Splinter Cell ad giving fabricated praise? [update 2]

If you have picked up the most recent issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly, you might have seen the above advertising for Splinter Cell Essentials, where GameSpy is quoted as calling it "one of the best games on PSP." The game has received lukewarm to poor reviews, so you might be tempted just to call GameSpy gamers with bad taste, but the peculiar thing is that GameSpy also gave Splinter Cell Essentials a poor review — 2 out of 5 stars, in fact, concluding with this key quote: "Hopefully, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Essentials will go down as the all-time low point for the series." Maybe the advertiser misread their review, so let us try to find where that quote could've come from (all emphasis added by us):

• (page 1) "[Sam Fisher] was one of the best and brightest personalities of the early days of the Xbox." Right series, right protagonist, but wrong console.
• (page 1) "One of the things that made the Splinter Cell series so great was the fact that ... you had complete control over the camera, allowing the player to put it in the best possible position for any situation. While you can still move the camera around, the lack of a second analog stick on the PSP makes it difficult (actually, annoying might be a better word)." Hmm ... nope, can't find it there. Again, right series, but not this title.
• "Over the past few years, the Splinter Cell series has become one of the best in the multiplayer arena ... It's a shame, then, that the multiplayer action in Essentials is easily weakest part of the game." We don't think one could misinterpret that declaration."

So we are not sure where the quote came from — not this review, at any rate. Did they confuse Essentials with the PlayStation 2's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (which received 5 out of 5 stars, being dubbed "one of the best stealth games of all time"). Not even GameSpy's parent company, IGN, has a "best" quote that can match this. Nor could we find one in Google (not even from some fan on Amazon.com or its like). So where did this fabricated quote come from? We'll keep you posted when we learn more.

Update 1: Here are two quotes from GameSpy's preview of the title:

• "one of the best looking and sounding games on the PSP"
• "one of the best games we've played on the PSP"

So now we understand where the quotes probably came from, but is it misleading to use quotations from a preview? And how can a title be so praised in a preview and then blasted for the very same reasons in the review? [Thanks, EzPz!]

Update 2: Moved some information to after the jump, so as not to clutter the main page.

[Thanks, tengaport]