That’s why this attempt by Eidos to game the system seems so ridiculously ham-handed:

Gamespot UK journalist Guy Cocker revealed the tactic in a Twitter post on Wednesday that said: “call from Eidos–if you’re planning on reviewing Tomb Raider Underworld at less than an 8.0, we need you to hold your review till Monday.”

Said a Barrington Harvey rep on the phone this afternoon: “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.”

On one level it acknowledges that gamers are probably going to respond to Metacritic’s review numbers, but it also completely fails to realize that if the information got out (and why wouldn’t it?) the fans will consider Eidos’ lack of confidence in their own product into their perception of the game as well.

It’s hard enough to re-invigorate a product that’s been through as many ups and downs as Tomb-Raider has over the years, especially when it seems like every iteration of the game is trying to be a “major re-launch”, but this kind of behavior only serves to confirm people’s worst fears. Oh, and turn them into a target for Penny Arcade.

This is an in-depth documentary about the life of Bruce Wayne as shown on Gotham Cable News. If anything it’s played almost too straight.

There’s tons of other fun goodies on the site as well, including web sites for Harvey Dent, and Gotham City Rail.

The first trailer was pretty awful, but we live in a post Matrix world, and it’s a world where computer graphics let you make “action ballet” movies. The trick is to try and tell a good, compelling story in the context of that genre.

The Wanted graphic novel was written by Marc Millar, who wrote the Ultimates, and can definitely can handle storytelling under pressure.

The voice over is terrible, but isn’t voice over always terrible?

Despite the ability to use the VCR it was still mostly appointment television. If you wanted to watch something you, and everybody else, showed up to your television when it was broadcast. And then everybody talked about it the next day. If you missed it… well maybe you would catch a rerun.

Over the next two decades that kind of media hierarchy was smashed. With the rise of the DVD, Tivo, and the Internet, by the end of the 90s you could start to see the beginnings of a new way of experiencing content. These days, it’s hard to remember what it felt like to have to chase after your favorite show.

But with that freedom has come a shattering of the audience. As its become easier to get what we want when we want it, it has also become almost impossible for the corporations to drive our tastes from the top down. Combining that with the ability to easily get a constant stream of specific behind the scenes information, we’ve moved into world where not only do we no longer have to take what we’re given, but can actually band together and lobby for exactly what we want.

That’s great for the consumer, but it also means that informing your audience about the media you think they’d like has become that much more difficult. How do you get an audience to show up when you can’t just tell them where to be, or even be sure that they’ll be interested in watching television at all when there’s so many blogs to read and video games to play?

But the corpse of the good old days of big media is still warm. Anyone over thirty will still have fond memories of television as a group event shared with family and friends. They can still remember a time where “everybody” was talking about what happened on their favorite show last night.

And so, the media from that era still bask in that warm nostalgic glow of cultural awareness.  A time when kitsch was king because everybody had seen “I Dream of Genie” or “Gilligan’s Island”. Shows from the pre-Internet era have power because they come with built in cultural awareness. And that translates directly into marketing leverage.  The audience may not be intimately familiar with Battlestar Galactica, but the vague memory, along with the ability to experience the source material on a DVD, means that you’re going to have a built in audience when you turn the seventies chestnut into a gritty remake for the new millennium.

These old shows, movies, and characters, have become a cultural resource of sorts: Mineable, exploitable, and most importantly, limited. And so we get The Sarah Conner Chronicles, pushing not only the show, but the idea of a “viewing party”, where you can get your friends together and have a shared cultural experience just like they used to do back in the old days.

Over on his blog, Warren Ellis has been talking about “looking for a 21st century fiction“. And there’s definitely something coming. After all we can only mine the corpse of our past for so long.

Not only are we running out of any kind of quality “classic” shows from which to remake new media, but you can only tap a reflex so many times before it starts to become annoying. Tweaking the audience’s nostalgic memories of “simpler days” where we had to sit back and absorb whatever culture came down from our masters is nostalgia isn’t going to keep working for a generation that knows nothing of media history beyond what they can absorb from a YouTube clip.

Hey gang! This is a very cool, very historic first for MySpace Comic Books, and a great way to celebrate  the new year!
In partnership with our excellent friends at BOOM! Studios, we are releasing a comic book series online at the same time as it is released in comic book stores. You read that right: you can download the complete issues of NORTH WIND for FREE on the same day they hit the stands!
Today, we are proud to release NORTH WIND 01. You can read the pages online below, or download the complete issue to your hard drive to read at your leisure with your favorite comic book reader. The choice is yours!

Download NORTH WIND 01 now!

Comics have been giving away the first issue online for a while, but this is the first time I’ve seen an entire series from a major publisher put up on the net.

And it probably isn’t going to sell that much more than an average book.  But even that may be a victory of sorts.

Here’s a great example of that idea in action:

The latest installment in the Jackass Movie franchise, “Jackass 2.5″is to be released exclusively first online and will be free to view. The move by Paramount pictures is being hailed as “the first studio-backed feature film to have its premiere online.”

Of course, in typical Hollywood style, the hype is greater than the reality.

Jackass 2.5 (trailer above) cost $2 million to make and is a one hour long compilation of original material and unseen outtakes from Jackass 2 which hit cinemas in 2006.

So… more of a high end DVD extra.  But still a step in the right direction.

Here’s the trailer for it, if you like that kind of thing:

It’s strange to think of the future as being old, but there’s a brilliance about the way they’re reducing fear by telling the audience that switching to digital is something we should have all done a long time ago. 

Have no fear, the future is here…

It seems to me like he gets it.

But Facebook’s new “Beacon” technology is so insanely egregious it’s jaw dropping.  Through some kind of dark (java based) alchemy, your transactions on the Beacon partner sites are automatically reported back to your Facebook account, and posted for all your friends to see.

This isn’t an “opt-in” thing either.  If you decide that you’d rather not tell the world what games you’re playing, movies you’re renting, or books you’re buying, then you had better be quick on the trigger, because you have only a few seconds after the pop-up appears before your virtual ass is exposed to the world. The first time it jumped up letting me know what was happening I couldn’t even parse what was trying to say before it was gone.  The second time I fought through my disbelief (It’s what now?) and began to figure it out.  But I didn’t have a chance to really react before it closed again.  Honestly it wasn’t until I read about it somewhere else that I realized that how thoroughly I’d been taken advantage of.

If I had been able to react I would have discovered that I can only opt-out on a per-site basis at best, and only from inside the pop-up itself.  There is currently no way to go to my Facebook account and globally tell Beacon to go screw itself. To do that I needed to install an add-on into my browser that blocks the application entirely.  Which is what I did. 

Today moveon.org entered the fray. They’ve created a privacy petition that’s telling Facebook that they need to stuff the genie back into the bottle. 

Personally I can’t understand how they thought they were going to get away with this. It’s one thing when it’s inside of web page, or I make a decision to allow myself to be exploited. It’s another to wake up one morning and discover that the wall between entirely different web applications has breached and nobody bothered to ask for your consent.

Facebook can play innocent and coy, but my transaction information is still mine. The thousands of tiny little scraps of our lives have meaning when they’re gathered together, and very few of us are still so innocent that we don’t recognize that.  It’s not just rude to take it without asking.  It’s wrong.