Eidos UK's PR firm has confirmed that British sites planning on posting Tomb Raider: Underworld reviews with less than an 8.0 score are being asked to hold off posting them until Monday. The news originally game from a twitter post from Gamespot UK journalist Guy Cocker, relaying a call he received voicing that very request. A representative from the PR firm Barrington Harvey spoke to Videogaming247 this morning.

"That's right. We're trying to manage the review scores at the request of Eidos."

When asked why, the spokesperson said: "Just that we're trying to get the Metacritic rating to be high, and the brand manager in the US that's handling all of Tomb Raider has asked that we just manage the scores before the game is out, really, just to ensure that we don't put people off buying the game, basically."

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A couple weeks ago, fanboy dorks exposed their stupidity to the wider community by hijacking the user reviews of two games on review aggregate site MetaCritic. The games in question were LittleBigPlanet and Gears of War 2, the people in question, morons. And while the whole mess was a little overplayed by some - who cares about user reviews on a website built solely to aggregate the reviews of critics? - MetaCritic were sufficiently moved by the episode to do something about it.

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It's just a tragic facet of the human condition - a tribal instinct that can pit friend against friend and brother against brother. Catholic v Protestant, Sunni vs Shia, Spectrum v Commodore 64 and now - perhaps most bitterly of all - Xbox 360 v PS3.

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Have you seen the recent Saints Row 2 trailer that makes direct comparisons to Grand Theft Auto IVto show why it's more fun? It's more tongue-in-cheek snarky than truly nasty, but apparently it prompted one analyst to counsel investors to take it with a grain of salt.

Janco Partners analyst Mike Hickey said that going toe-to-toe with GTA IV on content is "an unusually pompous position... considering GTA IV is estimated to be the highest grossing 1st week entertainment release of all time".

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Earlier this year, Kotaku began running its reviews under a unified template that was designed with a trio of key components in mind.

First, there would be no alphabetical or numerical review scores. Second, reviews would be focused on delivering the most critical information in the most efficient way possible. Third, they should be fun to read and hopefully foster conversation about a game's positives and negatives.

We decided to exclude a final score to ensure that Kotaku reviews would not contribute to the average rating at sites that collate and aggregate numerical scores, scores that do not follow a universal grading scale. Our hope was that we could avoid discussions that fruitlessly debate whether a "10" was, indeed, perfect and if one exclusive was better than another exclusive simply based on a number. Boiling down pages of analysis to a single grade or score or number of pumpkins doesn't help readers, it hurts them, reducing the process of critiquing what is often a living document into black and white terms, when there is often a world of grey left untouched.

Our hope is that by laying out the analytical process, by exposing what we feel was good and bad about that game without weighting either, we give you the resources to form your own educated opinion.

We hope this explains how and why we designed this system. We encourage you to add your comments, questions and suggestions in the comments after reading through the more detailed explanation on the key aspects of our reviews on the jump.

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Whenever we hear about the travails of a video game company, snark abounds, and ultimately, the chorus cries, "Why don't you just make some games that don't suck?"

Easy to say from the outside looking in, but independent game developer Matthew of the Magical Wasteland blog shared his insider experience with an unidentified major publisher to explain that it's not always so simple, even when executives "talk the talk" about quality control.

Matthew cited the institution of bonuses for developers based on Metacritic scores, similar to the practice of hinging developer royalties on good scores that MTV Multiplayer's Stephen Totilo recently investigated.

Said Matthew:

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Stephen Totilo of MTV Multiplayer continues his week-long look at video game review practices by exploring the practice of game publishers withholding certain bonuses and/or royalties if the game doesn't achieve a certain Metacritic average. Basically a publisher agrees to finance the development of a game as long as the developer in these sort of situation agrees to Metacritic score limit stipulations that could theoretically see a low-scoring game that sells millions (any children's licensed title really) hardly earning the devs a dime.

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Pissing contest time! The chaps at Electronic Entertainment Design and Research have compiled some lovely graphs highlighting not only the average review score for each major publisher, but one showcasing the range of scores they've received as well. Note that scores only apply to current-gen console titles, so no handheld, PC or PS2 scores count. As you can see, there's a sizeable gap between the top 5 and the chasing pack, and a sizeable gap between the chasing pack and Atari, who don't even make the list. Above are the average scores, click through for the score range, which proves to be a little more interesting.

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Xbox Live is going through some changes. Some might call them growing pains, with an increased file size on Xbox Live Arcade titles and a higher, 1600 Microsoft Point price cap for bigger titles. General manager of Xbox Live Marc Whitten says in an interview with Next-Gen that even more changes are coming. In addition to a "new fully funded 1st party studio which will be focused on high quality digital content creation," Microsoft will begin wiping the "shit" from Live, de-listing titles that underperform with critics and gamers.

According to Whitten, any title that is six months old, with an average Metacritic score below 65 and a demo-to-full conversion ratio below 6%, will be pulled from the service. Concerned parties will be notified three months in advance if a title is going to be pulled.

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In a conference call Thursday, EA seemed pretty worried about the low scores their games have been garnering on Metacritic. The average review score for an EA game has dropped from 77 to 72 over the last year, which EA CEO John Riccitiello says is unacceptable. While Riccitiello says he's not in the business of chasing numbers, those scores still have an impact on games.

Our core game titles are accurately measured and summarized by these assessments, and that is a very big deal.

Marc Doyle, who launched the Metacritic website in 2001, says that the scores being given out by Metacritic are having greater impact on the video game industry in recent years, mostly because people invest so much more time and money in video games than they do in other critiqued media, like movies.

He's got a point, too. I'm much more likely to see a movie critics don't like rather than pick up a video game critics have told me is terrible. Then again, it seems like video game critics hit the mark with game reviews more often than movie critics get it right.

EA concerned with low review scores of its games [GamePro.com]