't. In fact, if there's unfairness, it may be giving little indie publishers more of a break even if the game costs the same.
You can say that you don't give a damn if the casual gamer picks the game up at Best Buy and doesn't like it and tells their friends not to buy it, but if you want continued support and a SHV they need some serious sales, or they'll put their development dollars elsewhere. There's a reason that I don't have a lot of serious flight sims to review these days, compared to years ago when I'd play/review a dozen new combat sims a year. Publisher can get more sales with a mediocre FPS or RPG, so they invest their limited dollars in those.
Don't blame the writers/magazines if the publisher ships review copies and retail copies with 1.0 (and btw, only with some titles do the boxed copies get updated with the latest patches) and reviewers have been playing that one for some time, when they could have waited a week or so and released the fixed version. That's not the developers' desire, by the way - they surely prefer to ship the best product they can, every developer of a sim I've ever met has been pretty passionate about their product. The reviewers' obligation is to the readers. Unless my editor tells me to review the patched version (when it comes out) - and I asked - I'll mention in the article that a patch is out that addresses certain things, but the main body is what they shipped. Hopefully one day every publisher will build in an "auto-patch" function, such that anyone playing has the latest patch, but until then, ship to the stores what you want reviewed. What's the excuse not to?
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And so... I talked with my editor, and he has decided, since the patch is out before the program is out, to review the patched version and then make it very clear to the readers that you need to get and apply the patch for this review to be accurate.
So, things do change!
I'm still not convinced it's the "right" thing to do, since they're shipping 1.0 to all the stores, but I can take advanatge of the leeway.
Plus - it means I can stop playing 1.0 and play the patched version (as soon as the official released patch is out) - it is always frustrating to have to play a game that has problems that you know are fixed in a patch.