Eidos UK blocks Tomb Raider: Underworld scores below 8/10

Or buy used! SCREW EM ALL I SAY!

I guess to stay competitive and keep earning ad dollars, a site would want to offer reviews of ALL games in time to benefit readers who couldn't wait to buy the game. That said I really feel for anyone who runs a game review site. I think some banding together is in order, so reactive pressure can be put back on shifty developers like Eidos.

I knew this was a slippery slope back when Gamespot caved to Eidos the first (?) time.

I personally lost all respect for their reviews after that. How much crap like that goes on that the average reader never finds out about?

What do you think would happen if Universal Pictures was pressuring Ebert & Roeper to give good reviews? A congressional investigation, probably.

You're 100% correct on why this stuff flies at all. It all comes back to the almighty dollar. What it seems the journalistic community hasn't realized is that the publishers need the gaming press just as much (if not more) than the gaming press needs the publishers. What good is a hype campaign if no one is listening?

From the perspective of the editor of a gaming site, frankly, it sucks that we can't get our reviews out before a game launches. We don't get as much traffic (by a long shot) to the review as a bigger site's review that went up a few days early.

Our reviews generally go up two days to a week after a game launches, but they go up honest. I remember hearing that the sites promising a perfect score were the only ones allowed to release GTA4 reviews before launch day, and that seems kinda off to me. No game is perfect, not even GTA. Soooooo either the sites giving it a perfect (and early) score have lower standards than me (quite possible - I'm picky) or they gave it a perfect score in spite of it's flaws. I'm not trying to call anyone in particular out by saying that - there's no concrete evidence that anyone gave a dishonest review - the game was great, and every review, perfect score or not, reflected that. Maybe they felt that, despite it's flaws the game was as perfect as a game gets. The point I'm making here is that the relationship between publishers and journalists has become waaaay too complicated in recent years, and it kinda sucks for the little guy trying to break into video game journalism.

It's cheaper too. Other game companies just bribe the reviewers for a higher score, Eidos simply refuse them. At least Eidos is an honest company!

So you're saying journalists should give sympathy points to a game? No. If you're a game critic, it's literally in your job title that you should be CRITICAL of a game regardless of the size or the budget of the team that built it.

For example, Spiderman: Web of Shadows sucked. It was broken, and I reviewed it as such. Treyarch is the dev. They also made CoD:W@W, which was great. I gave it a very favorable review. A review should have nothing to do with the developer, and everything to do with the game they made. Since the launch of the Community Games on the XBLM, I've seen some really awesome games come out of one and two man dev teams. It's not about your development bandwidth, it's about what you do with it.

Aww, should we buy them ice cream cones and rub their belly while we tell them how proud we are of them for doing their job?

Grow up, if they're willing to take the good publicity that comes with reviews released prior to the game, then they should be willing to take the bad publicity too. It's a two way street.